Politeness [ Taste & Manners / Education ]
… Commons Résumé In the eighteenth century, the term ‘politeness’ became a powerful, if controverted, tool for thinking about and understanding social order and also for modelling and scripting social experience. Among an array of … to two quite different interpretations. On the one hand, the art of pleasing might be seen as a form of generosity and kindness: a version of social virtue. On the other hand, the art of social pleasing might be seen as a tool of a … all (or most) human attempts at virtuous self-restraint to an impossibly demanding self: in his view, politeness was a kind of refined egoism. 2 However, a number of Englishmen, Mandeville’s exact contemporaries, sought to anchor …
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