ABSTRACT

At the very moment in the eighteenth century that the use of the concept of interest and self-interest became widespread in ways of thinking about human behavior, that of disinterestedness was transferred from religion to the domains of ethics, art, literature, and law. “Disinterestedness” functions as what the chapter will call an “axiological operator,” i.e. a concept that gives systems of cultural oppositions both their meaning and their position in a hierarchy of values, and that thereby plays a key role in symbolic struggles. The chapter will analyze the various definitions and uses of the concept of disinterestedness and the system of oppositions it helps construct (with interest, self-interest, utility, greed, etc.) in the writings of eighteenth-century French, English, and German thinkers, tracing the intertextuality and debates among these thinkers in a transnational perspective.