Letters Concerning the English Nation

What is this book about?

Written after Voltaire's exile in England between 1726 and 1729, these twenty-five letters were published in French in 1734 and promptly banned by the French authorities. Through the eyes of a French visitor, Voltaire sets England and France side by side: Quakers and Presbyterians coexisting, merchants and parliament sharing public standing, inoculation against smallpox accepted rather than preached against, the empiricism of Bacon and Locke, the optics and gravitation of Newton, Shakespeare against Racine. There is no system here, only a sequence of comparisons that quietly demonstrates a single point: institutions and beliefs can be compared, and whatever can be compared can be changed. The book carried English empiricism, English science and English toleration to a French readership, and became the most widely circulated and most prosecuted text of the early Enlightenment.

Why read it?

The value of this book is methodological rather than historical. Voltaire almost never states what France ought to do; he simply describes another arrangement accurately and lets the reader draw the conclusion. That substitution of comparison for exhortation is the model case of Enlightenment prose. It remains useful precisely because public argument so often runs the other way, beginning with a verdict and working backwards. It is also a lesson in economy: not one of the twenty-five letters is longer than it needs to be.

Core Ideas

• Toleration is a calculation rather than a concession: England's many sects had not produced religious war, which let Voltaire restate coexistence as an observable political result instead of a moral demand.
• Commerce makes citizens: English merchants were respected and could enter public affairs, so wealth, credit and political standing are examined as one chain, and the pursuit of gain is no longer treated as degradation.
• Knowledge comes from experience: in the letters on Locke he rejects innate ideas, holding that the mind begins as something close to a blank sheet and that all ideas arrive through sensation and reflection.
• Science requires translation: Newton's work had long been obscured in France by Cartesian vortices, and Voltaire's plain restatement of gravitation and optics shows that conveying knowledge is itself intellectual labour.

What questions does this book try to answer?

• Is social order sustained by shared belief, or by mutual toleration?
• Can ideas be changed by accurate description of another arrangement, without argument or persuasion?
• What makes a suppressed account visible again when another system has occupied the field?

Who should read it?

Readers interested in the Enlightenment, religious toleration and the comparative study of institutions, and writers who want to see how complex arrangements can be made readable. No philosophical background is required; the letters stand alone and can be set down at any point.

How to Read It

Read out of order. Begin with the Quaker letters, the most vivid ethnographic writing in the book; then the letters on Locke and Newton, which carry the argument; finally those on drama and on the nobility, where Voltaire's taste and his prejudices both show. Set it beside Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding to see what he inherited and what he simplified.