The Emergence of Globalism by Rosenboim Or;

Author:Rosenboim, Or;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2017-11-25T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

Writing a World Constitution

The Chicago Committee and the New World Order

ON 18 AUGUST 1945, a few days after the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the president of the University of Chicago, Robert Hutchins, participated in a radio discussion on ‘Atomic Force: Its Meaning for Mankind’. In his speech, he argued that the global control of nuclear weaponry would be indispensable to prevent ‘world suicide’.1 Hutchins’s enthusiastic words were heard by two of his Chicago colleagues, literary critic Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, and philosopher Richard McKeon, who, like Hutchins, thought the international moment bore unique danger, but also a potential for initiating global change. The atomic bomb created a political void from which a new order could emerge. They suggested to Hutchins to establish at the university a centre for ‘synthetic and structural’ research in the humanities, aimed at providing the intellectual foundation for a new world order.2 Instead of a research centre, Hutchins agreed to form a committee of intellectuals and academics, who would draft a world constitution as the first step towards global change. The publication of this constitution in 1948 was accompanied by a vibrant international debate between its authors and other political observers including Albert Einstein, Quincy Wright, Louis Wirth, Hans Morgenthau, Jacques Maritain, Winston Churchill, Léon Blum, Henry Usborne, Altiero Spinelli, Jan Smuts, Louis B. Sohn, John Boyd Orr, and many others. The British Federal Union also sent a letter of support and appreciation.3

This chapter looks at the intellectual experience of the Chicago Committee to Frame a World Constitution Draft from December 1945 to July 1947. While existing scholarship sometimes mentions—briefly and uncritically—the existence of the ‘Hutchins Constitution’ or considers the committee’s work as an example of failed utopianism, I focus on the controversies and debates between the committee’s members during the two years that led to the draft’s publication.4 This project represented the extension of federal ideas to the global sphere, in continuation with the federalist thought explored in previous chapters. However, there are significant thematic differences between the committee and Federal Union, including the geopolitical scope of the project, its theoretical ambition, and its political motivation. For example, while at Federal Union ‘democracy’ was accepted as the normative foundation of political union, at the Chicago Committee this position was accepted only after a long debate on the moral value of political pluralism. The history of the constitution sheds light on the complex—and often contradictory and incompatible—theoretical ideas that set the foundation of visions of world order in the 1940s. As I show, the failure of the constitution to attain a concrete political goal depended not only on international diplomatic and geopolitical conjectures, but also on the philosophical assumptions about the moral desirability of pluralism and universalism advanced by the authors of the constitution.

There are three main reasons for rethinking the Chicago Committee. First, its members were influential figures with well-established intellectual authority, including Mortimer Adler, Richard McKeon, Charles Howard McIlwain, James M. Landis, Reinhold Niebuhr, Wilber G. Katz, Rexford Tugwell, Robert Redfield, William E.

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