On Voltaire

Once after I delivered a paper, a professor commented to me,"Your understanding of Voltaire is really very different from mine. You make him sound like such a good person."

And on the whole I do think he was. In The New Yorker Adam Gopnik explains Voltaire's enduring appeal:

There couldn’t be a better model of an improvisatory, anti-authoritarian intelligence, whose whole creed rests on individual acts and case-by-case considerations. He believed in the English model of trade and toleration, not the Jacobin model of ideology and intemperance... Voltaire’s spirit was one of tolerant cosmopolitanism, even though he didn’t have the insight to see that one challenge for the cosmopolitan spirit would be how well it tolerated those who had no wish to be cosmopolitan.

He was not perfect by a long stretch--but there is still a lot to admire. [Via Arts & Letters Daily; crossposted to Positive Liberty.]