Abstract

The essay traces an archeological analysis of the U.S. geopolitical imagination. This archeological path goes back at the beginning of political modernity, when European expansion built up a new world system centered on the Atlantic and founded upon relationship of dependence between the imperial core of the industrial State and the colonial peripheries. After looking at this continuity between the geopolitical vision and the narrative of modernity - a continuity supported by social sciences and technological changes - the essay considers the economic and territorial expansion of the United States in the 19th century, and its self-representation as the herz of the Roman and British Empires.