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Article: The code of reciprocation in Corneille's heroic drama. (playwright Pierre Corneille)
- Article from:
- The Romanic Review
- Article date:
- January 1, 1998
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1998 Columbia University. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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"L'interet parle routes sortes de langues, et joue toutes sortes de personnages, meme celui du desinteresse." La Rochefoucauld's thirty-ninth maxim still strikes us as a bold, cynical declaration, yet its fundamental claim is no longer surprising, for we are used to explaining almost all behavior as the product of self-interest. This vision of human nature and the model of social relations that corresponds to it, however, did not always seem obvious. Seventeenth-century France saw the first systematic arguments that all motives could be reduced to self-interest and that society would not be destroyed, but might actually flourish, if people acted egoistically. ...