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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 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 ...
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.
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.
It publishes the definitive edition of the Complete Works of Voltaire (Œuvres complètes de Voltaire), as well as Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment (previously SVEC, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century), a monograph series devoted to the eighteenth century, and the correspondences (letters) of several key French ...
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 ...
In his 1996 article, "the Origin of the Counter-Enlightenment: Rousseau and the New Religion of Sincerity", in the American Political Science Review (Vol. 90, No. 2), Arthur M. Melzer corroborates Everdell's view in placing the origin of the Counter-Enlightenment in the religious writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, further showing Rousseau as ...
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.