Letters from Arcadia: State of Nature in Cervantes and Vitoria

Abstract

In the history of legal and political ideas, the state of nature was a mental exercise to imagine how society would be in the absence of the state: for some golden age while for others, iron age. In this context, of the multiple paths that a jurist might take in a reading of Don Quixote, the myth of the golden age features prominently, in the celebrated adventure of the galley slaves, suggesting a further comparison with the myth of the state of nature, as viewed by Francisco de Vitoria, another classical author of that time.