Aristotle and the American Indians

"Few problems call more urgently for a solution than that of hostility between different races: the survival of our civilization may well depend on it. Many people think this is a new issue, peculiar to our times, but, as Professor Lewis Hanke shows in this study, the debate was raging furiously four centuries ago in Spain, at that time approaching the zenith of its colonial power in the New World. The kernel of this book is the encounter between Juan Gines de Sepulveda and Bartolome de las Casas, a Dominican friar and author of a 'Historia general de las Indias' that is still an essential source book for the early history of Mexico. Their prolonged debate took place at Valladolid in 1550-51. Based on the doctrine propounded by Aristotle in his 'Politics' that some men are born to slavery, and on Aquinas's grounds for a just war, much of Sepulveda's defence of Cortes' methods of conquest and forcible conversion of the Indians to Christianity has today a frighteningly familiar ring. Las Casas declared these arguments to be in direct contradiction to the Gospels, to the laws of the Church and to his personal knowledge of the Indians. In tracing the ramifications of this debate in subsequent Spanish colonial policy and in the wider context of our own times, Professor Hanke has not only provided an absorbing analysis of one phase of a perennial human problem, but also done a valuable service in reminding us that there have always been men who will not temporize for the sake of expediency when they see wrong put forward as right."--Front inside flap of book jacket.