Intellectual historians recall the 18th century as a golden age of public philosophers and men of letters, of discussion and speculation, but also, significantly, of experimentation in the physical sciences and in the art of statecraft. As an age of Enlightenment, it was an era of ideas, but one in which ideas had real consequences in action. Perhaps for this reason, the virtue its citizens held up for greatest praise appears nowhere in the Ethics of Aristotle or in the morality of any prior age — that of disinterestedness.
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