> >> The Constitution, of course.
> >And the Federalist Papers. Maybe even more so.
Yoshie Furuhashi:
> In _Empire_, Hardt & Negri use, as an epigram to Part 2.5, the
> following remark by Thomas Jefferson: "I am persuaded no constitution
> was ever before so well calculated as ours for extensive empire and
> self government" (160). They go on to invoke the _Federalist_ & U.S.
> constitution as heralding "a new principle of sovereignty" (169):
> "Already in this first phase, then, a new principle of sovereignty is
> affirmed, different from the European one: liberty is made sovereign
> and sovereignty is defined as radically democratic within an open and
> continuous process of expansion. The frontier is a frontier of
> liberty. How hollow the rhetoric of the Federalists would have been
> and how inadequate their own 'new political science' had they not
> presupposed this vast and mobile threshold of the frontier" (169)!
>
> Deliberate anachronism on the part of H & N, but suggestive
> nonetheless. American Nationalism = an ideology for the Empire.
However, if the frontier encounters a numerous and advanced people, then the resultant assimilation will be ambiguous. Hence, I would think, a particularism and isolationism, not mentioned in the Constitution but perhaps implicit there, chary of empire and foreign wars, concerned more with segregating its nationals into regions, castes and classes than with finding new converts. That is, the White Man at home in the New World with his Manifest Destiny.