Reviews of Books

The Postcolonial Origins of Modernity

Reviewed by Ralph Bauer, University of Maryland, College Park

"Does anybody know of any other nation, more brutish, more ignorant, more savage, and more barbarous than Spain?" asked the French philosophe Zacharie de Pazzi de Bonneville in 1771. "I defy that person to name it" (p. 159). Common among French, English, and German Enlightenment thinkers, disdain for Spanish culture outlived the eighteenth century and persisted over the next two centuries in a distinctly Protestant philosophy of history. Hegel famously dispatched Spain to oblivion with a quip: "When one is in Spain one is already in Africa." Inheriting such bias, the influential contemporary German social thinker Jürgen Habermas ignores that nation altogether with his dictum that the "key historical events" in the formation of modernity are the "Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution." In this Protestant philosophy of history, those peoples who fail to fit the progressive model of modernity—notably, non-European and non-Protestant cultures—are written off as "backward," "medieval," "pre-," or "un-modern."1

1

Ironically, Enlightenment "Spain-bashing" had its origins among Spanish thinkers themselves. As modern Spanish and Latin American philosophers of history such as Enrique Düssel and Leopoldo Zea have long argued, the ideological foundation of the Protestant philosophy of history can be traced back to the anti-Spanish "Black Legend," the idea originating during the sixteenth century with Spanish clerics such as Bartolomé de Las Casas and propagated by his Protestant English and Dutch translators that the Spanish had misbehaved grossly in the New World, that they had either degenerated into "American" barbarity and cruelty or, worse, had contaminated America with an original "Spanish" degeneracy derived perhaps from the southern European clime or from racial mixture with the Moors.2 With the ascendancy of British and French imperial power during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, on the one hand, and Spain's gradual decline, reaching its nadir with Napoleon's invasion of Spain in 1808, on the other, the early modern Protestant innuendos against Spain became universal gospel in modern Western historiography. Even Spain's own eighteenth-century Enlightenment got no respect. Montesquieu derided it as consisting of "romances on one side and scholastics on the other, assembled by some enemy of human reason" (p. 156).

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