Michael Johnson: The Delightful Voltaire
[Michael Johnson spent 17 years at McGraw-Hill, including six years as a news executive in New York. He now writes from Bordeaux in France.]
Voltaire, that ultimate freethinker and lifelong iconoclast, has never quite lost his audience. His epigrams are among the favorites of speechwriters and his political writings seem almost contemporary. Indeed he would make a suitable patron of today's U.S. Libertarian Party if its elders cared to look back far enough. (They tend to stop at Thomas Jefferson.)
Although Voltaire is absent from the party's materials, his spirit lives on in the libertarian movement, co-founder David Nolan told me recently.
In accidental Voltairean terms, the party rejects any attempt to constrain freedom of speech and calls for tolerance and a free, competitive market. Its platform lines up with Voltaire in its call for a world "where individuals are free to follow their own dreams in their own ways, without interference from government or any authoritarian power."
The similarities are perhaps as much a symptom of eternal human desires as any direct derivation from France of the 1700s. Some trace libertarianism back to Plato. But the overlap with Voltaire is striking. "Maybe it's more a case of great minds thinking alike than any attempt to copy or emulate Voltaire," Nolan says.
Modern readers stand in awe of Voltaire 232 years after his death, and many marvel at how this complex, contradictory writer came to be such an intellectual force. A contemporary called him "Monsieur Multiforme" for his mastery of the written word and his range of views.
Even for a man of his time, however, Voltaire had his blind spots. Like some of his high-minded contemporaries, he had a strain of anti-Semitism and a penchant for offhand cynicism. But his libertarian (libertaire, in French) convictions made him basically a force for good: a fierce advocate of free will, individual liberty, tolerance, open expression, and free trade, none of which France provided in his lifetime.
A revival of interest in the man and his mind is now under way as Voltaire fans celebrate the 250th anniversary of the publication Candide, his most familiar work. In my research for a book on his life and writings, I repeatedly find evidence of his connection with modern times, especially in the United States. He helps explain how we got where we are today....
Read entire article at American Spectator
Voltaire, that ultimate freethinker and lifelong iconoclast, has never quite lost his audience. His epigrams are among the favorites of speechwriters and his political writings seem almost contemporary. Indeed he would make a suitable patron of today's U.S. Libertarian Party if its elders cared to look back far enough. (They tend to stop at Thomas Jefferson.)
Although Voltaire is absent from the party's materials, his spirit lives on in the libertarian movement, co-founder David Nolan told me recently.
In accidental Voltairean terms, the party rejects any attempt to constrain freedom of speech and calls for tolerance and a free, competitive market. Its platform lines up with Voltaire in its call for a world "where individuals are free to follow their own dreams in their own ways, without interference from government or any authoritarian power."
The similarities are perhaps as much a symptom of eternal human desires as any direct derivation from France of the 1700s. Some trace libertarianism back to Plato. But the overlap with Voltaire is striking. "Maybe it's more a case of great minds thinking alike than any attempt to copy or emulate Voltaire," Nolan says.
Modern readers stand in awe of Voltaire 232 years after his death, and many marvel at how this complex, contradictory writer came to be such an intellectual force. A contemporary called him "Monsieur Multiforme" for his mastery of the written word and his range of views.
Even for a man of his time, however, Voltaire had his blind spots. Like some of his high-minded contemporaries, he had a strain of anti-Semitism and a penchant for offhand cynicism. But his libertarian (libertaire, in French) convictions made him basically a force for good: a fierce advocate of free will, individual liberty, tolerance, open expression, and free trade, none of which France provided in his lifetime.
A revival of interest in the man and his mind is now under way as Voltaire fans celebrate the 250th anniversary of the publication Candide, his most familiar work. In my research for a book on his life and writings, I repeatedly find evidence of his connection with modern times, especially in the United States. He helps explain how we got where we are today....