Abstract

The author undertakes a polemic with a concept launched by Samuel Huntington, who, in his book The clash of civilizations, posited the existence of a Latino-American civilisation. Other scholars, such as Oswald Spengler or Arnold Toynbee, however, only refer in their writings to the ancient Indian civilisation in pre-Colombian America, while colonisation of the New World by the Europeans is rather more tied to expansion of civilisation of the West. The Author thus presents arguments both supporting and undermining a thesis that there existed some separate Latin American community. His considerations also refer to the views expressed by Francis Fukuyama and Carlos A. Montaner, who describe the political, social and economic backwardness of Latin American countries compared to the United States and the European Union. Thus, while the Latin American culture is clearly different from the American or the European, nevertheless, from a historiosophic point of view, it is difficult to find in it features which would unambiguously bear testimony to the civilisation of the region’s being distinct from that of the West.