Indeed, in order that society be subjected to successful analysis, it was essen- tial that a primary model of man be adequately isolated and identified. Man must be stripped of his cultural contaminations and social corruptions. He must be imagined in his aboriginal condition, placed at point zero, before Temptation, before the Fall. And it is against such a backdrop, an inextin- guishable drive for reason and innocence, that the eigteenth century deliv- ered its most earth-shaking fabrication - the myth of the noble savage.