The American republic’s constitution was read as universal, not national, truth

Evidence

If for the creoles of the New World the strange toponyms discussed above represented figuratively their emerging capacity to imagine themselves as communities parallel and comparable to those in Europe, extraordinary events in the last quarter of the eighteenth century gave this novelty, quite suddenly, a completely new meaning. The first of these events was certainly the Declaration of (the Thirteen Colonies’) Independence in 1776, and the successful military defence of that declaration in the years following. This independence, and the fact that it was a republican independence, was felt to be something absolutely unprecedented, yet at the same time, once in existence, absolutely reasonable. Hence, when history made it possible, in 1811, for Venezuelan revolutionaries to draw up a constitution for the First Venezuelan Republic, they saw nothing slavish in borrowing verbatim from the Constitution of the United States of America. For what the men in Philadelphia had written was in the Venezuelans’ eyes not something North American, but rather something of universal truth and value. Shortly thereafter, in 1789, the explosion in the New World was paralleled in the Old by the volcanic outbreak of the French Revolution. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 721

Categorization

• XREF: Anderson’s treatment of universality claims here anticipates how ‘universal’ values get provincialized — a move central to Islamophobia critique of Western universalism. — connects to: The Rights of Man were only ever enforced as national rights, not universal ones; Hayek treated the US Constitution as a model for binding democratic majorities — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 361; the MOC “The Great Derivative: How the Athens-to-Washington Story Fabricates the Inheritance It Pretends to Record”