Description
For the first six years after the Second World War, a group called the Committee to Frame a World Constitution, based at the University of Chicago, convened to consider how to craft a global constitution that would ensure a just global order and an ultimate end to war. Intellectually diverse, the participants were united in their belief that the United Nations had not gone far enough in its attempts to enforce international law and control nuclear arms. The committee participants were influential critics in their own time, but their constitutional work has largely fallen into obscurity. In her 2019 book, The Emergence of Globalism, Or Rosenboim brought attention back to the committee with a chapter that examined the competing moral visions of two members of committee, Richard McKeon and Giuseppe Antonio Borgese. But there has still been little focus on the vision of environmental and economic justice crafted by the committee. Through an archival examination of papers of the Committee to Frame a World Constitution, with a focus on the contributions of Rexford Tugwell, a New Deal economist, and Elisabeth Mann Borgese, renowned maritime lawyer and daughter of Thomas Mann, I intend to recover an alternative proposed structure of global governance, worthy of reexamination as the United Nations enters a period of reflection and reassessment.
