Word: rousseauean
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Roger Lowenstein on former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan: "Greenspan's was a Rousseauean vision of markets as untainted social organisms--evolved, as it were, from a state of nature. (It overlooked the obvious point that markets were also human constructs--made...
...falls serve the picture as a moral and geographical dividing line. Above them, in 18th century Paraguay, live the Guarani Indians, which the movie asks us to believe were converted to Christianity by Jesuit missionaries without damage to their Rousseauean innocence. Below the falls lies an unpleasant civilization, composed of Spanish and Portuguese colonists bent on enslaving the Indians if they can drive out their priestly protectors...
...this does not seem revolutionary today, it is because 20th century man has already shown himself itching with the Rousseauean complaint that civilizing institutions have suborned man's true nature. But in the ceremonious, hierarchical, class-structured France of the 18th century, romantic individualism and moral egocentricity were new, sensational and heady stuff...
...that of a man whose posthumous reputation stands in heavy debt to his dramatic self-exile to the South Seas. By the time Gauguin arrived in 1891, his style had already been formed, his competence proved; nothing he did thereafter materially changed or improved either. Seeking in a Rousseauean state of nature the simple truths he wanted to paint, Gauguin found instead a culture already changed by a century of Western influences. Papeete, the capital, was any ugly French town. Gauguin's models dressed more decorously than he: when he bathed in the raw, a gendarme fined...
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