NOTE: Free essay sample provided on this page should be used for references or sample purposes only. The sample essay is available to anyone, so any direct quoting without mentioning the source will be considered plagiarism by schools, colleges and universities that use plagiarism detection software. To get a completely brand-new, plagiarism-free essay, please use our essay writing service.
One click instant price quote
... Voltaire does not labour the point of a progressive essence behind history, other than to realise that the age he lives in is a remarkable age that must have derived from progression. This is the seminal paradox. Yet his history remains a chronology, not a progression.
By no means could one assert that there are no forces that move history in Voltaire's eyes. They might lie in masses, though he does not trust revolution since revolution done in the name of reason is often executed by those least learned in reason itself. But because Voltaire relies on such media as the arts and manners, the question of a movement in history becomes difficult. Ambition and cruelty, heroism and nepotism underscore progress. So the question is, do manners evolve, and once that is determined, Voltaire's history is a progressive one.
Otherwise it lies like a beautiful still picture of the march of man's mind, but the march of man's mind on the same canvass. Voltaire's greatest demonstration of historical adventure is found in the Essai sur les Moeurs et l'Esprit des Nations (1756). Its greatness is not based on the complete rigidity of empirical findings, but breathtaking insight and a touch of the storyteller. But most importantly, it is the first truly monumental step in the history of the West in compiling a work that was truly universal in its outlook, universal not because it was universally European, but universally global. Two chapters are devoted to China, two to India, one to Persia, two to the Arabs, and a token mentioning of the Jews. Further more history assumes some form of the scientific.
A historian is only as good as his materials. It was within these sources that Voltaire sought to enliven the mind, not because he necessarily refuted an empirical method, but because he refuted a distinct interpretation of history from without. He was the historian from within, the writer of an organic work depicting inorganic phenomena. The concept of Voltaire's peculiarly static basis of history partly lies in the institution of laws itself along with arts, manners and movements.
Governments make laws so they limit freedom to shape our own histories. And there is religion itself. "True conquerors are those who know how to make laws. Their power is stable; others are torrents which pass, " he declares. The significance of this is that Voltairean history is a history delighted by the exploits of individuals, but also by the exploits of dynasties. The Chinese Empire, by being so pervasive for centuries, outshone the virtues of Carolingian France. His history is egalitarian.
Yet the individual's action is never coherent in a teleological sense, in the sense that there is some deterministic setting that his actions occur in. The Voltairean emphasis on the colossal magnitude of empire and time seeks merely to entrench the notion of a history that is not linked, or enjoined by a purpose other than the purpose of existence itself. "Until the Catholic and Romantic reaction of the nineteenth century, it was Voltaire who furnished cultivated minds with their concept of the march of civilisation." Space marches, but civilization merely moves. Ultimately the motivations for change in history have to occur by some human attitude. But Voltaire relies on virtue and vice as denominators of change.
All men have honour for instance. This does not ever change. But virtue is rare amongst governments. Then Voltaire, as he did in his History of Louis XIV, emphasises the credentials of an individual in an age, only to revert to an emphasis on aggregate movements in the spirits of the age in his Essai sur les moeurs.
But Voltaire's history is not a hero's history. Voltaire's iconoclasm was too advanced for that. Yet he makes a concession that individuals do have their place, just as nations have their place. In fact everything has a place in the Voltaire's paradise. And they all remain basking in a glorious inertia.
Arguably his greatest work Candide where the adventures of Candid and Professor Pangloss take centre stage, history's futile adventures are as futile as the exploits of Candide. When the anticlimactic conclusion arrives in its humble form, the master and student engage in a conversation that perfects the model of Voltairean history: Pangloss sometimes said to Candide: There is a concatenation of events in this best of all possible worlds: for if you had not been kicked out of a magnificent castle; ... if you had not been out into the Inquisition; if you had not walked over America; ... if you had not lost all your gold; ... you would not be here eating preserved citrons and pistachio-nuts. "All that is very well, " answers Candide; "but let us cultivate our garden. " This world is the world of events, a world of achievement and ill luck, yet a world seemingly mobile and yet need not have moved at all. Drama, discussion and finally a quiet life of gardening.
The history of the journey seems futile. Candide need never have moved. There is no discernible movement with an aim. There is no progression, and one might even say, no modernity except in the present. The events happened, one the sine qua non of the other, but that is the nature of all life, of all events. A link exists but no more.
Life returns to a humble agrarian existence in a garden, an idiosyncratic conclusion to a tumultuous history. And it is Voltaire who is smiling at the end of the journey, somewhat sardonically, to those who hoped to find a pattern when there was none to find. But this journey must realise one thing: "All is for the best in the best of possible worlds." Voltaire's accounts might as well be stories of kingdoms, not entirely insular, but enough to assume a separateness that never unites. Voltaire's history laughs. There are events in history. But there is no movement in the causal sense enough to make progress.
All events happen as a scheme, but it is a futile scheme, a needless one. Man will always be restricted but he will always need to be happy. His freewill will always be burdened but it occurs for the purpose of happiness. The events will happen and will persist in happening. People have honour but events will occur in their folly as fits of lunacy if people will not change.
But all men have virtue or comprehension of it. This tendency of Voltaire to contextualist history in the form of human behaviour and universal virtues entrenches the immobile or 'needless' composition of history as teleological. We need good government, we do not need theocracies and we need good climates. Ultimately the movements between the collective and mind and individual endeavour are too sporadic to form a historical fabric of progression.
As a historian Voltaire is not considered seriously by contemporary standards. But his use of history as a rhetorical device, a polemical tool has had followers. A final verdict is out: he was no historian. By mobilising intellect against intelligence as Roland Barthes put it, he grounded the paradox of confrontation against that of conciliation. History could thus never move. Even in his age, when he decried the crude slavishness that the documenting of history had become, he was criticised by some of his contemporaries, sometimes in envy, that his breadth of intellect was too capricious to detail a proper history, too fickle to render order to a chaotic world. "Voltaire will never write a good history, " wrote a sceptical Baron Montesquieu, "He is like the monks who care little about the subject they are treating, but only about the glory of their order.
Voltaire writes only for the monastery." He had condemned his age for revering fantasies and fictions in history, but his polemical pen only knew the dream. His love of humanity gave the first history of the world that was generous in its recognition of men as equals. But the only true progress for Voltaire lay in the present, whether it was the English parliamentary system, or the virtues of the Prussian King Frederick the Great. He never defined clearly how history had moved to attain that end. History just happened to dictate these terms by the rule of nature. And arts and manners, since they are themselves indefinable as historical causes, were used to define movement.
Voltaire thus surveyed the canvass, creating travel through space - events merely sufficed to fill that space. But the events never seemed to be commensurate with direction. They just happened for the sake of happiness. Since honour, love, humanity and every virtue under the stars has a place in the Voltairean universe, history likewise assumes a place.
Till Voltaire enlivened it, history was cruel. Till he wrote it, history was murderous. When he finished, history was the picture of perfection, a picture of the smiling philosopher himself. "The great and only concern one should have is to live happily." The smile that never changed, and a history that never moved. Voltaire's history was merely a history that happened. Bibliography Aldridge, A.
O. , Voltaire and the Century of Light (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1975) Bester man, T. , Voltaire (London: Longman, 1969). Hibben, J. G. , The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (London, Longmans Greene & Co. , 1910). Howells, J. , Mason, A. , Mason, H. T. , and Williams, D. (eds), Voltaire and His World: Studies Presented to W. H.
Barber (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1985). London, G. , Voltaire, trs. Robert A. Wagner (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1966). Noyes, A. , Voltaire (London: Faber & Faber, 1938). Outran, D. , The Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Sontag, S. (ed), A Barthes Reader (New York: Hill & Wang, 1982). Wade, I. , The Intellectual Development of Voltaire (New Jersey: Princeton University Press 1969).
Free research essays on topics related to: man mind, jersey princeton, make laws, sur les, princeton university
Research essay sample on Voltaire A History That Never Moved
