Text 12: Voltaire, 1694—1778

Voltaire was the most influential figure of the French Enlightenment. Considered by his contemporaries as the greatest poet and dramatist of the century, he is now better known for his essays and tales. His precocious wit, his upbringing among a group of libertines, and his predilection for aristocratic circles were to mark his life, as his classical education by the Jesuits was to form his taste.

For writing some satirical verses, he spent a year imprisoned in the Bastille (1717—1718), after which he adopted the name Voltaire. Subsequently he quarrelled with a nobleman, was returned briefly to the Bastille in April 1726, then went into exile in England for three years. There he absorbed the lessons of British liberties, deism, and literature. Then, for safety, he moved (1759) to Ferney, just inside the French border, which remained his home until his triumphal return to Paris in February 1778.

Voltaire was pre-eminent in almost every genre. He catapulted to fame in 1718 with Oedipus. His historical works — History of Charles XII, Age of Louis XIV, Essay on Manners — are landmarks of historiography.

Most of all, however, Voltaire was, and remains, famous as a philosopher, a fighter for reform. His ideas were expressed in poems, tracts, pamphlets, and tales, which are still universally read and admired. His philosophical works include the Treatise on Metaphysics (1734), The Disaster of Lisbon (1756), and the influential Philosophical Dictionary, a witty compendium of his ideas.

Finally, Voltaire was the most prolific correspondent of the century. His thousands of letters portray his life and personality, reflect his wit and ideas, and describe his times.

Voltaire was the leader and chief organizer and propagandist of the reformist group called Philosophers. He strove for collaboration with the more radical of the encyclopaedists, such as Diderot, but in 1770 the two groups could not agree on the issue of atheism or on tactics. Although Voltaire is known principally as a reformer and teller of tales, he was one of the originators of modern historiography. Although his use of history for non-historical purposes — propaganda, debunking, philosophical explanations — were justly criticised, he demanded authentic documentation and broke with tradition in his conception of history as the history of civilisation social, economic, and cultural, as well as political.

Text 13: Jeremy Bentham, 1748—1832

The philosopher and jurist Jeremy Bentham was born in London on the 15^th of February 1748. He proved to be something of a child prodigy: while still a toddler he was discovered sitting at his father's desk reading a multi-volume history of England, and he began to study Latin at the age of three. At twelve, he was sent to Queen's College, Oxford, by his father, a prosperous attorney, who decided that Jeremy would follow him into the law, feeling quite sure that his brilliant son would one day be Lord Chancellor of England.

Bentham, however, soon became disillusioned with the law, especially after hearing the lectures of the leading authority of the day, Sir William Blackstone. Instead of practicing the law, he decided to write about it, and he spent his life criticising the existing law and suggesting ways for its improvement. His father's death in 1792 left him financially independent, and for nearly forty years he lived quietly in Westminster, producing between ten and twenty sheets of manuscript a day, even when he was in his eighties. For those who have never read a line of Bentham, he will always be associated with the doctrine of Utilitarianism and his attempts to make the punishment more precisely fit the crime. This, however, was only his starting point for a radical critique of society, which aimed to test the usefulness of existing institutions, practices and beliefs against an objective evaluative standard. He was an outspoken advocate of law reform, a pugnacious critic of established political doctrines like natural law, and the first to produce a utilitarian justification for democracy. He also had much to say on subjects as diverse as prison reform, religion, poor relief and international law. A visionary far ahead of his time, he advocated universal suffrage.

By the 1820s Bentham had become a widely respected figure, both in Britain and in other parts of the world. His ideas were to influence greatly the reforms of public administration made during the nineteenth century, and his writings are still at the centre of academic debate, especially as regards social policy and legal positivism and welfare economics.