American Ideologies

In a series of lectures on the philosophy of history delivered in the 1820s, around the time Spain's colonies in the Western Hemisphere were declaring independence, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel declared that America was "the land of the future." For those "weary of the historical lumber-room of old Europe," the New World promised a chance "to abandon the ground on which hitherto World His-tory has developed." But this potential to break free from the past wasn't evenly distributed across the Americas. In the part of the hemisphere that had been "colonized" by Protestants, where "all citizens" were of "European descent," Hegel found "an increase of industry and population, civil order, and firm freedom." By contrast, in the region that had been "conquered" by Catholics, where the friars had "proposed to accustom the Indians to European culture," he saw nothing but "a continued revolution."