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Cluster index: Ricardo Duchesne

The Faustian impulse and European exploration.

Ricardo Duchesne: Europeans were not only exceptional in their literary endeavors, but also in their agonistic and expansionist behaviors. Their great books, including their liberal values, were themselves inseparably connected to their aristocratic ethos of competitive individualism. There is no need to concede to multicultural critics, as Norman Davies does, “the sorry catalogue of wars, conflict, and persecutions that have dogged every stage of the [Western] tale.” The expansionist dispositions of Europeans as well as their literary and other achievements were similarly driven by an aggressive and individually felt desire for superlative and undemocratic recognition.