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Three Interpretations of America in History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2015

Harold E. Davis
Harold E. Davis*
Affiliation:
The American University, Washington, D.C.
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Extract

Leaders of the american independence movements thought in concepts of natural law and natural rights. They assumed that a society not only should but could be based upon reason and liberty rather than authority or tradition. Even those who took the more dismal Hobbsian view believed that there was a large measure of rational consent to the laws which necessity forced upon men who were dominated by passion rather than by reason. In any case, Nature was believed to have a universal character, and differences in geographical background were thought to have relatively little importance in shaping society and civilization. Nor did they think in terms of the historical determinism, whether idealistic or materialistic, which dominated nineteenth-century thought. The New World was held to be the seat of liberty and equality, not because American soil necessarily produced freedom, but because in America man had freedom to reach his fullest development. The New World thus differed from the Old chiefly in the institutions and civilization which man had created here. Incidentally, this rationalist view had much in common with the older Utopian concept of America, from which, in no small measure, it was derived. Moreover, the very idea of Utopia was partly American in origin. Thomas More, for example, based his Utopia upon what he knew of Inca civilization. For a long time, therefore, Europeans had thought of America as a Utopia in which liberty, equality and opportunity for the immigrant were natural products of man’s freedom to live a life more in accord with Nature than Europe permitted.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Americas , Volume 10 , Issue 2 , October 1953 , pp. 131 - 139
Copyright
Copyright © Academy of American Franciscan History 1953

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References

1 See Zavala, Silvio, La Utopía de Tomás More en la Nueva España (second edition in Memoria de El Colegio Nacional [Mexico, 1949])Google Scholar. Hanke, Lewis, in The First Social Experiment in America: A Study of Spanish Indian Policy in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, 1935)Google Scholar, expressed ideas somewhat different from those of Zavala. Later aspects of American influence upon European natural law and Utopian concepts are treated in Jones, Howard Mumford, America and French Culture (Chapel Hill, N. C., 1927)Google Scholar and in Zavala, , América en el espíritu del siglo xviii (Mexico, 1949)Google Scholar.

2 The Frontier in American History (New York, 1920)Google Scholar. See also Curti, Merle E., Frederick Jackson Turner (Mexico, 1949)Google Scholar and Fox, D. R., Sources of Culture in the Middle West (New York, 1934)Google Scholar.

3 Facundo and the almost equally important Conflicto y armonía de las razas are available in 1915 editions, published in Buenos Aires. On Sarmiento see Zea, Leopoldo, Dos etapas del pensamiento en Hispanoamérica (Mexico, 1949)Google Scholar; Poviña, Alfredo, Historia de la sociología en Latinoamérica (Mexico, 1940)Google Scholar; Rojas, Ricardo, El pensamiento vivo de Sarmiento (Buenos Aires, 1941)Google Scholar; Guerrero, Luis Juan, Tres temas de filosofía en las entrañas de Facundo (Buenos Aires, 1945)Google Scholar; and Bunkley, Allison U., Life of Sarmiento (Princeton, N. J., 1952)Google Scholar.

4 Eurindia (Buenos Aires, 1924)Google Scholar, Obras, V. See also his La literatura argentina: ensayo filosófico sobre la evolución de la cultura en el Plata (8 vols., 2nd ed., Buenos Aires, 1924–1925)Google Scholar.

5 For a recent example see Vasconcelos, José, Ulises criollo (Mexico, 1935)Google Scholar.

6 Os sertões, published in Rio de Janeiro in 1902, has been translated into English by Herbert Putnam (Chicago, 1944)Google Scholar. See also Canudos: diario de uma expediçao [Coleção documentos brasileiros, 16] (Rio de Janeiro, 1939)Google Scholar.

7 Count Joseph Arthur de Gobineau laid the basis for the myth of Aryan supremacy in his Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines.