The American Constitutional Imagination

The united states presents in the post war period a constitutional model that has these features. The universal declaration of human rights is imagined as a kind of bill of rights for the international system. But what makes that package so important for american leats is precisely that it be attractive as a counterweight to the soviets. And increasingly, a series of step by step defections by the united states from its own order tell the story of ways in which the united states itself is attacking the imating framework of its own hegemony.