The Possibility of the New World. Social Cohesion, Legal Order and the Invention of Rights in Iberian Scholastic Thought

Europe’s discovery of the Americas opened up new opportunities for the itineraries of legal thought in the early Modern Era. With “territory” gradually coming to be seen as a potential place for the expansion and modernisation of the European legal dimension, those who saw these opportunities understood “space” in terms of a possibility rather than as a given, as it was during the Middle Ages. This change in spatial assumption posed a challenge to the theory behind the generation of new ideas and categories within legal issues. Iberian Scholastic Thought is concerned with this challenge, since the discovery of the Americas offered the opportunity to defend and promote the idea that Respublica Christiana was universal. Considering this framework, this paper will focus on the key issue of the invention of individual rights and the problem of generating community and social cohesion among people of very different origins and cultures. It will also show the main implications for other issues, such as the definition of legal spheres and the establishment of new legal orders, government regimes and constitutional entities. Finally, a comparison will be made with other understandings of “rights” in the European doctrines on Natural Law to better highlight the characteristics and perspectives of the Iberian scholastic approach.