Bartolomé de las Casas · Politics
Las Casas’s foundational claim - that the native peoples of the Americas were fully human and fully rational, possessed of natural liberty and legitimate dominion over their own lands and rulers, and therefore no man’s ‘natural slaves.’
Beneath every argument Las Casas ever made lies a single conviction, and it is a radical one for its time: that humanity is one. Against the widespread colonial assumption that the native peoples were a lower order of being - beasts, or half-beasts, or perpetual children fit only to serve - Las Casas insisted that they belonged fully to the human race and shared completely in the defining human trait, reason. There are not two kinds of people, the truly human and the barely human; there is one definition of the human, and every people on earth falls under it. From this apparently simple premise everything else follows, because in the natural-law tradition Las Casas worked in, to be rational is to be free by nature, to be capable of virtue and of self-government, and to be owed justice. If the Indians were rational, then the whole edifice of their subjugation had no foundation.
Las Casas did not simply assert native rationality; he documented it, at exhaustive length, above all in his vast Apologetic History of the Indies. There he marshalled everything he had learned in half a century among the peoples of the Americas to show that they met every classical test of a rational, civilized people. They built cities and organized states; they had kings, laws, courts, and magistrates; they practised agriculture and crafts and trade; they observed marriage and family and religion; they cultivated arts, memory, and eloquence. Measured by Aristotle’s own criteria for a well-ordered society, Las Casas argued, many native polities equalled or surpassed the ancient Greeks and Romans, and some of their institutions shamed those of contemporary Europe. The point of this mountain of ethnography was legal and moral: a people with all of this is manifestly rational, and a rational people cannot be classed as natural slaves or treated as ownerless.
The hardest obstacle for Las Casas was the word ‘barbarian.’ Europeans looked at unfamiliar customs, unfamiliar dress, human sacrifice among some peoples, and the absence of Christianity, and concluded that here were barbarians in the deepest sense - beings deficient in reason. Las Casas answered by taking the concept apart. ‘Barbarian’ can mean several things, he argued: merely someone who speaks a strange language and seems foreign (in which case every people is barbarian to every other), or someone who lacks a written literature or settled laws, or, in the strict and rare sense, someone genuinely wanting in the use of reason. The native peoples were ‘barbarians’ only in the harmless first sense - strangers with different ways. Their unfamiliarity was not irrationality. Even the cruel practices some of them followed, he argued, sprang from a mistaken but sincere religious devotion - a misuse of reason, which is itself proof of reason, not its absence. Difference, in short, is not deficiency, and a people is not sub-human because it is not European.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Las Casas grounded the rights of the Indians in their full rationality (‘all the peoples of the world are men’), argued that they held genuine dominion - real ownership and legitimate self-rule - before contact, and concluded that natural liberty could not be stripped from a rational people. Explain h…
Leads to Francisco de Vitoria.
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