Abstract
Here are introduced the topic, the role played by the Americas in early modern political theory; the problematic to be studied, how paradoxically but pointedly, early modern social contract theory, while opening up the universalizing potential of human rights, actually supposes and necessitates the exclusion of the “un-civilized”—thus undermining any hope for true, inclusive, universality; the keywords to keep in mind, American imaginaries, Aboriginality, and Aboriginalism; and, finally, the approach chosen. Deliberately open, the interpretations proposed in the book use travel literature as a background against which legal and political European responses to the Americas will be studied. Starting with yet relatively undetermined American social imaginaries, we will show how a particular rapport of opposition emerges, Aboriginality versus civilization—as formulated by early modern social contract theory.
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Notes
- 1.
From the Henry Reeve Translation, 1899, revised and corrected for the online version of Democracy in America published by ASGRP, the American Studies Programs at the University of Virginia, June 1, 1997; words in brackets have been modified to stay closer to the original French. For the French edition, see Alexis de Tocqueville, De la démocratie en Amérique, Volume 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1961), 496–497.
- 2.
Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 23.
- 3.
Charles Taylor makes a similar use of “social imaginaries” in A Secular Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), 159–211. In Modern Social Imaginaries, Taylor elaborates on his choice of terminology and pinpoints three key differences “between social theory and social imaginary.” The concept of social imaginary makes room for literary as well as theoretical themes: “images, stories, and legends” are the main media for such an imagination (p. 23). The second difference between social theory and social imaginary for Taylor is that of audience: “theory is often the possession of a small minority, whereas what is interesting in the social imaginary is that it is shared by large groups of people, if not the whole society” (p. 22). The third difference is more elusive but no less important: it consists for Taylor in defining a social imaginary as “a common understanding that makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy” (p. 22).
Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 22–23.
For a commentary on Taylor’s use of “social imaginaries” and how it differs from other authors’ more specific usage, see Florence Hulak, “Que permet de penser le concept d’imaginaire social de Charles Taylor?” Philosophiques 37, no. 2 (2010): 387–409.
- 4.
Columbus diaries are exemplary there.
Christopher Columbus, and Clements R. Markham (ed.). The Journal of Christopher Columbus (during His First Voyage, 1492–93): And Documents Relating the Voyages of John Cabot and Gaspar Corte Real (London: Printed for the Hakluyt society, 1893).
- 5.
Nowadays, we may safely assume most readers are aware that there are no true/real savages or barbarians out there. Many, however, may still retain the idea or intuition that there is such a thing as true Aboriginality. One of my contentions is that the term Aboriginal, although less deprecatory and nowadays more politically correct, is still a Western invention, a confiscation of naming prerogatives by the colonizers to the detriment of the colonized, and thus the expression of a similar power relation to the one expressed by “savage” or “barbarian.”
- 6.
Civilization itself is a problematic term. For the sake of the argument, civilization is to be understood here as a singular—the community of civilized men—and with all the universalizing connotations it implies. It is not to be understood here as a plural, as in Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations. The singular is more fitted to the definition the authors of early Modernity had in mind, in particular when using the adjective “civil.” The use of “civil” and its compounds in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe is discussed in Chap. 6, as is the development of the notion of “civilization” and the progressive introduction of the corresponding lexicon in European languages.
- 7.
Edward W. Said, Orientalism, First ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 1–3.
- 8.
Cf. Said, Orientalism, 5.
- 9.
Grotius and Pufendorf, for instance, although the Americas do not feature as predominantly as one might expect in early international legal theories. See Chap. 3.
- 10.
See Anthony Pagden, “The Savage Critic: Some European Images of the Primitive,” The Yearbook of English Studies 13 (1983): 32–45.
- 11.
See, for instance, the works by Michel Villey, tracking the origin of “subjective” rights and proposing a critical interpretation of human rights.
Michel Villey, Le droit et les droits de l’homme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1983); Philosophie du droit: 1. Définitions et fins du droit (Paris: Dalloz, 1986). Another French author studying the development of human rights within the natural law theory, and putting social contract theory at the center of the analysis is Blandine Barret-Kriegel.
Blandine Barret-Kriegel, “Les deux jusnaturalismes ou l’inversion des enjeux politiques,” Cahiers de philosophie politique et juridique 11 (1987): 7–42; Les droits de l’homme et le droit naturel (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1989).
In English language, studies by Brian Tierney and Richard Tuck are illustrative of such a perspective as well, trying to identify the modern meaning of jus and to contrast it with Ancient and medieval conceptions.
Brian Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights: Studies on Natural Rights, Natural Law, and Church Law, 1150–1625. (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1997); Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (Cambridge, New York, Cambridge University Press, 1981). Other outstanding analyses of Hobbes and Locke from the perspective of natural law include, for instance, Knud Haakonssen’s and Oakley’s surveys: Knud Haakonssen, Natural Law and Moral Philosophy: From Grotius to the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996); Francis Oakley, Natural Law, Laws of Nature, Natural Rights (London, New York: Continuum, 2005).
- 12.
Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997).
Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Cambridge, Polity Press, 1988).
Carole Pateman and Charles W. Mills, Contract and Domination (Cambridge, Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2007).
- 13.
In reality, the epistemological and methodological stance adopted in this dissertation was closer to that chosen by Wendy Brown in her early work Manhood and Politics: A Feminist Reading in Political Theory (1988</CitationRef>). In her introduction, “Politics, Manhood, and Political Theory,” she describes her project as less of a critique and more of a “rereading of past political theories for the light they shed upon a newly discovered problem [the relation manhood-politics],” insisting that “the challenge that strikes at the heart of all past political constructions is that the politics men have made by and for themselves is saturated with highly problematic, often dangerous, ideals and practices of manhood” (pp. 10, 12). Such possibilities have appeared only recently, because the relationship under scrutiny, between manhood and politics, was “beginning to fracture” in the 1970s and 1980s. The other defining relation for politics under attack nowadays, or “cracking” to use Brown’s terminology, is the one linking the West to the rest, under all its diverse forms—Orientalism, universalism, ethnocentrism, or racism. Just as feminist studies have contributed to the “cracking” of the manhood-politics relationship, post-colonial studies have also contributed to the “cracking” of the civilization-politics relationship. A new vantage point, an “uninterrogated terrain” (p. 12), has thus appeared, for a couple of decades now, and needs to be occupied in the history of political thought. A project analog to Brown’s critical rereading of political theory in Manhood and Politics was thus undertaken here: instead of manhood and its invisible “other-half,” womanhood, it was civilization and its excluded “other-half,” Aboriginality, which served as analytical focuses.
Wendy Brown, Manhood and Politics: A Feminist Reading in Political Theory (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 1988).
- 14.
Barbara Arneil, John Locke and America: The Defence of English Colonialism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). Peter Laslett, “Introduction,” in Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988). Ann Talbot, “The Great Ocean of Knowledge”: The Influence of Travel Literature on the Work of John Locke (Leiden, Netherlands: BRILL, 2010). James Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993).
- 15.
Barry Hindess, “Locke’s State of Nature.” History of the Human Sciences 20 (2007): 1–20.
References
Said, Edward W. Orientalism, First Ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.
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Martens, S.B. (2016). Introduction. In: The Americas in Early Modern Political Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51999-3_1
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