This article sets forth Voltaire’s philosophy of liberty. Contrary to generally accepted readings, which take Voltaire at face value rather than considering the environment in which he wrote, Voltaire had a clear normative political thought. He was an early proponent of rule of law, ordered liberty, freedom of conscience and expression, and the right to prudent rebellion against tyranny. At the root of his political theory lay a rejection of slavery, and hence of all forms of subjugation.

The question of Voltaire’s belief in (or lack of belief in) God is a vexed one. René Pomeau’s classic study of 1956 argued that Voltaire believed in a God who would punish and reward in the next life. More recently Gerhardt Stenger has shown that, at least after 1764, Voltaire adopted a moderated form of Spinozism. He consistently rejected a materialist atheism on the grounds that the universe showed evidence of intelligent design, and appealed to Spinoza against d’Holbach. This article (...) studies the evolution of Voltaire’s philosophical account of the deity, showing that he moved from a belief in a Newtonian creator God to a Spinozist monopsychism at least by 1756. But, under the influence of Warburton, he had come to reject Bayle’s concept of a society of atheists, and consequently held that the wider public must be encouraged to believe in a providential God, a view he pretended to hold himself. Reading Voltaire after 1756 it is thus essential to understand that he held a double truth theory, so that it is sometimes necessary to ‘read between the lines’ to discover his meaning. (shrink)

This article argues that Voltaire’s supposed letter to ’s Gravesande of 1741 was written for publication after ’s Gravesande’s death. It is thus Voltaire’s reply to David Boullier’s critique of the Lettres philosophiques. The willingness of Voltaire scholars to mistake this for a genuine letter results from a naïve desire to avoid acknowledging Voltaire’s habit of falsifying the historical record. An appendix argues that Letter Twenty-Five of the Lettres philosophiques, on Pacal, was influenced by a reading of Pope’s Essay on (...) Man. (shrink)

We live in a world made by science. How and when did this happen? This book tells the story of the extraordinary intellectual and cultural revolution that gave birth to modern science, and mounts a major challenge to the prevailing orthodoxy of its history. David Wootton's landmark book changes our understanding of how this great transformation came about, and of what science is.

Emilie Du Châtelet (1706–1749) is the author of the Institutions de physique (1740; revised 1742), and of a two-volume translation of Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy accompan...

The seventeenth century was England’s century of revolution, an era in which the nation witnessed protracted civil wars, the execution of a king, and the declaration of a short-lived republic. During this period of revolutionary crisis, political writers of all persuasions hoped to shape the outcome of events by the force of their arguments. To read the major political theorists of Stuart England is to be plunged into a world in which many of our modern conceptions of political rights and (...) social change are first formulated. David Wootton's masterly compilation of speeches, essays, and fiercely polemical pamphlets--organized into chapters focusing on the main debates of the century--represents the first attempt to present in one volume a broad collection of Stuart political thought. In bringing together abstract theorizing and impassioned calls to arms, anonymous tract writers and King James I, Wootton has produced a much-needed collection; in combination with the editor’s thoughtful running commentary and invaluable Introduction, its texts bring to life a crucial period in the formation of our modern liberal and conservative theories. (shrink)

A provocative history of the changing values that have given rise to our present discontents. We pursue power, pleasure, and profit. We want as much as we can get, and we deploy instrumental reasoning—cost-benefit analysis—to get it. We judge ourselves and others by how well we succeed. It is a way of life and thought that seems natural, inevitable, and inescapable. As David Wootton shows, it is anything but. In Power, Pleasure, and Profit, he traces an intellectual and cultural revolution (...) that replaced the older systems of Aristotelian ethics and Christian morality with the iron cage of instrumental reasoning that now gives shape and purpose to our lives. Wootton guides us through four centuries of Western thought—from Machiavelli to Madison—to show how new ideas about politics, ethics, and economics stepped into a gap opened up by religious conflict and the Scientific Revolution. As ideas about godliness and Aristotelian virtue faded, theories about the rational pursuit of power, pleasure, and profit moved to the fore in the work of writers both obscure and as famous as Hobbes, Locke, and Adam Smith. The new instrumental reasoning cut through old codes of status and rank, enabling the emergence of movements for liberty and equality. But it also helped to create a world in which virtue, honor, shame, and guilt count for almost nothing, and what matters is success. Is our world better for the rise of instrumental reasoning? To answer that question, Wootton writes, we must first recognize that we live in its grip. (shrink)

It is a remarkable fact that of all the ideas and aspirations which led up to the Revolution the concept and desire of political liberty, in the full sense of the term, were the last to emerge, as they were also the first to pass away. Alexis de Tocqueville.

This lecture presents the text of the speech about Elizabeth I Queen of England delivered by the author at the 2008 Raleigh Lecture on History held at the British Academy. It explores the religious movement called the Family of Love and discusses Sir Walter Raleigh's knowledge about the discourse on Dover Harbour, which was later spuriously attributed to him. The lecture provides an excerpt and interpretation of Queen Elizabeth's poem titled On Monsieur's Departure.

John Locke's _Second Treatise of Government_ is perhaps the key founding liberal text. _A Letter Concerning Toleration_, written in 1685, is a classic defense of religious freedom. Yet many of Locke's other writings--not least the Constitutions of Carolina, which he helped draft--are almost defiantly anti-liberal in outlook. This comprehensive collection brings together the main published works with the most important surviving evidence from among Locke’s papers relating to his political philosophy. David Wootton's wide-ranging and scholarly Introduction sets the writings in (...) the context of their time, examines Locke's developing ideas and unorthodox Christianity, and analyzes his main arguments. The result is the first fully rounded picture of Locke’s political thought in his own words. (shrink)

The second edition of David Wootton's Modern Political Thought: Readings from Machiavelli to Nietzsche offers a new unit on modern constitutionalism with selections from Hume, Montesquieu, the Federalist, and Constant. In addition to a new essay by Wootton, this unit features his new translation of Constant's 1819 essay "On Ancient and Modern Liberty". Other changes include expanded selections from Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy and a new Hegel selection, all of which strengthen an already excellent anthology.

This article is divided into three sections. The first argues that the significance of David Hume's History of England as an inspiration for Gibbon's Decline and Fall has been underestimated, and that Momigliano's famous account of Gibbon's originality needs to be adapted to take account of the fact that Gibbon was, in effect, a disciple of Hume. Hume and Gibbon, I argue, shaped our modern understanding of "history" by producing narratives rather than annals, encyclopedias, or commentaries. Moreover, they made history (...) primarily the study of the remote past, not the recent past. In order to test my claim that "histories" had generally been quite different in character from those written by Hume and Gibbon, I survey the histories of the early church available to Gibbon. Of Gibbon's critics, East Apthorp, I suggest, is most alert to the novelty of his enterprise.The second section analyzes the argument of chapter fifteen of the Decline and Fall, the first chapter on Christianity. I argue that Gibbon deliberately assembles all the arguments against belief in Christianity that were current in the first century. But I also argue that Gibbon intends the alert reader to notice that ancient arguments against Christianity and modern ones largely overlap, so that he is at the same time offering a conspectus of eighteenth-century arguments against religious faith. At one point only do the modern arguments differ from the ancient ones, and that is in the attitude to miracles expressed in Conyers Middleton's Free Enquiry and Hume's essay "Of Miracles."The last section criticizes David Womersley's claim that the attitude to religion expressed in the later books of the Decline and Fall is significantly different from that in the first. I argue that Gibbon is throughout a more subtle historian of faith than is generally recognized , and that this is because Gibbon himself had once been a Catholic convert. (shrink)

Andrew Janiak has recently claimed that Mme Du Châtelet was “the Enlightenment's most dangerous woman.” There is no evidence that contemporaries regarded her as dangerous. There is no evidence that contemporaries (publishing in French, in France, during her lifetime) took exception to a woman philosopher, or regarded her epistemology as innovative and/or subversive. The claim that she was dangerous is thus a peculiar one, as it is unsupported by any empirical evidence. A consideration of the various meanings of the word (...) “dangerous” leads to the conclusion that Du Châtelet was not a threat to the culture of the French Enlightenment. (shrink)