The Fondo de Cultura Económica has made available in an attractive Spanish edition Antonello Gerbi’s detailed study of the eighteenth and nineteenth century controversy over the quality of America as environment. The translation is the work of Antonio Alatorre, who deserves praise for a sensitive and understanding rendering that maintains the Fondo’s reputation for fine translations.
Gerbi’s study has primary focus in the long dispute whether or not the American environment fostered inferior development relative to the Old World. That view found eloquent expression in Buffon and culminated in Hegel, who managed a triadic synthesis that places him in both camps. A necessary secondary theme is the role of America in human history either as land of degeneration or land of promise. This theme, Gerbi finds in the sixteenth century in religious discussion and traces down to the nineteenth century in a juxtaposition of Dickens and Whitman. Most readers probably would have preferred a reversal of emphasis of the two themes and far fuller treatment of the second one, which still awaits as detailed and thoughtful analysis as Gerbi has given the first. Nevertheless, even for the concept of America as land of promise and the fulfillment of ideals thwarted in the Old World, Gerbi has brought together much material and shows interesting and not generally known sequences. One can only hope that Gerbi or a scholar of equal perception and perseverance will trace in detail what O’Gorman entitles “la invención de America” in its two earlier facets, recognition of the presence of a new continent and the conception of earthly Utopia, and the new and interesting sequel that develops in our day as the New World emerges as the defender of the old and the Old World takes on new forms.
