The ‘Discovery’ of America as a Culture Shock

Abstract

‘In our days’, wrote Montesquieu in The Spirit of the Laws, ‘we receive three different or contrary educations, namely, of our parents, of our masters, and of the world. What we learn in the latter effaces all the ideas of the former’ (1949: 33). This world, or rather that part of the world which Montesquieu would still 200 years later experience as contradicting all the teachings of parents and masters, was ‘discovered’ by the Spaniards in 1492. This ‘discovery’ triggered a unique and crucial debate among the Spaniards at the time. It was unique because it was the only case in which a European power accompanied the process of colonization with an officially sponsored public debate about its legitimacy. And it was of crucial importance because it was in the course of this debate that Spanish discussants developed the concept of the state of nature in its modern sense, a concept which subsequently came to underpin European political thought, in both its domestic and international varieties — in fact, eventually the concept revolutionized all branches of the sciences but, in particular, the social sciences (Parry, 1981: 15f; Meek, 1976: 3).