François-Marie d’Arouet (1694–1778), better knownby his pen name Voltaire, was a French writer and public activist whoplayed a singular role in defining the eighteenth-century movementcalled the Enlightenment. At the center of his work was a newconception of philosophy and the philosopher that in several crucialrespects influenced the modern concept of each. Yet in other waysVoltaire was not a philosopher at all in the modern sense of the term.He wrote as many plays, stories, and poems as patently philosophicaltracts, and he in fact directed many of his critical writings againstthe philosophical pretensions of recognized philosophers such asLeibniz, Malebranche, and Descartes. He was, however, a vigorousdefender of a conception of natural science that served in his mind asthe antidote to vain and fruitless philosophical investigation. Inclarifying this new distinction between science and philosophy, andespecially in fighting vigorously for it in public campaigns directedagainst the perceived enemies of fanaticism and superstition, Voltairepointed modern philosophy down several paths that it subsequentlyfollowed.

To capture Voltaire’s unconventional place in the history ofphilosophy, this article will be structured in a particular way.First, a full account of Voltaire’s life is offered, not merelyas background context for his philosophical work, but as an argumentabout the way that his particular career produced his particularcontributions to European philosophy. Second, a survey ofVoltaire’s philosophical views is offered so as to attach thelegacy of what Voltaire did with the intellectual viewpoints that hisactivities reinforced.

• 1. Voltaire’s Life: The Philosopher as Critic and Public Activist
  • 1.1 Voltaire’s Early Years (1694–1726)
  • 1.2 The English Period (1726–1729)
  • 1.3 Becoming aPhilosophe
  • 1.4 The Newton Wars (1732–1745)
  • 1.5 From French Newtonian to EnlightenmentPhilosophe (1745–1755)
  • 1.6 Fighting forPhilosophie (1755–1778)
  • 1.7 Voltaire,Philosophe Icon of EnlightenmentPhilosophie (1778–Present)
• 2. Voltaire’s Enlightenment Philosophy
  • 2.1 Liberty
  • 2.2 Hedonism
  • 2.3 Skepticism
  • 2.4 Newtonian Empirical Science
  • 2.5 Toward Science without Metaphysics
• Bibliography
  • Primary Literature
  • Primary Literature in Translation
  • Secondary Literature
• Academic Tools
• Other Internet Resources
• Related Entries

1. Voltaire’s Life: The Philosopher as Critic and Public Activist

Voltaire only began to identify himself with philosophy and thephilosophe identity during middle age. His workLettresphilosophiques, published in 1734 when he was forty years old,was the key turning point in this transformation. Before this date,Voltaire’s life in no way pointed him toward the philosophicaldestiny that he was later to assume. His early orientation towardliterature and libertine sociability, however, shaped hisphilosophical identity in crucial ways.

1.1 Voltaire’s Early Years (1694–1726)

François-Marie d’Arouet was born in 1694, the fourth offive children, to a well-to-do public official and his well bredaristocratic wife. In its fusion of traditional French aristocraticpedigree with the new wealth and power of royal bureaucraticadministration, the d’Arouet family was representative of elitesociety in France during the reign of Louis XIV. The youngFrançois-Marie acquired from his parents the benefits ofprosperity and political favor, and from the Jesuits at theprestigious Collège Louis-le-Grand in Paris he also acquired afirst-class education. François-Marie also acquired anintroduction to modern letters from his father who was active in theliterary culture of the period both in Paris and at the royal court ofVersailles. François senior appears to have enjoyed the companyof men of letters, yet his frustration with his son’s ambitionto become a writer is notorious. From early in his youth, Voltaireaspired to emulate his idols Molière, Racine, and Corneille andbecome a playwright, yet Voltaire’s father strenuously opposedthe idea, hoping to install his son instead in a position of publicauthority. First as a law student, then as a lawyer’sapprentice, and finally as a secretary to a French diplomat, Voltaireattempted to fulfill his father’s wishes. But in each case, heended up abandoning his posts, sometimes amidst scandal.

Escaping from the burdens of these public obligations, Voltaire wouldretreat into the libertine sociability of Paris. It was here in the1720s, during the culturally vibrant period of the Regency governmentbetween the reigns of Louis XIV and XV (1715–1723), thatVoltaire established one dimension of his identity. His wit andcongeniality were legendary even as a youth, so he had fewdifficulties establishing himself as a popular figure in Regencyliterary circles. He also learned how to play the patronage game soimportant to those with writerly ambitions. Thanks, therefore, to someartfully composed writings, a couple of well-made contacts, more thana fewbon mots, and a little successful investing, especiallyduring John Law’s Mississippi Bubble fiasco, Voltaire was ableto establish himself as an independent man of letters in Paris. Hisliterary debut occurred in 1718 with the publication of hisOedipe, a reworking of the ancient tragedy that evoked theFrench classicism of Racine and Corneille. The play was firstperformed at the home of the Duchesse du Maine at Sceaux, a sign ofVoltaire’s quick ascent to the very pinnacle of elite literarysociety. Its published title page also announced the new pen name thatVoltaire would ever after deploy.

During the Regency, Voltaire circulated widely in elite circles suchas those that congregated at Sceaux, but he also cultivated moreillicit and libertine sociability as well. This pairing was not at alluncommon during this time, and Voltaire’s intellectual work inthe 1720s—a mix of poems and plays that shifted between playfullibertinism and serious classicism seemingly withoutpause—illustrated perfectly the values of pleasure,honnêteté, and good taste that were thewatchwords of this cultural milieu. Philosophy was also a part of thismix, and during the Regency the young Voltaire was especially shapedby his contacts with the English aristocrat, freethinker,and JacobiteLord Bolingbroke. Bolingbroke lived in exile in France during theRegency period, and Voltaire was a frequent visitor to La Source, theEnglishman’s estate near Orléans. The chateau served as areunion point for a wide range of intellectuals, and many believe thatVoltaire was first introduced to natural philosophy generally, and tothe work of Locke and the English Newtonians specifically, atBolingbroke’s estate. It was certainly true that these ideas,especially in their more deistic and libertine configurations, were atthe heart of Bolingbroke’s identity.

1.2 The English Period (1726–1729)

Yet even if Voltaire was introduced to English philosophy in this way,its influence on his thought was most shaped by his brief exile inEngland between 1726–29. The occasion for his departure was anaffair of honor. A very powerful aristocrat, the Duc de Rohan, accusedVoltaire of defamation, and in the face of this charge the untitledwriter chose to save face and avoid more serious prosecution byleaving the country indefinitely. In the spring of 1726, therefore,Voltaire left Paris for England.

It was during his English period that Voltaire’s transition intohis maturephilosophe identity began. Bolingbroke, whoseaddress Voltaire left in Paris as his own forwarding address, was oneconduit of influence. In particular, Voltaire met through BolingbrokeJonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, and John Gay, writers who were at thatmoment beginning to experiment with the use of literary forms such asthe novel and theater in the creation of a new kind of critical publicpolitics. Swift’sGulliver’s Travels, whichappeared only months before Voltaire’s arrival, is the mostfamous exemplar of this new fusion of writing with politicalcriticism. Later the same year Bolingbroke also brought out the firstissue of theCraftsman, a political journal that served asthe public platform for his circle’s Tory opposition to the Whigoligarchy in England. TheCraftsman helped to create Englishpolitical journalism in the grand style, and for the next three yearsVoltaire moved in Bolingbroke’s circle, absorbing the cultureand sharing in the public political contestation that was percolatingall around him.

Voltaire did not restrict himself to Bolingbroke’s circle alone,however. After Bolingbroke, his primary contact in England was amerchant by the name of Everard Fawkener. Fawkener introduced Voltaireto a side of London life entirely different from that offered byBolingbroke’s circle of Tory intellectuals. This included theWhig circles that Bolingbroke’s group opposed. It also includedfigures such as Samuel Clarke and other self-proclaimed Newtonians.Voltaire did not meet Newton himself before Sir Isaac’s death inMarch, 1727, but he did meet his sister—learning from her thefamous myth of Newton’s apple, which Voltaire would play a majorrole in making famous. Voltaire also came to know the other Newtoniansin Clarke’s circle, and since he became proficient enough withEnglish to write letters and even fiction in the language, it is verylikely that he immersed himself in their writings as well. Voltairealso visited Holland during these years, forming important contactswith Dutch journalists and publishers and meeting Willem’sGravesande and other Dutch Newtonian savants. Given his otheractivities, it is also likely that Voltaire frequented thecoffeehouses of London even if no firm evidence survives confirmingthat he did. It would not be surprising, therefore, to learn thatVoltaire attended the Newtonian public lectures of John TheophilusDesaguliers or those of one of his rivals. Whatever the preciseconduits, all of his encounters in England made Voltaire into a veryknowledgeable student of English natural philosophy.

1.3 Becoming aPhilosophe

When French officials granted Voltaire permission to re-enter Paris in1729, he was devoid of pensions and banned from the royal court atVersailles. But he was also a different kind of writer and thinker. Itis no doubt overly grandiose to say with Lord Morley that,“Voltaire left France a poet and returned to it a sage.”It is also an exaggeration to say that he was transformed from a poetinto aphilosophe while in England. For one, these two sidesof Voltaire’s intellectual identity were forever intertwined,and he never experienced an absolute transformation from one into theother at any point in his life. But the English years did trigger atransformation in him.

After his return to France, Voltaire worked hard to restore hissources of financial and political support. The financial problemswere the easiest to solve. In 1729, the French government staged asort of lottery to help amortize some of the royal debt. A friendperceived an opportunity for investors in the structure of thegovernment’s offering, and at a dinner attended by Voltaire heformed a society to purchase shares. Voltaire participated, and in thefall of that year when the returns were posted he had made a fortune.Voltaire’s inheritance from his father also became available tohim at the same time, and from this date forward Voltaire never againstruggled financially. This result was no insignificant developmentsince Voltaire’s financial independence effectively freed himfrom one dimension of the patronage system so necessary to aspiringwriters and intellectuals in the period. In particular, while otherwriters were required to appeal to powerful financial patrons in orderto secure the livelihood that made possible their intellectualcareers, Voltaire was never again beholden to these imperatives.

The patronage structures of Old Regime France provided more thaneconomic support to writers, however, and restoring thecrédit upon which his reputation as a writer andthinker depended was far less simple. Gradually, however, through acombination of artfully written plays, poems, and essays and carefulself-presentation in Parisian society, Voltaire began to regain hispublic stature. In the fall of 1732, when the next stage in his careerbegan to unfold, Voltaire was residing at the royal court ofVersailles, a sign that his re-establishment in French society was allbut complete.

During this rehabilitation, Voltaire also formed a new relationshipthat was to prove profoundly influential in the subsequent decades. Hebecame reacquainted with Emilie Le Tonnier de Breteuil,the daughter ofone of his earliest patrons, who married in 1722 to become theMarquise du Châtelet. Emilie du Châtelet was not quitetwenty-seven years old in the spring of 1733 when Voltaire began hisrelationship with her. She was also a uniquely accomplished woman. DuChâtelet’s father, the Baron de Breteuil, hosted a regulargathering of men of letters that included Voltaire, and his daughter,ten years younger than Voltaire, shared in these associations. Herfather also ensured that Emilie received an education that wasexceptional for girls at the time. She studied Greek and Latin andtrained in mathematics, and when Voltaire reconnected with her in 1733she was a very knowledgeable thinker in her own right even if her ownintellectual career, which would include an original treatise innatural philosophy and a complete French translation of Newton’sPrincipia Mathematica—still the only complete Frenchtranslation ever published—had not yet begun. Her intellectualtalents combined with her vivacious personality drew Voltaire to her,and although Du Châtelet was a titled aristocrat married to animportant military officer, the couple was able to form a lastingpartnership that did not interfere with Du Châtelet’smarriage. This arrangement proved especially beneficial to Voltairewhen scandal forced him to flee Paris and to establish himselfpermanently at the Du Châtelet family estate at Cirey. From1734, when this arrangement began, to 1749, when Du Châteletdied during childbirth, Cirey was the home to each along with the siteof an intense intellectual collaboration. It was during this periodthat both Voltaire and Du Châtelet became widely knownphilosophical figures, and the intellectual history of each before1749 is most accurately described as the history of the couple’sjoint intellectual endeavors.

1.4 The Newton Wars (1732–1745)

For Voltaire, the events that sent him fleeing to Cirey were also theimpetus for much of his work while there. While in England, Voltairehad begun to compose a set of letters framed according to thewell-established genre of a traveler reporting to friends back homeabout foreign lands. Montesquieu’s 1721LettresPersanes, which offered a set of fictionalized letters byPersians allegedly traveling in France, and Swift’s 1726Gulliver’s Travels were clear influences when Voltaireconceived his work. But unlike the authors of these overtlyfictionalized accounts, Voltaire innovated by adopting a journalisticstance instead, one that offered readers an empirically recognizableaccount of several aspects of English society. Originally titledLetters on England, Voltaire left a draft of the text with aLondon publisher before returning home in 1729. Once in France, hebegan to expand the work, adding to the letters drafted while inEngland, which focused largely on the different religious sects ofEngland and the English Parliament, several new letters including someon English philosophy. The new text, which included letters on Bacon,Locke, Newton and the details of Newtonian natural philosophy alongwith an account of the English practice of inoculation for smallpox,also acquired a new title when it was first published in France in1734:Lettres philosophiques.

Before it appeared, Voltaire attempted to get official permission forthe book from the royal censors, a requirement in France at the time.His publisher, however, ultimately released the book without theseapprovals and without Voltaire’s permission. This made the firstedition of theLettres philosophiques illicit, a fact thatcontributed to the scandal that it triggered, but one that in no wayexplains the furor the book caused. Historians in fact still scratchtheir heads when trying to understand why Voltaire’sLettresphilosophiques proved to be so controversial. The only thing thatis clear is that the work did cause a sensation that subsequentlytriggered a rapid and overwhelming response on the part of the Frenchauthorities. The book was publicly burned by the royal hangman severalmonths after its release, and this act turned Voltaire into a widelyknown intellectual outlaw. Had it been executed, a royallettre decachet would have sent Voltaire to the royal prison of theBastille as a result of his authorship ofLettresphilosophiques; instead, he was able to flee with DuChâtelet to Cirey where the couple used the sovereignty grantedby her aristocratic title to create a safe haven and base forVoltaire’s new position as a philosophical rebel and writer inexile.

Had Voltaire been able to avoid the scandal triggered by theLettres philosophiques, it is highly likely that he wouldhave chosen to do so. Yet once it was thrust upon him, he adopted theidentity of the philosophical exile and outlaw writer with conviction,using it to create a new identity for himself, one that was to havefar reaching consequences for the history of Western philosophy. Atfirst, Newtonian science served as the vehicle for thistransformation. In the decades before 1734, a series of controversieshad erupted, especially in France, about the character and legitimacyof Newtonian science, especially the theory of universal gravitationand the physics of gravitational attraction through empty space.Voltaire positioned hisLettres philosophiques as anintervention into these controversies, drafting a famous and widelycited letter that used an opposition between Newton and Descartes toframe a set of fundamental differences between English and Frenchphilosophy at the time. He also included other letters about Newtonianscience in the work while linking (or so he claimed) the philosophiesof Bacon, Locke, and Newton into an English philosophical complex thathe championed as a remedy for the perceived errors and illusionsperpetuated on the French by René Descartes and NicolasMalebranche. Voltaire did not invent this framework, but he did use itto enflame a set of debates that were then raging, debates that placedhim and a small group of young members of the Royal Academy ofSciences in Paris into apparent opposition to the older and moreestablished members of this bastion of official French science. Onceinstalled at Cirey, both Voltaire and Du Châtelet furtherexploited this apparent division by engaging in a campaign on behalfof Newtonianism, one that continually targeted an imagined monolithcalled French Academic Cartesianism as the enemy against which they inthe name of Newtonianism were fighting.

The centerpiece of this campaign was Voltaire’sÉléments de la Philosophie de Newton, which wasfirst published in 1738 and then again in 1745 in a new and definitiveedition that included a new section, first published in 1740, devotedto Newton’s metaphysics. Voltaire offered this book as a clear,accurate, and accessible account of Newton’s philosophy suitablefor ignorant Frenchman (a group that he imagined to be large). But healso conceived of it as amachine de guerre directed againstthe Cartesian establishment, which he believed was holding France backfrom the modern light of scientific truth. Vociferous criticism ofVoltaire and his work quickly erupted, with some critics emphasizinghis rebellious and immoral proclivities while others focused on hisprecise scientific views. Voltaire collapsed both challenges into asingular vision of his enemy as “backward Cartesianism”.As he fought fiercely to defend his positions, an unprecedentedculture war erupted in France centered on the character and value ofNewtonian natural philosophy. Du Châtelet contributed to thiscampaign by writing a celebratory review of Voltaire’sÉléments in theJournal des savants,the most authoritative French learned periodical of the day. Thecouple also added to their scientific credibility by receivingseparate honorable mentions in the 1738 Paris Academy prize contest onthe nature of fire. Voltaire likewise worked tirelessly rebuttingcritics and advancing his positions in pamphlets and contributions tolearned periodicals. By 1745, when the definitive edition ofVoltaire’sÉléments was published, thetides of thought were turning his way, and by 1750 the perception hadbecome widespread that France had been converted from backward,erroneous Cartesianism to modern, Enlightened Newtonianism thanks tothe heroic intellectual efforts of figures like Voltaire.

1.5 From French Newtonian to EnlightenmentPhilosophe (1745–1755)

This apparent victory in the Newton Wars of the 1730s and 1740sallowed Voltaire’s new philosophical identity to solidify.Especially crucial was the way that it allowed Voltaire’s outlawstatus, which he had never fully repudiated, to be rehabilitated inthe public mind as a necessary and heroic defense of philosophicaltruth against the enemies of error and prejudice. From thisperspective, Voltaire’s critical stance could be reintegratedinto traditional Old Regime society as a new kind of legitimateintellectual martyrdom. Since Voltaire also coupled his explicitlyphilosophical writings and polemics during the 1730s and 1740s with anequally extensive stream of plays, poems, stories, and narrativehistories, many of which were orthogonal in both tone and content tothe explicit campaigns of the Newton Wars, Voltaire was further ableto reestablish his old identity as an Old Regime man of lettersdespite the scandals of these years. In 1745, Voltaire was named theRoyal Historiographer of France, a title bestowed upon him as a resultof his histories of Louis XIV and the Swedish King Charles II. Thisroyal office also triggered the writing of arguably Voltaire’smost widely read and influential book, at least in the eighteenthcentury,Essais sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations(1751), a pioneering work of universal history. The position alsolegitimated him as an officially sanctioned savant. In 1749, after thedeath of du Châtelet, Voltaire reinforced this impression byaccepting an invitation to join the court of the young Frederick theGreat in Prussia, a move that further assimilated him into the powerstructures of Old Regime society.

Had this assimilationist trajectory continued during the remainder ofVoltaire’s life, his legacy in the history of Western philosophymight not have been so great. Yet during the 1750s, a set of newdevelopments pulled Voltaire back toward his more radical andcontroversial identity and allowed him to rekindle the criticalphilosophe persona that he had innovated during the NewtonWars. The first step in this direction involved a dispute with hisonetime colleague and ally, Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis.Maupertuis had preceded Voltaire as the first aggressive advocate forNewtonian science in France. When Voltaire was preparing his ownNewtonian intervention in theLettres philosophiques in 1732,he consulted with Maupertuis, who was by this date a pensioner in theFrench Royal Academy of Sciences. It was largely around Maupertuisthat the young cohort of French academic Newtonians gathered duringthe Newton wars of 1730s and 40s, and with Voltaire fighting his ownpublic campaigns on behalf of this same cause during the same period,the two men became the most visible faces of French Newtonianism evenif they never really worked as a team in this effort. Like Voltaire,Maupertuis also shared a relationship with Emilie du Châtelet,one that included mathematical collaborations that far exceededVoltaire’s capacities. Maupertuis was also an occasional guestat Cirey, and a correspondent with both du Châtelet and Voltairethroughout these years. But in 1745 Maupertuis surprised all of Frenchsociety by moving to Berlin to accept the directorship of Frederickthe Great’s newly reformed Berlin Academy of Sciences.

Maupertuis’s thought at the time of his departure for Prussiawas turning toward the metaphysics and rationalist epistemology ofLeibniz as a solution to certain questions in natural philosophy. DuChâtelet also shared this tendency, producing in 1740 herInstitutions de physiques, a systematic attempt to wedNewtonian mechanics with Leibnizian rationalism and metaphysics.Voltaire found this Leibnizian turn dyspeptic, and he began to craftan anti-Leibnizian discourse in the 1740s that became a bulwark of hisbrand of Newtonianism. This placed him in opposition to DuChâtelet, even if this intellectual rift in no way soured theirrelationship. Yet after she died in 1749, and Voltaire joinedMaupertuis at Frederick the Great’s court in Berlin, thisanti-Leibnizianism became the centerpiece of a rift with Maupertuis.Voltaire’s public satire of the President of the Royal Academyof Sciences of Berlin published in late 1752, which presentedMaupertuis as a despotic philosophical buffoon, forced Frederick tomake a choice. He sided with Maupertuis, ordering Voltaire to eitherretract his libelous text or leave Berlin. Voltaire chose the latter,falling once again into the role of scandalous rebel and exile as aresult of his writings.

1.6 Fighting forPhilosophie (1755–1778)

This event proved to be Voltaire’s last official rupture withestablishment authority. Rather than returning home to Paris andrestoring his reputation, Voltaire instead settled in Geneva. Whenthis austere Calvinist enclave proved completely unwelcoming, he tookfurther steps toward independence by using his personal fortune to buya chateau of his own in the hinterlands between France andSwitzerland. Voltaire installed himself permanently at Ferney in early1759, and from this date until his death in 1778 he made the chateauhis permanent home and capital, at least in the minds of hisintellectual allies, of the emerging French Enlightenment.

During this period, Voltaire also adopted what would become his mostfamous and influential intellectual stance, announcing himself as amember of the “party of humanity” and devoting himselftoward waging war against the twin hydras of fanaticism andsuperstition. While the singular defense of Newtonian science hadfocused Voltaire’s polemical energies in the 1730s and 1740s,after 1750 the program became the defense ofphilosophie toutcourt and the defeat of its perceived enemies within theecclesiastical and aristo-monarchical establishment. In this way,Enlightenmentphilosophie became associated through Voltairewith the cultural and political program encapsulated in his famousmotto, “Écrasez l’infâme!”(“Crush the infamy!”). This entanglement of philosophywith social criticism and reformist political action, a contingenthistorical outcome of Voltaire’s particular intellectual career,would become his most lasting contribution to the history ofphilosophy.

The first cause to galvanize this new program was Diderot andd’Alembert’sEncyclopédie. The firstvolume of this compendium of definitions appeared in 1751, and almostinstantly the work became buried in the kind of scandal to whichVoltaire had grown accustomed. Voltaire saw in the controversy a newcall to action, and he joined forces with the project soon after itsappearance, penning numerous articles that began to appear with volume5 in 1755. Scandal continued to chase theEncyclopédie, however, and in 1759 the work’spublication privilege was revoked in France, an act that did not killthe project but forced it into illicit production in Switzerland.During these scandals, Voltaire fought vigorously alongside theproject’s editors to defend the work, fusing theEncyclopédie’s enemies, particularly theParisian Jesuits who edited the monthly periodical theJournal deTrevoux, into a monolithic “infamy” devoted toeradicating truth and light from the world. This framing wasrecapitulated by the opponents of theEncyclopédie,who began to speak of the loose assemblage of authors who contributedarticles to the work as a subversive coterie ofphilosophesdevoted to undermining legitimate social and moral order.

As this polemic crystallized and grew in both energy and influence,Voltaire embraced its terms and made them his cause. He formedparticularly close ties with d’Alembert, and with him began togeneralize a broad program for Enlightenment centered on rallying thenewly self-consciousphilosophes (a term often usedsynonymously with theEncyclopédistes) towardpolitical and intellectual change. In this program, thephilosophes were not unified by any shared philosophy butthrough a commitment to the program of defendingphilosophieitself against its perceived enemies. They were also imagined asactivists fighting to eradicate error and superstition from the world.The ongoing defense of theEncyclopédie was onerallying point, and soon the removal of the Jesuits—the greatenemies of Enlightenment, thephilosophesproclaimed—became a second unifying cause. This effort achievedvictory in 1763, and soon thephilosophes were attempting toinfiltrate the academies and other institutions of knowledge inFrance. One climax in this effort was reached in 1774 when theEncyclopédiste and friend of Voltaire and thephilosophes, Anne-Robert Jacques Turgot, was namedController-General of France, the most powerful ministerial positionin the kingdom, by the newly crowned King Louis XVI. Voltaire and hisallies had paved the way for this victory through a barrage ofwritings throughout the 1760s and 1770s that presentedphilosophie like that espoused by Turgot as an agent ofenlightened reform and its critics as prejudicial defenders of anossified tradition.

Voltaire did bring out one explicitly philosophical book in supportthis campaign, hisDictionnaire philosophique of1764–1770. This book republished his articles from the originalEncyclopédie while adding new entries conceived in thespirit of the original work. Yet to fully understand the brand ofphilosophie that Voltaire made foundational to theEnlightenment, one needs to recognize that it just as often circulatedin fictional stories, satires, poems, pamphlets, and other lessobviously philosophical genres. Voltaire’s most widely knowntext, for instance,Candide, ou l’Optimisme, firstpublished in 1759, is a fictional story of a wandering travelerengaged in a set of farcical adventures. Yet contained in the text isa serious attack on Leibnizian philosophy, one that in many ways marksthe culmination of Voltaire’s decades long attack on thisphilosophy started during the Newton wars.Philosophie à laVoltaire also came in the form of political activism, such as hispublic defense of Jean Calas who, Voltaire argued, was a victim of adespotic state and an irrational and brutal judicial system. Voltaireoften attached philosophical reflection to this political advocacy,such as when he facilitated a French translation of CesareBeccaria’s treatise on humanitarian justice and penal reform andthen prefaced the work with his own essay on justice and religioustoleration (Calas was a French protestant persecuted by a Catholicmonarchy). Public philosophic campaigns such as these that channeledcritical reason in a direct, oppositionalist way against the perceivedinjustices and absurdities of Old Regime life were the hallmark ofphilosophie as Voltaire understood the term.

1.7 Voltaire,Philosophe Icon of EnlightenmentPhilosophie (1778–Present)

Voltaire lived long enough to see some of his long-term legacies startto concretize. With the ascension of Louis XVI in 1774 and theappointment of Turgot as Controller-General, the French establishmentbegan to embrace thephilosophes and their agenda in a newway. Critics of Voltaire and his program forphilosophieremained powerful, however, and they would continue to survive as thenecessary backdrop to the positive image of the Enlightenmentphilosophe as a modernizer, progressive reformer, andcourageous scourge against traditional authority that Voltairebequeathed to later generations. During Voltaire’s lifetime,this new acceptance translated into a final return to Paris in early1778. Here, as a frail and sickly octogenarian, Voltaire was welcomedby the city as the hero of the Enlightenment that he now personified.A statue was commissioned as a permanent shrine to his legacy, and apublic performance of his playIrène was performed ina way that allowed its author to be celebrated as a national hero.Voltaire died several weeks after these events, but the canonizationthat they initiated has continued right up until the present.

Western philosophy was profoundly shaped by the conception of thephilosophe and the program for Enlightenmentphilosophie that Voltaire came to personify. The model heoffered of thephilosophe as critical public citizen andadvocate first and foremost, and as abstruse and systematic thinkeronly when absolutely necessary, was especially influential in thesubsequent development of the European philosophy. Also influentialwas the example he offered of the philosopher measuring the value ofany philosophy according by its ability to effect social change. Inthis respect, Karl Marx’s famous thesis that philosophy shouldaspire to change the world, not merely interpret it, owes more than alittle debt Voltaire. The link between Voltaire and Marx was alsoestablished through the French revolutionary tradition, whichsimilarly adopted Voltaire as one of its founding heroes. Voltaire wasthe first person to be honored with re-burial in the newly createdPantheon of the Great Men of France that the new revolutionarygovernment created in 1791. This act served as a tribute to theconnections that the revolutionaries saw between Voltaire’sphilosophical program and the cause of revolutionary modernization asa whole. In a similar way, Voltaire remains today an iconic hero foreveryone who sees a positive linkage between critical reason andpolitical resistance in projects of progressive, modernizingreform.

2. Voltaire’s Enlightenment Philosophy

Voltaire’s philosophical legacy ultimately resides as much inhow he practiced philosophy, and in the ends toward which he directedhis philosophical activity, as in any specific doctrine or originalidea. Yet the particular philosophical positions he took, and the waythat he used his wider philosophical campaigns to champion certainunderstandings while disparaging others, did create a constellationappropriately called Voltaire’s Enlightenment philosophy. Trueto Voltaire’s character, this constellation is best described asa set of intellectual stances and orientations rather than as a set ofdoctrines or systematically defended positions. Nevertheless, othersfound in Voltaire both a model of the well-orientedphilosophe and a set of particular philosophical positionsappropriate to this stance. Each side of this equation played a keyrole in defining the Enlightenmentphilosophie that Voltairecame to personify.

2.1 Liberty

Central to this complex is Voltaire’s conception of liberty.Around this category, Voltaire’s social activism and hisrelatively rare excursions into systematic philosophy also converged.In 1734, in the wake of the scandals triggered by theLettresphilosophiques, Voltaire wrote, but left unfinished at Cirey, aTraité de metaphysique that explored the question ofhuman freedom in philosophical terms. The question was particularlycentral to European philosophical discussions at the time, andVoltaire’s work explicitly referenced thinkers like Hobbes andLeibniz while wrestling with the questions of materialism,determinism, and providential purpose that were then central to thewritings of the so-called deists, figures such as John Toland andAnthony Collins. The great debate between Samuel Clarke and Leibnizover the principles of Newtonian natural philosophy was alsoinfluential as Voltaire struggled to understand the nature of humanexistence and ethics within a cosmos governed by rational principlesand impersonal laws.

Voltaire adopted a stance in this text somewhere between the strictdeterminism of rationalist materialists and the transcendentspiritualism and voluntarism of contemporary Christian naturaltheologians. In his articles “Free Will” and“Liberty,” published in hisDictionnairephilosophique (1752), Voltaire offered a nuanced elaboration ofhis views on the matter that is useful for specifying the precisedetails of his complex position.^[1]

Noting how Christian theological notions of grace and the human soulhave only shrouded the matter in mystery, Voltaire praises Locke asthe first to “find a thread in this labyrinth” (1752[1900, 142]) in his description of “free will” or“human liberty” as a natural power of mind connected, likeall other such powers, to the human passions. As he writes,

the word “liberty,” “free-will,” is …an abstract word, a general word, like beauty, goodness, justice.These terms do not state that all men are always beautiful, good andjust; similarly, they are not always free. (143)

Instead, and stressing the deterministic nature of the human passions,Voltaire offers an empirical case to illustrate his view:

It is proposed to you that you mount a horse, you must absolutely makea choice, for it is quite clear that you either will go or that youwill not go. There is no middle way. It is therefore of absolutenecessity that you wish yes or no. Up to there it is demonstrated thatthe will is not free. You wish to mount the horse; why? The reason, anignoramus will say, is because I wish it. This answer is idiotic,nothing happens or can happen without a reason, a cause; there is onetherefore for your wish. What is it? the agreeable idea of going onhorseback which presents itself in your brain, the dominant idea, thedeterminant idea. But, you will say, can I not resist an idea whichdominates me? No, for what would be the cause of your resistance?None. By your will you can obey only an idea which will dominate youmore. (142–143)

In this sense, Voltaire concludes, the will is never free from thedeterministic powers that drive the passions and motivate ourconduct.

Yet standing against those that leave the matter there by concludingthat there is no liberty in human action at all, Voltaire adopts amore nuanced understanding. Asserting that the word“liberty” means “to be able,” and must bedistinguished from the word “wish,” which means “todesire,” it is essential that we understand that “to willis to wish, and to be free is to be able” (142). For any choiceto be an exercise of “free will,” therefore, it must be achoice enabled by the deterministic power to act, or, to use histerms, the power that makes us able to realize the wish. A human wish,or desire, alone is impotent unless it acts with a power capable ofacting in the world. “What is this power,” Voltaire asks?“It is the effect of the constitution and present state of ourorgans,” he responds, stressing again the deterministicphysiological character of this power in human being (144).

But this is not to say that free human action is a complete illusion,a principle that is essential for Voltaire to maintain since itanchors his belief that humans are free moral actors capable, ifproperly self-governed, of avoiding vice and achieving virtue. Toillustrate, he offers the following case:

Is a vigorous young man, madly in love, who holds his willing mistressin his arms, free to tame his passion? Undoubtedly not. He has thepower of enjoying, and has not the power of refraining.… Whenis it that this young man can refrain despite the violence of hispassion? When a stronger idea determines in a contrary sense theactivity of his body and his soul. (144)

This is the opening he needs to assert his fundamental moral principleregarding human ethical choice within a physically determined world.Let us imagine that that our passionate lover experiences a strongwish to consummate his love sexually, but before acting a powerfulcounter power emerges telling him that this act will cause horriblepain and harm to his mistress. In this case, the countervailing powercan push the man toward restraining his sexual urges, a scenario thatalso suggests a Lockean program of moral education designed to createa reservoir of morally uplifting experiences that inculcates in theorgans of the body a broad array of morally righteous powers orientingour actions toward the good.

Answering in this way the charge that such a view reduces human moralconduct to the level of animals and to a machine-like determinism,Voltaire counters by offering an example of how human moral conductcan be improved even if the solution can only be achieved through aphysiological altering of the powers motivating our sensate experienceof morally righteous actions. “If a brigand is executed,”Voltaire theorizes, “his accomplice who sees him expire has theliberty of not being frightened at the punishment,” a responsewhich means that his organs are not generating horror at thatspectacle. If his will is determined by this absence of horror, theaccomplice very well might go from the scaffold to assassinate on thehighway again. “But if the organs of the accomplice are strickenwith horror,” Voltaire concludes, “and make him experiencean unconquerable terror, he will stop robbing” (144).

The brigand’s punishment therefore becomes useful to theaccomplice and “an insurance for society only so long as hiswill is not free” (145). Or, to state the same conclusionanother way: humans can transform the physiological determinismsdriving their conduct through a program of moral education, which isto say that while the human will is not free, it is not completely andirredeemably determined by blind external forces or incapable ofrighteous transformation either.

This stance distanced Voltaire from more radical deists like Toland,and he reinforced this position by also adopting an elitistunderstanding of the role of religion in society. For Voltaire, thoseequipped to develop their own reason could find the proper motivationsfree action themselves. But since many were incapable of suchself-knowledge and self-control, religion, he claimed, was a necessaryguarantor of social order. This stance distanced Voltaire from therepublican politics of Toland and other materialists, and Voltaireechoed these ideas in his political musings, where he remainedthroughout his life a liberal, reform-minded monarchist and a skepticwith respect to republican and democratic ideas.

In theLettres philosophiques, Voltaire had revealed hissympathy with a deterministic understanding of the human passions,especially in his letter on Locke, which emphasized the materialistreading of the Lockean soul that was then a popular figure in radicalphilosophical discourse. Some readers singled out this part of thebook as the major source of its controversy, and in a similar vein thevery materialist account of “Âme,” or thesoul, which appeared in volume 1 of Diderot andd’Alembert’sEncyclopédie, was also aflashpoint of controversy. Voltaire also defined his own understandingof the soul in similar terms in his ownDictionnairephilosophique, as is noted above. What these examples point to isVoltaire’s willingness, even eagerness, to publicly defendcontroversial views even when his own, more private and moreconsidered writings often complicated the understanding that his morepublic and polemical writings insisted upon. In these cases, one oftensees Voltaire setting aside carefully reasoned explanations of complexphilosophical problems so as to assert his political conviction thatliberty of speech, no matter what the topic, is sacred and cannot beviolated.

Voltaire never actually said “I disagree with what you say, butI will defend to the death your right to say it.” Yet the myththat associates this dictum with his name remains very powerful, andone still hears his legacy invoked through the redeclaration of thispronouncement that he never actually declared. Part of the deepcultural tie that joins Voltaire to this dictum is the fact that evenwhile he did not write these precise words, they do capture, howeverimprecisely, the spirit of his philosophy of liberty. In hisvoluminous correspondence especially, and in the details of many ofhis more polemical public texts, one does find Voltaire articulating aview of intellectual and civil liberty that makes him an unquestionedforerunner of modern civil libertarianism. He never authored anysingle philosophical treatise on this topic, however, yet the memoryof his life and philosophical campaigns was influential in advancingthese ideas nevertheless. Voltaire’s influence is palpablypresent, for example, in Kant’s famous argument in his essay“What is Enlightenment?” that Enlightenment stems from thefree and public use of critical reason, and from the liberty thatallows such critical debate to proceed untrammeled. The absence of asingular text that anchors this linkage in Voltaire’s collectedworks in no way removes the unmistakable presence of Voltaire’sinfluence upon Kant’s formulation.

2.2 Hedonism

Voltaire’s notion of liberty also anchored his hedonisticmorality, another key feature of Voltaire’s Enlightenmentphilosophy. One vehicle for this philosophy was Voltaire’ssalacious poetry, a genre that both reflected in its eroticism andsexual innuendo the lived culture of libertinism that was an importantfeature of Voltaire’s biography. But Voltaire also contributedto philosophical libertinism and hedonism through his celebration ofmoral freedom through sexual liberty. Voltaire’s avowed hedonismbecame a central feature of his wider philosophical identity since hislibertine writings and conduct were always invoked by those who wantedto indict him for being a reckless subversive devoted to undermininglegitimate social order. Voltaire’s refusal to defer to suchcharges, and his vigor in opposing them through a defense of the verylibertinism that was used against him, also injected a positivephilosophical program into these public struggles that was veryinfluential. In particular, through his cultivation of a happilylibertine persona, and his application of philosophical reason towardthe moral defense of this identity, often through the widelyaccessible vehicles of poetry and witty prose, Voltaire became aleading force in the wider Enlightenment articulation of a moralitygrounded in the positive valuation of personal, and especially bodily,pleasure, and an ethics rooted in a hedonistic calculus of maximizingpleasure and minimizing pain. He also advanced this cause bysustaining an unending attack upon the repressive and, to his mind,anti-human demands of traditional Christian asceticism, especiallypriestly celibacy, and the moral codes of sexual restraint and bodilyself-abnegation that were still central to the traditional moralteachings of the day.

This same hedonistic ethics was also crucial to the development ofliberal political economy during the Enlightenment, and Voltaireapplied his own libertinism toward this project as well. In the wakeof the scandals triggered by Mandeville’s famous argument inThe Fable of the Bees (a poem, it should be remembered) thatthe pursuit of private vice, namely greed, leads to public benefits,namely economic prosperity, a French debate about the value of luxuryas a moral good erupted that drew Voltaire’s pen. In the 1730s,he drafted a poem calledLe Mondain that celebratedhedonistic worldly living as a positive force for society, and not asthe corrupting element that traditional Christian morality held it tobe. In hisEssay sur les moeurs he also joined with otherEnlightenment historians in celebrating the role of materialacquisition and commerce in advancing the progress of civilization.Adam Smith would famously make similar arguments in his founding tractof Enlightenment liberalism,On the Wealth of Nations,published in 1776. Voltaire was certainly no great contributor to thepolitical economic science that Smith practiced, but he did contributeto the wider philosophical campaigns that made the concepts of libertyand hedonistic morality central to their work both widely known andmore generally accepted.

The ineradicable good of personal and philosophical liberty isarguably the master theme in Voltaire’s philosophy, and if itis, then two other themes are closely related to it. One is theimportance of skepticism, and the second is the importance ofempirical science as a solvent to dogmatism and the perniciousauthority it engenders.

2.3 Skepticism

Voltaire’s skepticism descended directly from the neo-Pyrrhonianrevival of the Renaissance, and owes a debt in particular toMontaigne, whose essays wedded the stance of doubt with the positiveconstruction of a self grounded in philosophical skepticism. PierreBayle’s skepticism was equally influential, and what Voltaireshared with these forerunners, and what separated him from otherstrands of skepticism, such as the one manifest in Descartes, is theinsistence upon the value of the skeptical position in its own rightas a final and complete philosophical stance. Among the philosophicaltendencies that Voltaire most deplored, in fact, were those that heassociated most powerfully with Descartes who, he believed, began inskepticism but then left it behind in the name of some positivephilosophical project designed to eradicate or resolve it. Such urgesusually led to the production of what Voltaire liked to call“philosophical romances,” which is to say systematicaccounts that overcome doubt by appealing to the imagination and itsneed for coherent explanations. Such explanations, Voltaire argued,are fictions, not philosophy, and the philosopher needs to recognizethat very often the most philosophical explanation of all is to offerno explanation at all.

Such skepticism often acted as bulwark for Voltaire’s defense ofliberty since he argued that no authority, no matter how sacred,should be immune to challenge by critical reason. Voltaire’sviews on religion as manifest in his private writings are complex, andbased on the evidence of these texts it would be wrong to callVoltaire an atheist, or even an anti-Christian so long as one acceptsa broad understanding of what Christianity can entail. But even if hispersonal religious views were subtle, Voltaire was unwavering in hishostility to church authority and the power of the clergy. For similarreasons, he also grew as he matured ever more hostile toward thesacred mysteries upon which monarchs and Old Regime aristocraticsociety based their authority. In these cases, Voltaire’sskepticism was harnessed to his libertarian convictions through hiscontinual effort to use critical reason as a solvent for these“superstitions” and the authority they anchored. Thephilosophical authority ofromanciers such as Descartes,Malebranche, and Leibniz was similarly subjected to the same critique,and here one sees how the defense of skepticism and liberty, more thanany deeply held opposition to religiosity per se, was often the mostpowerful motivator for Voltaire.

From this perspective, Voltaire might fruitfully be compared withSocrates, another founding figure in Western philosophy who made arefusal to declaim systematic philosophical positions a centralfeature of his philosophical identity. Socrates’s repeatedassertion that he knew nothing was echoed in Voltaire’sinsistence that the true philosopher is the one who dares not to knowand then has the courage to admit his ignorance publicly. Voltaire wasalso, like Socrates, a public critic and controversialist who definedphilosophy primarily in terms of its power to liberate individualsfrom domination at the hands of authoritarian dogmatism and irrationalprejudice. Yet while Socrates championed rigorous philosophicaldialectic as the agent of this emancipation, Voltaire saw this samedialectical rationalism at the heart of the dogmatism that he soughtto overcome. Voltaire often used satire, mockery and wit to underminethe alleged rigor of philosophical dialectic, and while Socrates sawthis kind of rhetorical word play as the very essence of the erroneoussophism that he sought to alleviate, Voltaire cultivated linguisticcleverness as a solvent to the false and deceptive dialectic thatanchored traditional philosophy.

2.4 Newtonian Empirical Science

Against the acceptance of ignorance that rigorous skepticism oftendemanded, and against the false escape from it found in sophisticalknowledge—or what Voltaire called imaginative philosophicalromances—Voltaire offered a different solution than the rigorousdialectical reasoning of Socrates: namely, the power and value ofcareful empirical science. Here one sees the debt that Voltaire owedto the currents of Newtonianism that played such a strong role inlaunching his career. Voltaire’s own critical discourse againstimaginative philosophical romances originated, in fact, with Englishand Dutch Newtonians, many of whom were expatriate French Huguenots,who developed these tropes as rhetorical weapons in their battles withLeibniz and European Cartesians who challenged the innovations ofNewtonian natural philosophy. In hisPrincipia Mathematica(1687; 2^nd rev. edition 1713), Newton had offered acomplete mathematical and empirical description of how celestial andterrestrial bodies behaved. Yet when queried about how his philosophyexplained the physical causes that led bodies to act in the way thathe mathematically and empirically demonstrated that they did, Newtonfamously avoided the question, responding in one oft-cited passage“I feign no hypotheses.” From the perspective oftraditional natural philosophy, this was tantamount to hand wavingsince offering rigorous causal accounts of the nature of bodies inmotion was the very essence of this branch of the sciences.Newton’s major philosophical innovation rested, however, inchallenging this very epistemological foundation, and the assertionand defense of Newton’s position against its many critics, notleast by Voltaire, became arguably the central dynamic ofphilosophical change in the first half of the eighteenth century.

While Newtonian epistemology admitted of many variations, at its corerested a new skepticism about the validity of apriori rationalistaccounts of nature and a new assertion of brute empirical fact as avalid philosophical understanding in its own right. European Naturalphilosophers in the second half of the seventeenth century had thrownout the metaphysics and physics of Aristotle with its four partcausality and teleological understanding of bodies, motion and thecosmic order. In its place, however, a new mechanical causality wasintroduced that attempted to explain the world in equallycomprehensive terms through the mechanisms of an inert matter actingby direct contact and action alone. This approach lead to the vorticalaccount of celestial mechanics, a view that held material bodies to beswimming in an ethereal sea whose action pushed and pulled objects inthe manner we observe. What could not be observed, however, was theethereal sea itself, or the other agents of this supposedlycomprehensive mechanical cosmos. Yet rationality nevertheless dictatedthat such mechanisms must exist since without them philosophy would bereturned to the occult causes of the Aristotelian natural tendenciesand teleological principles. Figuring out what these point-contactmechanisms were and how they worked was, therefore, the charge of thenew mechanical natural philosophy of the late seventeenth century.Figures such as Descartes, Huygens, and Leibniz established theirscientific reputations through efforts to realize this goal.

Newton pointed natural philosophy in a new direction. He offeredmathematical analysis anchored in inescapable empirical fact as thenew foundation for a rigorous account of the cosmos. From thisperspective, the great error of both Aristotelian and the newmechanical natural philosophy was its failure to adhere strictlyenough to empirical facts. Vortical mechanics, for example, claimedthat matter was moved by the action of an invisible agent, yet this,the Newtonians began to argue, was not to explain what is reallyhappening but to imagine a fiction that gives us a speciouslysatisfactory rational explanation of it. Natural philosophy needs toresist the allure of such rational imaginings and to instead deal onlywith the empirically provable. Moreover, the Newtonians argued, if aset of irrefutable facts cannot be explained other then by acceptingthe brute facticity of their truth, this is not a failure ofphilosophical explanation so much as a devotion to appropriate rigor.Such epistemological battles became especially intense aroundNewton’s theory of universal gravitation. Few questioned thatNewton had demonstrated an irrefutable mathematical law whereby bodiesappear to attract one another in relation to their masses and ininverse relation to the square of the distance between them. But wasthis rigorous mathematical and empirical description a philosophicalaccount of bodies in motion? Critics such as Leibniz said no, sincemathematical description was not the same thing as philosophicalexplanation, and Newton refused to offer an explanation of how and whygravity operated the way that it did. The Newtonians countered thatphenomenal descriptions were scientifically adequate so long as theywere grounded in empirical facts, and since no facts had yet beendiscerned that explained what gravity is or how it works, noscientific account of it was yet possible. They further insisted thatit was enough that gravity did operate the way that Newton said itdid, and that this was its own justification for accepting his theory.They further mocked those who insisted on dreaming up chimeras likethe celestial vortices as explanations for phenomena when no empiricalevidence existed to support of such theories.

The previous summary describes the general core of the Newtonianposition in the intense philosophical contests of the first decades ofthe eighteenth century. It also describes Voltaire’s own stancein these same battles. His contribution, therefore, was not centeredon any innovation within these very familiar Newtonian themes; rather,it was his accomplishment to become a leading evangelist for this newNewtonian epistemology, and by consequence a major reason for itswidespread dissemination and acceptance in France and throughoutEurope. A comparison with David Hume’s role in this samedevelopment might help to illuminate the distinct contributions ofeach. Both Hume and Voltaire began with the same skepticism aboutrationalist philosophy, and each embraced the Newtonian criterion thatmade empirical fact the only guarantor of truth in philosophy. YetHume’s target remained traditional philosophy, and hiscontribution was to extend skepticism all the way to the point ofdenying the feasibility of transcendental philosophy itself. Thisargument would famously awake Kant’s dogmatic slumbers and leadto the reconstitution of transcendental philosophy in new terms, butVoltaire had different fish to fry. His attachment was to the newNewtonian empirical scientists, and while he was never more than adilettante scientist himself, his devotion to this form of naturalinquiry made him in some respects the leading philosophical advocateand ideologist for the new empirico-scientific conception ofphilosophy that Newton initiated.

For Voltaire (and many other eighteenth-century Newtonians) the mostimportant project was defending empirical science as an alternative totraditional natural philosophy. This involved sharing in Hume’scritique of abstract rationalist systems, but it also involved thevery different project of defending empirical induction andexperimental reasoning as the new epistemology appropriate for amodern Enlightened philosophy. In particular, Voltaire foughtvigorously against the rationalist epistemology that critics used tochallenge Newtonian reasoning. His famous conclusion inCandide, for example, that optimism was a philosophicalchimera produced when dialectical reason remains detached from bruteempirical facts owed a great debt to his Newtonian convictions. Hisalternative offered in the same text of a life devoted to simple taskswith clear, tangible, and most importantly useful ends was alsoderived from the utilitarian discourse that Newtonians also used tojustify their science. Voltaire’s campaign on behalf of smallpoxinoculation, which began with his letter on the topic in theLettres philosophiques, was similarly grounded in an appealto the facts of the case as an antidote to the fears generated bylogical deductions from seemingly sound axiomatic principles. All ofVoltaire’s public campaigns, in fact, deployed empirical fact asthe ultimate solvent for irrational prejudice and blind adherence topreexisting understandings. In this respect, his philosophy asmanifest in each was deeply indebted to the epistemologicalconvictions he gleaned from Newtonianism.

2.5 Toward Science without Metaphysics

Voltaire also contributed directly to the new relationship betweenscience and philosophy that the Newtonian revolution made central toEnlightenment modernity. Especially important was his critique ofmetaphysics and his argument that it be eliminated from anywell-ordered science. At the center of the Newtonian innovations innatural philosophy was the argument that questions of body per se wereeither irrelevant to, or distracting from, a well focused naturalscience. Against Leibniz, for example, who insisted that all physicsbegin with an accurate and comprehensive conception of the nature ofbodies as such, Newton argued that the character of bodies wasirrelevant to physics since this science should restrict itself to aquantified description of empirical effects only and resist the urgeto speculate about that which cannot be seen or measured. This removalof metaphysics from physics was central to the overall Newtonianstance toward science, but no one fought more vigorously for it, ordid more to clarify the distinction and give it a public audience thanVoltaire.

The battles with Leibnizianism in the 1740s were the great theater forVoltaire’s work in this regard. In 1740, responding to DuChâtelet’s efforts in herInstitutions dephysiques to reconnect metaphysics and physics through asynthesis of Leibniz with Newton, Voltaire made his opposition to sucha project explicit in reviews and other essays he published. He didthe same during the brief revival of the so-called “vis vivacontroversy” triggered by du Châtelet’s treatise,defending the empirical and mechanical conception of body and forceagainst those who defended Leibniz’s more metaphysicalconception of the same thing. In the same period, Voltaire alsocomposed a short book entitledLa Metaphysique de Newton,publishing it in 1740 as an implicit counterpoint toChâtelet’sInstitutions. This tract did not somuch articulate Newton’s metaphysics as celebrate the fact thathe avoided practicing such speculations altogether. It also accusedLeibniz of becoming deluded by his zeal to make metaphysics thefoundation of physics. In the definitive 1745 edition of hisÉléments de la philosophie de Newton, Voltairealso appended his tract on Newton’s metaphysics as thebook’s introduction, thus framing his own understanding of therelationship between metaphysics and empirical science in directopposition to Châtelet’s Leibnizian understanding of thesame. He also added personal invective and satire to this sameposition in his indictment of Maupertuis in the 1750s, linkingMaupertuis’s turn toward metaphysical approaches to physics inthe 1740s with his increasingly deluded philosophical understandingand his authoritarian manner of dealing with his colleagues andcritics.

While Voltaire’s attacks on Maupertuis crossed the line intoad hominem, at their core was a fierce defense of the waythat metaphysical reasoning both occludes and deludes the work of thephysical scientist. Moreover, to the extent that eighteenth-centuryNewtonianism provoked two major trends in later philosophy, first thereconstitution of transcendental philosophyà la Kantthrough his “Copernican Revolution” that relocated theremains of metaphysics in the a priori categories of reason, andsecond, the marginalization of metaphysics altogether through thecelebration of philosophical positivism and the anti-speculativescientific method that anchored it, Voltaire should be seen as a majorprogenitor of the latter. By also attaching what many in thenineteenth century saw as Voltaire’s proto-positivism to hiscelebrated campaigns to eradicate priestly and aristo-monarchicalauthority through the debunking of the “irrationalsuperstitions” that appeared to anchor such authority,Voltaire’s legacy also cemented the alleged linkage that joinedpositivist science on the one hand with secularizing disenchantmentand dechristianization on the other. In this way, Voltaire should beseen as the initiator of a philosophical tradition that runs from himto Auguste Comte and Charles Darwin, and then on to Karl Popper andRichard Dawkins in the twentieth century.

Bibliography

Primary Literature

Because of Voltaire’s celebrity, efforts to collect and canonizehis writings began immediately after his death, and still continuetoday. The result has been the production of three major collectionsof his writings including his vast correspondence, the lastunfinished. Together these constitute the authoritative corpus ofVoltaire’s written work.

• Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire, edited by A.Beuchot. 72 vols. Paris: Lefevre, 1829–1840.
• Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire, edited by L.E.D.Moland and G. Bengesco. 52 vols. Paris: Garnier Frères,1877–1885.
• Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire, edited by TheodoreBesterman. 135 vols. (projected) Geneva, Banbury, and Oxford: VoltaireFoundation, 1968–.

Primary Literature in Translation

Collections of Writings

• The Works of Voltaire: A Contemporary Version, William F.Fleming (ed. and tr.), 21 vols., New York: E.R. Du Mont, 1901.[Complete edition available at theOnline Library of Liberty]
• The Portable Voltaire, Ben Ray Redman (ed.), New York:Penguin Books, 1977.
• Selected Works of Voltaire, Joseph McCabe (ed.), London:Watts, 2007.
• Shorter Writings of Voltaire, J.I. Rodale (ed.), NewYork: A.S. Barnes, 1960.
• Voltaire in his Letters, Being a Selection of hisCorrespondence, S.G. Tallentyre (tr.), Honolulu, HI: UniversityPress of the Pacific, 2004.
• Voltaire on Religion: Selected Writings, Kenneth W.Applegate (ed.), New York: F. Ungar, 1974.
• Voltaire: Selected Writings, Christopher Thacker (ed.),London: Dent, 1995.
• Voltaire: Selections, Paul Edwards (ed.), New York:Macmillan, 1989.

Theater

• Translations of Voltaire’s major plays are found in:TheWorks of Voltaire: A Contemporary Version, William F. Fleming(ed. and tr.), New York: E.R. Du Mont, 1901. [Complete editionavailable at theOnline Library of Liberty]
• Seven Plays (Mérope (1737), Olympia (1761), Alzire(1734), Orestes (1749), Oedipus (1718), Zaire, Caesar), WilliamFleming (tr.), New York: Howard Fertig, 1988.

History

• The Age of Louis XIV (1733) and other Selected Writings,J.H. Brumfitt (ed.), New York: Twayne, 1963.
• The Age of Louis XIV (1733), Martyn P. Pollack (tr.),London and New York: Dutton, 1978.
• History of Charles XII, King of Sweden (1727), Honolulu,HI: University Press of the Pacific, 2002.
• History of Charles XII, King of Sweden (1727), AntoniaWhite and Ragnhild Marie Hatton (eds.), New York: Barnes & NobleBooks, 1993.
• The Philosophy of History (1764), New York: ThePhilosophical Library, 1965.

Essays, Letters, and Stories

• The Complete Tales of Voltaire, William Walton (tr.), 3vols., New York: Howard Fertig, 1990.
  • Vol. 1: The Huron (1771), The History of Jenni (1774), TheOne-eyed Street Porter, Cosi-sancta (1715), An Incident of Memory(1773), The Travels of Reason (1774), The Man with Forty Crowns(1768), Timon (1755), The King of Boutan (1761), and The City ofCashmere (1760).
  • Vol. 2: The Letters of Amabed (1769), The Blind Judges of Colors(1766), The Princess of Babylon (1768), The Ears of Lord Chesterfieldand Chaplain Goudman (1775), Story of a Good Brahman (1759), An IndianAdventure (1764), and Zadig, or, Destiny (1757).
  • Vol. 3: Micromegas (1738), Candide, or Optimism (1758), The Worldas it Goes (1750), The White and the Black (1764), Jeannot and Colin(1764), The Travels of Scarmentado (1756), The White Bull (1772),Memnon (1750), Plato’s Dream (1737), Bababec and the Fakirs(1750), and The Two Consoled Ones (1756).
• The English Essays of 1727, David Williams and RichardWalker (eds.), Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1996.
• Epistle of M. Voltaire to the King of Prussia (1738),Glasgow, 1967.
• The History of the Travels of Scarmentado (1756),Glasgow: The College Press, 1969.
• Micromégas and other Short Fictions (1738), TheoCuffe and Haydn Mason (eds.), London and New York: Penguin Books,2002.
• The Princess of Babylon (1768), London: Signet Books,1969.
• The Virgin of Orleans, or Joan of Arc (1755), HowardNelson (tr.), Denver: A. Swallow, 1965.
• Voltaire. Essay on Milton (1727), Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1954.
• Voltaire’s Romances, New York: P. Eckler,1986.
• Zadig, or L’Ingénu (1757), London: PenguinBooks, 1984.
• Zadig, or the Book of Fate (1757), New York: Garland,1974.
• Zadig, or The Book of Fate an Oriental History (1757),Woodbridge, CT: Research Publications, 1982.

Politics

• The Calas Affair: A Treatise on Tolerance (1762), BrianMasters (ed.), London: The Folio Society, 1994.
• The Sermon of the Fifty (1759), J.A.R. Séguin(ed.), Jersey City, NJ: R. Paxton, 1963.
• A Treatise on Toleration and Other Essays, Joseph McCabe(ed.), Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1994.
• A Treatise on Tolerance and other Writings, edited byBrian Masters, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press,1994
• Voltaire. Political Writings, edited by David Williams,Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994

Editions of Major Individual Works

• The Elements of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy(1738; 2nd expanded edition, 1745)
  • Translated John Hanna. London: Cass, 1967.
  • Birmingham, AL: Gryphon Editions, 1991.
• Philosophical Dictionary (1752)
  • Edited by Theodore Besterman. London: Penguin Books, 2002.
  • Translated by Peter Gay. New York: Basic Books, 1962.
  • Philosophical Dictionary: A Compendium, Wade Baskin(ed.), New York: Philosophical Library, 1961.
  • Philosophical Dictionary: Selections, Chicago: The GreatBooks Foundation, 1965.
  • Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary, Clarence L.Barnhart (ed.), New York: Carlton House, 1900.
• Philosophical Letters (Letters on the English Nation, Letterson England) (1734)
  • John Leigh and Prudence L. Steiner (ed.), Indianapolis, IN:Hackett, 2007.
  • Leonard Tancock (ed.), London and New York: Penguin Books,2003.
  • Ernest Dilworth (ed.), Mineola, NY: Dover, 2003.
  • Nicholas Cronk (ed.), New York: Oxford University Press,1994.
  • F.A. Taylor (ed.), Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1946.
  • Harvard Classics, Vol. 34, Part 2. [Available online from Bartleby.com]
• Voltaire’s Letters on the Quakers (1727),Philadelphia: William H. Allen, 1953.
• Candide, or Optimism (1758). Hundreds of English editionsof this text have been published, so this list is restricted to themost important scholarly editions published since 1960.
  • C.H.R. Niven (ed.), London: Longman, 1980.
  • Candide and other Writings, Haskell M. Block (ed.), NewYork: Modern Library, 1985.
  • Richard Aldington, Ernest Dilworth, and others (eds.), New York:Modern Library, 1992.
  • Shane Weller (ed.), New York: Dover, 1993.
  • Candide: A Dual Language Book, New York: Barnes &Noble Books, 1993.
  • Robert Martin Adams (ed.), New York: W.W. Norton, 1996.
  • Electronic Scholarly Publishing Project, 1998. [Available onlineatElectronic Scholarly Publishing Project]
  • Daniel Gordon (ed.), Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s,1999.
  • Candide and Related Texts, David Wooton (ed.),Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2000.
  • Lowell Bair (ed.), New York: Bantam Books, 2003.
  • Candide & Zadig, Lester G. Crocker (ed.), New York:Pocket Books, 2005.
  • Raffael Burton (ed.), New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.
  • Theo Cuffe (ed.), London and New York: Penguin Books, 2007.
  • Candide and other Stories, Roger Pearson (ed.), Oxford:Oxford University Press, 2008.
  • Candide, Zadig, and Selected Stories, Donald Frame (tr.and ed.), New York: Signet Classic, 2009.

Secondary Literature

The scholarly literature on Voltaire is vast, and growing larger everyday. The summary here, therefore, will be largely restricted toscholarly books, with only a few articles of singular import listed.The Voltaire Foundation’s seriesStudies on Voltaire and theEighteenth Century changed its name in 2013 toOxfordUniversity Studies on Enlightenment. The original seriespublished over 450 volumes, many related to Voltaire, and while thenew title reflects a change toward a broader publishing agenda, itremains, along withCahier Voltaire published by La FondationVoltaire à Ferney, the best periodical source for newscholarship on Voltaire.

• Aldridge, Alfred Owen, 1975,Voltaire and the Century ofLight, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Badinter, Elizabeth, 1983,Émilie, Émilie,l’ambition féminine au XVIIIe siècle, Paris:Flammarion.
• –––, 1999–2002,Les Passionsintellectuelles, 2 volumes, Paris: Fayard.
• Barber, W.H., 1955,Leibniz in France from Arnauld toVoltaire: A Study in French Reactions to Leibnizianism1670–1760, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Barrell, Rex A., 1988,Bolingbroke and France, Lanham,MD: University Press of America.
• Besterman, Theodore, 1969,Voltaire, New York: Harcourt,Brace, & World.
• Bird, Stephen, 2000,Reinventing Voltaire: The Politics ofCommemoration in Nineteenth-century France, Oxford: OxfordUniversity Studies on Enlightenment.
• Brooks, Richard A., 1964,Voltaire and Leibniz, Geneva:Droz.
• Brown, Harcourt, 1947,Voltaire and the Royal Society ofLondon, Toronto: University of Toronto Quarterly.
• Brumfitt, J.H., 1970,Voltaire: historian, London: OxfordUniversity Press.
• –––, 1973,The French Enlightenment,Cambridge: Schenkman Pub. Co.
• Brunel, Lucien, 1967,Les Philosophes etl’académie française au dix-huitièmesiècle, Genève: Slatkine Reprints.
• Brunet, Pierre, 1931,L’introduction des théoriesde Newton en France au XVIIIe siècle, Paris: A.Blanchard.
• Collins, J. Churton, 1908,Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Rousseauin England, London: E. Nash.
• Conlon, Pierre M., 1961,Voltaire’s literary career from1728 to 1750, Genève: Institut et MuséeVoltaire.
• Cottret, Bernard, 1992,Bolingbroke: exil et écritureau siècle des Lumières, Paris: Klincksieck.
• Cronk, Nicolas, 2009,The Cambridge Companion toVoltaire, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• –––, 2014,Voltaire: a very shortintroduction, Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation.
• Darnton, Robert, 1979,The Business of Enlightenment: ThePublishing History of the Encyclopédie, 1775–1800,Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• –––, 1982,The Literary Underground of theOld Regime, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• Dickinson, H.T., 1970,Bolingbroke, London:Constable.
• Dieckmann, Herbert, 1943,Le Philosophe: Texts andInterpretations, (Washington University Studies, New Series,Language and Literature, no. 18), St. Louis: Washington UniversityPress.
• Duchet, Michèle, 1971,Anthropologie et histoire ausiècle des lumières Buffon, Voltaire, Rousseau,Helvetius, Diderot, Paris: F. Maspero.
• Ehrman, Esther, 1986,Mme. du Châtelet: Scientist,Philosopher and Feminist of the Enlightenment, Leamington [Spa]:Berg.
• Gandt, François de, 2001,Cirey dans la vieintellectuelle: la réception de Newton en France, Oxford:Voltaire Foundation.
• Gardiner Janik, Linda, 1982, “Searching for the Metaphysicsof Science: The Structure and Composition of Mme. DuChâtelet’sInstitutions de physiques,1737–1740”,Studies on Voltaire and the EighteenthCentury, 201: 85–113.
• Gay, Peter, 1954,The Party of Humanity: Essays in the FrenchEnlightenment, New York: Knopf.
• –––, 1959,Voltaire’s Politics: ThePoet as Realist, New Haven: Yale University Press.
• –––, 1969,The Enlightenment: AnInterpretation (Volume 1:The Science of Freedom), NewYork: Knopf.
• –––, 1977,The Enlightenment: AnInterpretation (Volume 2:The Rise of Modern Paganism),New York: Knopf.
• Guerlac, Henry, 1981,Newton on the Continent,Ithaca.
• Gurrado, Antonio, 2013,Voltaire cattolico, Torino:Lindau.
• Hagengruber, Ruth (ed.), 2011,Emilie du Châteletbetween Leibniz and Newton, Dordrecht: Springer.
• Ḥadīd, Javādī, 2012,Voltaire etl’Islam, Ozoir la Ferriere : Albouraq.
• Hellman, Lilian, 1980, Dorothy Parker, John La Touche, RichardWilbur, and Leonard Bernstein, 1956–1957,Candide, AnOperetta in Two Acts, New York: Jaini Publications.
• Hutchison, Ross, 1991,Locke in France: 1688–1734,Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.
• Iltis, Carolyn, 1977, “Madame du Châtelet’smetaphysics and mechanics”,Studies in the History andPhilosophy of Science, 8: 29–48.
• Israel, Jonathan, 2000,The Radical Enlightenment: Philosophyand the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750, Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press.
• –––, 2006,Enlightenment Contested:Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man1670–1752, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 2009,A Revolution of the Mind: RadicalEnlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy,Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 2011,Democratic Enlightenment:Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights 1750–1790, Oxford:Oxford University Press.
• –––, 2014,Revolutionary Ideas: AnIntellectual History of the French Revolution from The Rights of Manto Robespierre, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Jacob, Margaret, 1981,The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists,Freemasons, and Republicans, London: Cornerstone BookPublishers.
• James, E. D., 1978, “Voltaire on the Nature of theSoul”,French Studies, 32: 20–33.
• –––, 1980, “Voltaire and Malebranche: fromSensationalism to ‘tout en Dieu’”,ModernLanguage Review, 75: 282–90.
• –––, 1984, “Voltaire and the Ethics ofSpinoza”,Studies on Voltaire and the EighteenthCentury, 228: 67–87.
• –––, 1987, “Voltaire on Free Will”,Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 249:1–18.
• Kramnick, Isaac, 1968,Bolingbroke and His Circle: ThePolitics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole, Cambridge: HarvardUniversity Press.
• Lanson, Gustave, 1894,Histoire de la littératurefrançaise, Paris: Hachette.
• –––, 1906,Voltaire, Paris:Hachette.
• Libby, Margaret Sherwood, 1935,The Attitude of Voltaire toMagic and the Sciences, New York: Columbia University Press,1935.
• Lilti, Antoine, 2005,Le monde des salons. Sociabilitéet mondanité à Paris au XVIIIe siècle,Paris: Fayard.
• Mason, Haydn Trevor, 1963,Pierre Bayle and Voltaire,London: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 1975,Voltaire, New York: St.Martin’s.
• Masseau, Didier, 1994,L’Invention del’intellectual dans l’Europe du XVIIIe siècle,Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.
• Mattei, Silvia, 2010,Voltaire et les voyages de laraison, Paris: Harmattan.
• Maurois, André, 1935,Voltaire, Paris:Gallimard.
• Mauzi, Robert, 1960,L’idée du bonheur dans lalitterature et la pensée francaises au XVIIIesiècle, Paris: A. Colin.
• McKenna, Antony, 1994,Écraser l’infame,1759–1770,Voltaire en son temps (Volume 4),René Pomeau (ed.), Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.
• McMahon, Darrin M., 2001,Enemies of the Enlightenment: TheFrench Counter-enlightenment and the Making of Modernity, NewYork: Oxford University Press.
• McNutt, Jennifer Powell, 2013,Calvin meets Voltaire: theclergy of Geneva in the age of enlightenment, 1685–1798,Burlington: Ashgate.
• Melton, James Van Horn, 2001,The Rise of the Public inEnlightenment Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Méricam-Bourdet, Myrtille, 2012,Voltaire etl’écriture de l’histoire: un enjeu politique,Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.
• Mervaud, Christiane, 1991,De la cour au jardin,1750–1759,Voltaire en son temps (Volume 3),René Pomeau (ed.), Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.
• Mitchell, Harvey, 2104,Voltaire’s Jews and modernJewish identity: rethinking the Enlightenment, London:Routledge.
• Morize, André, 1909,L’Apologie du luxe au XVIIIeSiècle: “Le Mondain” et ses Sources, Paris: H.Didier.
• Neiertz, Patrick, 2012,Voltaire et l’économiepolitique, Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.
• Northeast, Catherine M., 1991,The Parisian Jesuits and theEnlightenment, 1700–1762, Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.
• Orieux, Jean, 1966,Voltaire, ou la Royauté del’esprit, Paris: Flammarion.
• Palmer, Robert R., 1939,Catholics and Unbelievers in18^th Century France, Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress.
• Pappas, John N., 1957,Berthier’s Journal de Trevoux andthe Philosophes (Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century,Volume 3), Geneva: Institut and Musée Voltaire.
• –––, 1962,Voltaire andd’Alembert, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
• Pearson, Roger, 1993,The Fables of Reason: A Study ofVoltaire’s “Contes philosophiques”, Oxford:Clarendon Press.
• –––, 2005,Voltaire Almighty: A Life inPursuit of Freedom, London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
• Perry, Norma, 1975,Sir Everard Fawkener, friend andcorrespondent of Voltaire, Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.
• Pettit, Alexander, 1997,Illusory Consensus: Bolingbroke andthe Polemical Responses to Walpole, 1730–1737, Newark:University of Delaware Press.
• Pomeau, René, 1969,La réligion deVoltaire, Paris: Nizet.
• –––, 1985,D’Arouet à Voltaire,1694–1734,Voltaire en son temps (Volume 1),René Pomeau (ed.), Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.
• –––, 1994,On a voulu l’enterrer,1770–1791,Voltaire en son temps (Volume 5),René Pomeau (ed.), Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.
• Pomeau, René (ed)., 1963.Politique de Voltaire,Paris: A. Colin.
• –––, 1985–1994,Voltaire en sontemps, 5 vols., Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.
• Popkin, Richard Henry, 1979,The History of Scepticism fromErasmus to Spinoza, Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress.
• Proust, Jacques, 1962,Diderot etl’Encyclopédie, Paris: Slatkine.
• Rasmussen, Dennis Carl, 2014,The pragmatic enlightenment:recovering the liberalism of Hume, Smith, Montesquieu, andVoltaire, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Rousseau, André Michel, 1976,L’Angleterre etVoltaire (1718–1789), Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.
• Saigey, Émile, 1873,Les sciences au XVIIIesiècle: la physique de Voltaire, Paris: G.Baillière.
• Schlereth, Thomas J., 1977,The cosmopolitan ideal inEnlightenment thought, its form and function in the ideas of Franklin,Hume, and Voltaire, 1694–1790, South Bend, IN: Universityof Notre Dame Press.
• Shank, J.B., 2008,The Newton Wars and the Beginning of theFrench Enlightenment, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Sharpe, Matthew, 2015, “On a Neglected Argument in FrenchPhilosophy: Sceptical Humanism in Montaigne, Voltaire andCamus”,Critical Horizons: A Journal of Philosophy andSocial Theory, 16(1): 1–26.
• Spink, John Stephenson, 1960,French Free-thought fromGassendi to Voltaire, London: University of London, AthlonePress.
• Terrall, Mary, 2002,The Man Who Flattened the Earth:Maupertuis and the Sciences in the Enlightenment, Chicago:University of Chicago Press.
• Tlili, Mahbouba Saï, 2009,Voltaire etl’Islam Tunis: Arabesques.
• Torrey, Norman L., 1930,Voltaire and the English Deists,New Haven: Yale University Press, 2^nd edition, Hamden, CT:Archon Books, 1967.
• –––,1938,The Spirit of Voltaire, NewYork: Russell and Russell, 2^nd edition, 1968.
• Undank, Jack, 1989, “Portrait of the Philosopher asTramp”, inA New History of French Literature, DennisHollier (ed.), Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989, pp.421–428.
• Vaillot, René, 1988,Avec madame Du Châtelet,1734–1749,Voltaire en son temps (Volume 2),René Pomeau (ed.), Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.
• Van Kley, Dale, 1975,The Jansenists and the Expulsion of theJesuits in France, 1757–1767, New Haven: Yale UniversityPress.
• Vercruysse, Jeroom, 1966,Voltaire et la Holland,Genève: Institut et Musée Voltaire.
• Vernière, Paul, 1954,Spinoza et la penséefrançaise avant la Révolution, Paris: PressesUniversitaires de France.
• Wade, Ira Owen, 1938,The Clandestine Organization andDiffusion of Philosophic Ideas in France from 1700 to 1750,Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• –––, 1941,Voltaire and Madame duChâtelet: An Essay on the Intellectual Activity at Cirey,Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• –––, 1947,Studies on Voltaire with SomeUnpublished Papers of Mme. du Châtelet, Princeton:Princeton University Press.
• –––, 1969,The Intellectual Devevelopment ofVoltaire, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Wooton, David, 2022, “Voltaire on Liberty,”Journal des Économistes et des Études Humaines,28: 59–90.
• Zinsser, Judith, 2006,La Dame d’Esprit: A Biography ofthe Marquise du Châtelet, New York: Viking.
• Zinsser, Judith and Hayes, Julie (eds.), 2006,Emilie duChâtelet: Rewriting Enlightenment Philosophy and Science,Oxford: Voltaire Foundation.

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