Two Major Works that Shaped American (and Américan) Thought

Two Major Works that Shaped American (and Américan) Thought

This article relates to America, América

In America, América, historian Greg Grandin references two major intellectual works of history and philosophy that influenced the worldviews of peoples in the Americas and in Europe. These two books offer much in the way of understanding the evolution of both the United States and Latin America in relation to one another and are highly recommended for further reading.

A Brief History of the Destruction of the Indies by Bartolomé de las Casas

Written in 1542 and published in 1552, A Brief History (sometimes translated under different titles) chronicles the full horror of the Spanish Conquest as witnessed by Catholic Dominican priest Bartolomé de Las Casas. A clarion call against the brutalization of Indigenous people, the book was translated into English, French, German, Dutch, and Italian and saw wide distribution throughout Protestant Europe. This firsthand account drips with "extreme colonial gore," Grandin writes, which shocked the world and shamed the Spanish Catholic Church, so much so that a "new morality" was required by its eminent thinkers to justify the continued enslavement, torture, rape, and other depredations it enacted in the New World.

Grandin notes that Las Casas made a clever play on the use of "destruction" in the title, as opposed to "instruction," which was what Catholics were supposed to be providing America's inhabitants. The urgent and dramatic style of the account is also worth noting; as Grandin observes, the priest's denunciation of violence against the people of the New World "perfected a polemical style based not on revelation or appeals to authority but the power of personal witness."

Two Treatises of Government by John Locke

The first sentence of philosopher John Locke's Two Treatises on Government sets the stage dramatically: "In the beginning all the world was America." As Grandin explains, Locke's 1689 tract about society would have been more appropriate if he had opened with "in the beginning all the world was Spanish America," because Locke drew heavily from Spanish thinkers and jurists. Grandin traces Locke's ideas about social contract theory—consent of the governed—back to the Jesuit Juan de Mariana, who published a work one hundred years earlier that "tracks point by point" what Locke argued for in the Two Treatises. In this context, Grandin cites the work as an example of early European thought of America as "empty and unclaimed" that would lay the foundation for a "claim" to the land.

As Grandin observes, Locke imbibed many of the beliefs of Jesuitical thinking of the New World as "pristine, inhabited not by the storied Aztecs or the cultured Inca but by artless peoples whose simplicity offered a window back in time to what Europe was like before written records and political society." The treatise explores the notion of possession, and while Locke says Indigenous inhabitants of America have the right to possession, he claims that "Amerindians didn't make use of this right." Two Treatises is worth reading to understand the European political and philosophical attitude toward land, labor, and "adding value" to nature's bounty, despite the destructive result of this attitude already observed by Las Casas.

Filed under People, Eras & Events

This "beyond the book article" relates to America, América. It originally ran in June 2025 and has been updated for the April 2026 paperback edition. Go to magazine.