Fictions in Political Thought

Abstract

The paper deals with the dispute between Bartolomé de las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda over the rights of indigenous peoples in the newly discovered America. The author argues that lying behind their different stances was a shared conception of what was the »Turk«, and that this fiction structured their response to the Indians. Where Las Casas tried to prove that the Indians were not »Turks« and should be treated differently, that is peacefully, Sepúlveda extended the European attitude towards the Turks to the treatment of the Indians.