The Dispute of the New World: The History of a Polemic, 1750-1900 (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 115 the man we know that he wrote of inevitable progress in the shadow of the guillotine. By placing Condorcet back within the context out of which he arose, Baker works his long overdue rehabilitation as a thinker worthy of serious consideration, showing that he is significant first of all because he embraces and brings to culmination such a large segment of the eighteenthcentury Enlightenment. But there is another reason why Condorcet is significant, and this does not emerge quite so clearly from Baker's account. If Condorcet's radical rationalism tended to divorce him from the political reality of his own time, it tends to connect him all the more with ours; for the bureaucratic rationality over whose infancy Condorcet so fondly presided has now grown to ominous maturity. Though under normal circumstances we hardly notice it, we live under the aegis of bureaucracy. We are the quantifiable, interchangeable, and hence rationally manipulable units glimpsed and in part recommended by Condorcet--though he himself failed to recognize the tension between rational conduct and individual choice. Thus, Condorcet's legacy to the twentieth century--and by extension, the legacy of the Enlightenment as a whole --is profoundly ambiguous, vacillating as it does between the competing and in some measure conflicting values of rationality and freedom. ALLAN MEGILL Australian National University The Dispute of the New World: The History of a Polemic, 1750-1900. By Antonello Gerbi. Translated by Jeremy Moyle. (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973. Pp. xviii + 700. $19.95) Gerbi's short study of over thirty years ago, Viejaspolemicassobre elNuevo Mundo (Lima, 1944), focused attention on a strange debate that took place among leading European and American thinkers in the Enlightenment and that carried over into the nineteenth century. The question was whether the New World (the entire New World, from Baffin Bay to Tierra del Fuego) was basically, structurally, naturally, or metaphysically inferior to the Old World. Out of this grew all sorts of side debates about whether the New World was younger in the sense of having emerged from the waters of the Flood more recently than Europe, Asia, or Africa; about whether Europeans would develop the same kind of inferior features, physical as well as mental, if forced to live in the New World; and about the merits of many differences between the two worlds. In this greatly expanded edition of Gerbi's study a vast amount of new material has been added, as well as some new perspectives in terms of the part played in keeping the dispute alive in the nineteenth century by literary figures, both European and American. Finally, Gerbi concludes with some very suggestive supplementary material about a few details of the dispute. The basic dispute was spawned by a group of theoreticians of the defects of America, all holding that the two American continents are inferior in geography, flora, fauna, people, and living conditions for man and beast, and that this inferiority is in some way essential to the American world. The four major protagonists of this view whom Gerbi singles out are Count Buffon, Cornelius de Pauw, the abb6 Raynal, and William Robertson, the historian. Buffon and de Pauw are shown to be central in setting the character of the dispute and in influencing other intellectuals, especially toward developing a negative attitude about the New World. Buffon, the greatest biologist of his day, had complained about the smallness of American animals and about the absence there of the large majestic beasts of Asia and Africa. As far as Buffon was concerned, all of the native American animals were stunted compared to European ones. Even the birds in America could not sing as well and as melodiously as European 116 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY birds. And worst of all, America had no real lions or tigers (just small pumas and wild cats), no camels, and no elephants. Geographically, as far as Buffon knew, America had no decent mountains. In terms of people, the natives lacked real masculinity, since they did not grow beards and had little sex drive. Buffon attributed the whole sad scene (as did Lord Kames) to the "fact" that America emerged from the briny deep much...