Transcription of voltaire and the necessity of modern history
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voltaire and the necessity of modern history
modern Intellectual history ,6,3(2009), 484C Cambridge University Press2009 and the necessityof modern historypierre forceDepartment of French, Columbia UniversityE-mail: article revisits what has often been called the naive presentism of voltaire shistorical work. It looks at the methodological and philosophical reasons for voltaire sdeliberate focus on modern history as opposed to ancient history , his refusal to makeallowances for time in judging the past, and his extreme selectiveness in determiningthe relevance of past events to world history . voltaire s historical practice is put in thecontext of the quarrel of the ancients and the moderns, and considered in a tradition ofuniversal history going back to Bossuet and leading up to nineteenth-century Germanhistoricism. Paradoxically, voltaire is a major figure in the history of historiography notin spite of his presentism (as Ernst Cassirer and Peter Gay have argued), but becauseof significant proportion of voltaire s enormous output is historical in nature:alifeofCharlesXIIofSweden(1731),1 a cultural history of France under LouisXIV (1751),2a history of the War of1741(1755),3a history of Russia under Peter theGreat (1760),4apr ecis of the age of Louis XV (1768),5a history of the Parliamentof Paris (1769),6a
voltaire and the necessity of modern history 459 Meineckeaddedthat“neverbefore...hadtherebeensuchadeliberateand determined effort to distinguish between the valuable and the valueless in the
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