The term innocent fraud is coined by Harvard Economist John Kenneth Galbraith in his last book, published in 2005, concerning the impersonal role of market forces. This fraud is innocent, because most those who employ it are without conscious guilt; and it is fraud, because it is quietly in the service of special interests. It is this corporate management of a functional anonymity that is the target of the ‘Rebel’, whose sole purpose is to retain his own entity and virtuous integrity, in winning his own life. Taking the title by Galbraith as a starting point we are working on an analysis of civilizations, proposing to speak about some of the new ways in which comparative civilizational analysis and political anthropological have recently been interacting, and the impact of that dialogue, in terms of views but also attitudes, towards cultural artifacts, whether contained in literature or in images. This analysis prominently extends to the reflections of the best artists, like Shakespeare, Goethe or Tiepolo, on their own activity, in terms of the broad social effects works of art generate. In particular, we propose to discuss the role of Charisma and Rebel, as it is portrayed in respective works by Max Weber and Albert Camus, as a way of turning away from depersonalization, which – no matter how innocent it is – is always a fraud.