Western Civilization II / Unit 6 WC2 0510 short lesson, about 20 seconds
Voltaire: Wit Against Injustice, and His Ambiguities
Captions available
The idea
Voltaire, born François-Marie Arouet, is arguably the single most influential philosophe in the anchor's judgment: novels, poems, wit against superstition and injustice, and interventions for the unjustly convicted. He also doubted human improvement and thought the masses needed a God.
In practice
If God did not exist, he wrote, one would invent him.
Where people slip
The witness: two years at Frederick's Potsdam from seventeen fifty.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
Something wrong in this lesson? Flag it