The geographical Utopias that present a New World, from classical Antiquity and the Middle Ages to the exploration and conquest of American territories by Spain, give a two-fold vision of the myth of gold. On the one hand, the legendary lands in which were found the wealth and power generated by the coveted metal—El Dorado, El Paititi, the City of the Caesars—establish the direction of a venture toward the unknown, and a geography of the imaginary marked the ubiquitous sign of (...) the mythical gold. But at the same time, America permitted the felicitous re-encounter in its territory of the Golden Age that had been lost in the Old World. The first steps of Western man toward the American adventure wavered contradictorily between these extremes, in that gold was at the same time “booty and marvel.”. (shrink)

Dreams of gold have accompanied human history down through the ages. Gold is a beautiful and useful metal, easily shaped and immune to rust, and from the time of the ancient Sumerian and Egyptian civilizations, it has been regarded as a precious metal from which jewels and decorative as well as everyday objects have been fashioned. Even before the concept of money turned it into one of the principal forms of exchange, gold was used as a medium of barter.Apart from (...) being of commercial and aesthetic value, gold is also a part of the stuff of fables and legends. Legendary and mythical lands where gold abounds have crowded the imaginative geography of almost all civilizations. The Bible itself, in the Book of Kings, speaks of the Mines of King Solomon, the Kingdom of Ophir, and the City of Sidon, while the prophet Zechariah observes that in the City of Tyre: “silver is heaped up like dust, and gold as the mire of the streets.” [Zachariah, 9.3]. (shrink)

“The ships that invented regions were directed toward the West”, announced Juan de Castellanos in 1587 in his Elegías dedicated to Christopher Columbus, and at the beginning of the 16th century Hernán Pérez de Oliva wrote a Historia de la invención de las Indias. The use of the word invention when speaking of the discovery of America may seem to be a semantic confusion or poetic license, viewed from the contemporary perspective of a discipline with well-defined limits, such as geography, (...) since we usually understand invention as the transformation of things by man's intervention, while discovery is finding something that already existed so as to make it known to others. (shrink)

Résumé Face aux effets aliénants de la globalisation actuelle il convient de prendre la mesure de l’expérience historique brutale que constituèrent la conquête et la colonisation de l’Amérique par l’Espagne. De ce choc sont nés des mélanges innovants, des métamorphoses inattendues et la réalité polymorphe que l’on observe dans les cultures latino-américaines d’aujourd’hui. L’utopie dans le contexte de la mondialisation que nous vivons actuellement passe par l’interculturalité, par les multiples possibilités d’échanges et de métissages. Le discours utopique classique doit désormais (...) réconcilier les valeurs universelles de la raison avec les passions, les différences, la fragmentation et la diversité des cultures. (shrink)

El título de este libro, al estar en plural, constituye de por sí una petición de principio. Se trata, pues, de descomponer el Tiempo en tiempos y dentro de ellos analizar lo que son las secuencias de carácter temporal. Porque sólo rompiendo la interesada confusión del Tiempo con los tiempos puede pensarse de una forma "otra", puede empezar a repensarse el enorme sinsentido de la Estructura que nos atrapa, ratonera del pensamiento que adora la Realidad.

This article precisely analyzes the relation ship between the State, society and the individual, both from the point of view of liberalism and of republicanism. There is a surprising difference in the categories of both theories and their philosophical bases: the form in which the social state is ..

In the face of the alienating effects of the current globalization it is appropriate to assess the brutal historical experience of Spain’s conquest and colonization of America. From that confrontation were born innovative mixtures, unanticipated metamorphoses and the polymorphous reality to be seen in today’s Latin-American cultures. Utopia, in the context of the globalization we are now experiencing, is composed of interculturalism, the very many opportunities for exchange and cross-fertilization. Traditional utopian discourse must henceforth reconcile the universal values of reason (...) with passions, differences, fragmentation and the diversity of cultures. (shrink)

Behind every Utopia there is always a territory, but a territory that “is not here”, a territory removed from immediate reality in space or in time. In time, when the Utopia invokes the past of an Age of Gold or a Paradise Lost “illo tempore,” but also when there is a gamble with the hope of a better world to be organized in the future. These are “ideal times” or “longed-for times,” past or future of which philosophers, writers or political (...) men speak. (shrink)