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affluence

Dedalus00

Senior Member
Spanish-Spain
Hola,

Alguien podría decirme qué es affluence en esta oración?

Además, no tengo muy claro si es que se le promete a la opulencia emanciparse o es que la opulencia se promete a sí misma la emancipación


The cosy and sheltered life of plenty and comfort leads, paradoxically, back to the precivilizational state Mi versión:

La vida cómoda y protegida de la abundancia y el confort llevaba de vuelta, paradójicamente, a un estado pre-civilizado desde el que la opulencia prometió emanciparse
Affluence here simply means wealth. It's not necessarily negative. The basic idea is that money was supposed to emancipate the wealthy from living in an uncivilized state, but it did the exact opposite.
To me, it is missing a "them" but I get the impression the author was trying to avoid any personal pronouns. Rearranging the sentence into a more normal order:

Affluence [had] promised to emancipate them from a pre-civilised state.
"from which (that/such) wealth/affluence had promised emancipation", would work better grammatically.

As I see it, "emancipate/emancipation" is here being used loosely to mean "free/freedom" although it really means "(to free by) the removal of restrictions" and the idea that a civilized state is more free or less restricted than a pre-civilized one is......... complicated.

syd
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