The Americas in Early Modern Political Theory

States of Nature and Aboriginality

Stephanie B. Martens

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137519993
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book examines early modern social contract theories within European representations of the Americas in the 16th and 17th century. Despite addressing the Americas only marginally, social contract theories transformed American social imaginaries prevalent at the time into Aboriginality, allowing for the emergence of the idea of civilization and the possibility for diverse discourses of Aboriginalism leading to excluding and discriminatory forms of subjectivity, citizenship, and politics. What appears then is a form of Aboriginalism pitting the American/Aboriginal other against the nascent idea of civilization. The legacy of this political construction of difference is essential to contemporary politics in settler societies. The author shows the intellectual processes behind this assignation and its role in modern political theory, still bearing consequences today. The way one conceives of citizenship and sovereignty underlies some of the difficulties settler societies have in accommodating Indigenous claims for recognition and self-government.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Stephanie B. MartensThe Americas in Early Modern Political Theory10.1057/978-1-137-51999-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Stephanie B. Martens¹

(1)

Laurentian University, Barrie, ON, Canada

End Abstract

The Spaniards pursued the Indians with bloodhounds, like wild beasts; they sacked the New World like a city taken by storm, with no discernment or compassion; but destruction must cease at last and frenzy has a limit: the remnant of the Indian population which had escaped the massacre mixed with its conquerors and adopted in the end their religion and their manners.

The conduct of the Americans of the United States towards the aborigines is characterized, on the other hand, by a singular attachment to the formalities of law. Provided that the Indians retain their [savage] condition, the Americans take no part in their affairs; they treat them as independent [peoples] and do not possess themselves of their [lands] without a treaty of purchase; and if an Indian nation happens to be so encroached upon as to be unable to subsist upon their territory, they kindly take them by the hand and transport them to a grave far from the land of their fathers.

The Spaniards were unable to exterminate the Indian race by those unparalleled atrocities which brand them with indelible shame, nor did they succeed even in wholly depriving it of its rights; but the Americans of the United States have accomplished this twofold purpose with singular felicity, tranquilly, legally, philanthropically, without shedding blood, and without violating a single great principle of morality in the eyes of the world. It [would] be impossible to destroy men with more respect for the laws of humanity. [Original French: On ne saurait détruire les hommes en respectant mieux les lois de l'humanité.]¹

This opening quotation was authored by Tocqueville in 1835, in his major opus, De la démocratie en Amérique, comparing and contrasting the colonizing methods of the “Spaniards” and those of the Americans, juxtaposing the naked violence of the former with the constant concern for legality, if only in appearance, of the latter. This contrast, not devoid of irony, may be naïve and somewhat historically inaccurate, as both “Spaniards” and Americans resorted to a combination of violence and legal tools in their colonizing enterprises. Yet more than four centuries after the “discovery” of the Americas, it raises a key question, concisely expressed by the last sentence: in the original French, on ne saurait détruire les hommes en respectant mieux les lois de l’humanité. The stylistically clever antithesis hides a major political and philosophical interrogation: How does one exterminate “legally” and even “philanthropically”? How does one destroy entire communities while upholding and even forging the notion of shared humanity, its defense, and a system of legality built around it?

This interrogation serves simultaneously as the starting point and the underlying thread of the book and chapters to follow. Tocqueville was writing during the nineteenth century, and his positions regarding colonialism are far from benign; however, the paradox he so stylistically highlights dates as far back as the discovery of the Americas itself and brings us to the very roots of modernity. Early modern political and legal theories illustrate only too well this art of “legal/philanthropic destruction”: indeed, the articulation of natural law into universalizable human rights coincides chronologically with expanding colonialism and increasing contacts with non-European populations—populations that were then denied those very rights. More than a historical coincidence, this chronological concomitance, marking the beginnings of modernity, cannot be dismissed as an object of study on the grounds of the ambient racism and ethnocentrism of the times, but instead reveals deeper intellectual, philosophical, and political connections. To analyze and understand these connections, three notions will be introduced and articulated: “American Imaginaries,” “Aboriginality,” and finally “Aboriginalism”—all meant to encapsulate the paradoxical relationship between Old and New Worlds so cleverly highlighted by Tocqueville. The focus is accordingly placed first on intellectual rather than physical contacts between the two continents, as experienced by the literate elite of the Old World, in particular its philosophers and political thinkers; and second, on the specificity of the differentiating mechanisms at stake, the form of otherness and the relation to difference that “Aboriginality” captures, as well as its impact on the political and legal theories of the time.

Working through this intellectual landscape, it will become clear that, paradoxically but pointedly, early modern social contract theory, while opening up the universalizing potential of human rights, actually supposes and necessitates an original discrimination—thus undermining any hope for true, inclusive, universality. This discrimination operates at a theoretical level, as a simplifying binary, affirming the possibility for an “other”—“an-other” human or an “un-civilized” human. It also claims historical sense, when social contract theory, as a dynamic process, proposes a path to civility and proper government, bound to become an all-powerful road to civilization, one that leaves many behind. The theoretical discrimination then becomes actual, with its share of exclusion and violence: it finds its concrete expression in the colonizing practices of Western Europeans in the Americas (North and South). New colonies in general, and the Americas in particular, bring unprecedented novelty for Europeans, and provide a space for discovery, experimentation, and the unleashing of their wildest fantasies. As the world—and with it, humanity altogether—is fully “discovered,” universalization becomes a real horizon; humanity is “whole,” human nature graspable, and universal human rights are within purview. Yet, the possibility for radical otherness must be preserved—an outside providing a concrete limitation is necessary to the stability and actualization of this new system of rights. The historical, concrete, unfolding of this binary, the exploring Europeans and their “discovered” other, as well as the violence, the events and policies that have marked American colonial history, however, are outside the scope of this study; what interests us is its unfolding at the intellectual and discursive level, more precisely its expression within political theory, uncovering some of the mechanisms and logics linking “Ab-original” Americas and early modern social contract theory. How is the imaginary of the “Aboriginal/natural man” reflected in the political theory of the time? What type of exclusion is expressed through references to the Americas and “savage” men? What is so specific about this relation to otherness, this making and re-enacting of “Aboriginality”?

Two sets of issues arise from these questions, or rather, two distinct levels of study: on one hand, questions regarding the relationship between ideas, theories, and historical reality; and on the other hand, questions regarding the particular articulation of Aboriginality and civilization at work in the period under study, that is, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Western Europe. The three key words highlighted above are meant to address these two levels of analysis.

1.

“American Imaginaries”

The notion of American imaginaries—more precisely, “American social imaginaries”—is used to identify a few recurrent themes, images, and tropes characterizing the travel literature on the Americas, as well as the common perceptions and conceptions circulating in Western Europe at the time. At the root of these “social imaginaries” is the prolific Renaissance and early modern travel literature; it is made up of relaciones (relations), correspondence, diaries, and reports from explorers, conquistadores, and observers, chronicles, and reports. This travel literature includes fiction as well, with many popular and influential works intricately and elegantly mixing the American, the Classical, and the medieval imagery of the monstrous and barbarous.

“Social imaginary” is approached here, following Charles Taylor, as: “something much broader and deeper than the intellectual schemes people may entertain when they think about social reality in a disengaged mode, [but rather as] the way people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations.”² It can be studied at a discursive and inter-textual level, but it also keeps in mind larger social histories, calling upon both written and oral traditions, their transmission, and effects on mentalities and opinions. The notion is kept deliberately vague and open,³ providing flexibility very well suited to the object “America(s).” American social imaginaries are replete with heterogeneous and contradictory images, fantasies, and pseudo empirical knowledge; travel literature mixes empirical claims with fiction, and uses the long detour of the New Continent to talk about and critique the Old. This diversity, messiness almost, is well illustrated by the cohabitation of two powerful myths, the “noble savage” and the “dirty dog,” sometimes found within the same text—depending of the mood of the author and the amicability of the individuals encountered at a given moment.⁴ American social imaginaries are multiple and heterogeneous; nevertheless, amid this variety, recurrent associations, mechanisms for comparison, and concerns appear: concerns about the reality of the Americas, its potential wealth, the resources and wonders it may hide, the morality of its customs and mores, its place in Christianity, and ultimately, its very nature and place within the world of human affairs.

2.

“Aboriginality”

Aboriginality, on the other hand, refers to a first “reduction,” homogenization, and simplification of these American Imaginaries. Through legal and political examinations of the “Question of the Indians” during the Renaissance first (Vitoria and the Salamanca School), and in seventeenth-century social contract theories, the challenge and ungraspable difference presented by the New Continent is progressively subsumed under a set of powerful binary distinctions: natural vs. civil/artificial, savage vs. civilized, “Ab-originality” vs. civilization. The mechanism of the state of nature plays a crucial role, Chaps. 4 and 5 will show, in this transformation of “American social imaginaries” into a simplified “Aboriginal” one, operating as a counterpart to nascent ideas of civility and civilization, embodying a specific form of primitivism—one in which the exotic other, as natural and original, provides the key to human nature and new insights into the origins of society and government.

The term “Aboriginality” is to be understood in this study not only in relation to early modern characterizations of the Americas, but also against the emerging idea of civilization. At this stage, a few warrants may be introduced. At first sight, the term faces two obvious problems: the first being the risk of anachronism and the second consisting in its heavy luggage, its diverse usages around the world, and its multiple meanings—varying from one area to the other. Both problems are linked, leading to the following pitfall: using the term “Aboriginality” when studying sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe seems to be uncritically associating the reality of individuals and nations nowadays called “Aboriginal” to the racist prejudices and misconceptions about “savages” and “barbarians” of earlier writers. Because the term “Aboriginal” is sometimes used today to refer (more or less objectively) to indigenous peoples around the world (Aborigines being even the standard term used to describe the ensemble of continental Australian indigenous populations), its connotations and biases are not always obvious. By contrast, terms such as “savage” or “barbarian” are obviously biased and derogatory. The blatant negativity and prejudices associated with those terms may have made them better suited for the critical perspective intended here. Moreover, they also most often correspond to the vocabulary and terminology used by the authors under study. “Aboriginal,” on the other hand, appears at first more innocent, even potentially descriptive.⁵ It is thus necessary to remind the reader that choosing this lexicon ought not to be misread as an endorsement. The study proposed in this dissertation does not refer to the reality and the existence of actual populations, past or present, but rather tries to show how perspectives on otherness, indigenous populations in general, and American indigenous populations in particular, form a complex network of tropes and meanings that can be best accessed as a construction of “Aboriginality.” It highlights, once again, that conceptions of the “other” are often nothing more than misconceptions of “oneself,” a wild imagination having more to do with one’s own ethnocentric conceptions of the world than an actual knowledge of the other.

The critical potential of “Aboriginal” and its cognates is not evident yet powerful: “Aboriginal” and its substantive, “Aboriginality,” carry in their etymology connotations of utmost significance. “Aboriginality” decomposed is the character of what is deemed ab-origine. The connotations implied in this Latin expression are especially appropriate to the topic: an essence stemming from the very beginning of times and things. It indicates an a-historical or truly pre-historical moment (literally and logically situated before and outside history), while civilization⁶ becomes synonymous with historical times and progress. This explains the strategic choice of “Aboriginality” as an object of study and an analytical lens through which social contract theories shall be read. The current use of the term then adds another critical layer, reminding us that our own contemporary understanding of Indigeneity and Aboriginality is dependent on intellectual (discursive and lexical) frameworks inherited from early modernity. Therefore, the critique envisioned in the book, although dealing with past authors, is indirectly addressing our very contemporary mode of thought and subjection, as will be shown in Chap. 6. This justifies again using a contemporary terminology, which too often remains unexamined.

3.

“Aboriginalism”

The neologism, “Aboriginalism,” is meant, evidently, to echo Edward Said’s Orientalism (1979). Said’s seminal work and the type of Foucauldian discourse analysis he has been carrying in his eponymous book still influence very mu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Discovering and Inventing a New World: Post-Columbian Travel Literature
• 3. Unsettling New World: Scholastic Approaches to the Americas
• 4. The Invention of the Natural Man in Political Theory: Hobbes’s Leviathan
• 5. The “Inconvenience” of America: Locke’s State of Nature
• 6. Aboriginalism: Representing Indigenous Peoples as “Un-Civil” and “Un-Civilized”
• 7. Conclusion
• Backmatter