Political theorists have long grappled with ‘nature’ to explain the making, transformation and destruction of human polities. Aristotle connected his Politics to his Meteorology. Scholasticism drew on Aristotelian physics and meteorology to offer exacting definitions of natural law. Lockean liberalism and Rousseauian republicanism had ‘nature’ at the very heart of theories of the origins of rights and property. Humboldt's writings were more than about a science of a global networked nature. They were also a Kantian theory of the interactions of humans with landscapes to produce scientific, aesthetic, political, sociological and cultural knowledge. Nineteenth-century European political theory was a sustained engagement with Spinoza's theories of nature (as well as Darwin's natural selection). Mauro José Caraccioli turns to the ‘natural histories’ of five sixteenth-century Spanish writers in the Indies (Oviedo, Las Casas, Sahagún, Hernández and Acosta) to add Iberians in America to the roster of modern naturalists-cum-political-scientists.
Caraccioli calls attention to ideas conceived outside Renaissance Europe. He argues that the New World produced theories of empire and nature that later became normative via Bacon and the Scientific Revolution. Caraccioli forcefully concludes that the first recognisable modern theories of nature and the political emerged in the sixteenth-century Spanish Empire, not in England in the seventeenth (Hobbes and Locke) or in France in the Enlightenment (Rousseau). He does not see the religiosity of his writers as antithetical to modernity. Political theories that centre on nature's agency, he argues, did not need to be secular to be modern. Finally, Caraccioli contends that political theory ought not be found only as explicitly theoretical reflection. Political theory is built into story-telling and narrative structures (hence the title: Writing the New World).
According to Caraccioli, sixteenth-century Iberian natural histories of the New World were organised on the narrative structure of the Reconquista, namely, an epic plot pitting two religious foes over control of land and sovereignty. In this chivalric–epic structure, nature represents more than the staging where the battle between Faith and Heresy or Satan and God unfold. In the Reconquista narratives, nature itself has agency, encouraging heresy temptation, utopian moral perfection or demonological extirpation.
According to Caraccioli, Oviedo wrote a painstaking empirically driven chronicle of conquest (as eyewitness account) while introducing at every turn descriptions of the marvels of nature in an unknown New World. His nature was potentially corrupting as much as tantalisingly novel. It held the promise of new beginnings and new society. Yet this unveiling of nature could not be severed from the hardships of conquest. For Las Casas, on the other hand, New World's nature was utopianly temperate and benign. Such a natural world had produced morally and spiritually superior societies of all types (either of ‘natural’ man or of pagan civilisations). The conquest was therefore a process of destruction not only of peoples but of nature's sanctuary as well.
By contrast, Sahagún's Florentine Codex, Caraccioli argues, was not an empirically driven chronicle of conquest but an encyclopaedia that sought to catalogue all cultural terms associated to Aztec knowledge of deities, cosmos, nature, society, trades and history. The underlying motivating structure of this encyclopaedia, however, was also an epic of Satanic extirpation. Caraccioli finds in Sahagún a ‘bifurcated’ (or deeply dichotomous; p. 30) political logic. The pursuit of extirpation fuelled knowledge gathering that encouraged, in turn, indigenous participation. As more knowledge was accumulated and more philological detail about the true meaning of everyday Nahua words gathered, the greater became the respect for the moral, political and technical accomplishments of the Nahua. Sahagún and his indigenous collaborators moved from the logic of the epic of conquest to a logic of recognition of indigenous epistemological authority.
Hernández also produced empirical, secular knowledge of nature as he was sent by Philip II to expand knowledge of herbals for the royal pharmacy. According to Caraccioli, Hernández moved from an extractive experimental narrative of nature to a philosophical one. The Crown and local authorities, Caraccioli argues, did not support this shift and withdrew support from Hernández, preventing the publication of his large illustrated natural history.
Acosta, Caraccioli maintains, was part of a similar shift (from natural history to natural philosophy) as the Jesuit became interested in interpretation of all the marvels of an unknown ‘New World’. Caraccioli takes issue with reductive readings of Acosta as anticipating Bacon's instrumental interpretation of natural philosophy. Whereas Bacon used the Spanish conquest as metaphor of ‘discovery’, Acosta saw New World nature as a source of religious inspiration and marvellous contemplation, not just conquest, subordination and extraction.
For Caraccioli these narratives were strikingly modern despite the religiosity of their authors: they deserve an airing in the age of the Anthropocene. It is in the ‘bifurcations’ and contradictions of Spanish narratives of nature that their postcolonial liberating potential lies.
Caraccioli's efforts to find political ‘theory’ buried deep in the structural narrative of texts is methodologically illuminating. His readings of Oviedo, Las Casas, Sahagún, Hernández and Acosta as modern political theorists of nature and society, however, are more difficult to digest. I would prefer that we entirely jettison the category of modernity rather than contort ourselves into finding all sorts of unrecognised modernities (arrested, failed or alternative) in colonial Spanish America.
