Historians of the future may yet come to describe the origins of modern governance as a cultural composite, assembled from Amer indian notions of personal liberty, African social-contract theory, free-market economics inspired by medieval Islam, and Chinese models of the nation-state (a civil service chosen by competitive exams, administering a uniform ethnolinguistic population).
In similar fashion, one could make a case that some of the very earliest Enlightenment salons were held not in Europe but in Montreal, during the 1690s. It was there that an indigenous statesman called Kandiaronk, acting as liaison between the Wendat (“Huron”) confederation and the regime of Louis XIV, sat down regularly with the French governor-general, the comte de Frontenac et de Palluau, and his deputies—including a certain Baron de Lahontan—to debate issues such as economic morality, law, sexual mores, and revealed religion. Kandiaronk was widely hailed by French observers as the most brilliant logician and wittiest debater anyone had ever met (one slightly irritated Jesuit wrote, “No one has perhaps ever exceeded him in mental capacity”), and a book based on notes from these debates later became a best seller across Europe.
From Hiding in Plain Sight – Democracy’s indigenous origins in the Americas. By David Graeber and David Wengrow. Link from Ganzeer
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