E pluribus unum, or “Out of many, one,” is a motto for
the United States—the American States that are united. The many can refer, I suppose, to the sheer number of inhabitants
stretching across a continent and beyond. The word could also refer to the diversity
of people living even in a large American city. Finally, the word could refer
to the Union consists of many different socio-political societies, or
republics—again possibly referring to the number of states or the fact that
they differ so from one another. It is
the last interpretation that I want to explore here, for it alone gets at the
fact that the U.S., like the E.U. and China, are at the empire-level (or scale)
in twentieth-century (rather than medieval) terms (i.e., scaling).
The complete essay is at Essays on Two Federal Empires, available at Amazon.
