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In some ways, the book can be compared with Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville, in how it flatteringly explains a nation to itself from the perspective of an outsider, as Voltaire's depictions of aspects of English culture, society and government are often given favourable treatment in comparison to their French equivalents.
Voltaire was a versatile and prolific writer, producing works in almost every literary form, including plays, poems, novels, essays, histories, and even scientific expositions. He wrote more than 20,000 letters and 2,000 books and pamphlets. [7] Voltaire was one of the first authors to become renowned and commercially successful internationally.
Voltaire based his book on his experiences living in Great Britain as his compatriot Tocqueville did a century later in America, and according to the National Constitution Center, "Voltaire's passages on the spirit of commerce, religious diversity, religious freedom, and the English form of government also greatly influenced American thinking ...
The American Enlightenment was influenced by the 17th- and 18th-century Age of Enlightenment in Europe and distinctive American philosophy. According to James MacGregor Burns , the spirit of the American Enlightenment was to give Enlightenment ideals a practical, useful form in the life of the nation and its people.
Since its inception as Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century in 1955, nearly 550 books have been published within this series. It publishes scholarly work in English or French across a broad range of disciplines, including history, the history of ideas/philosophy, the history of the book, theatre, literature, visual arts and music ...
1. “Better is the enemy of good.” 2. “I cannot imagine how the clockwork of the universe can exist without a clockmaker.” 3. “Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will ...
Voltaire repeatedly remarked that he aimed less at a conventional history of great men and events, than something like a painting: he highlighted historical and cultural trends in the way that a painter brings out shadings of light and color which may be more important than the ostensible subject depicted.
Essai sur les mœurs et l'esprit des nations (translated to English as "An Essay on Universal History, the Manners, and Spirit of Nations") [1] [2] is a work by the French writer, historian, and philosopher Voltaire, published for the first time in 1756. [3]