Thus far, Alain Alcouffe and I have explored two important incidents that coincided with Adam Smith’s sojourn in Switzerland in late 1765/early 1766: (1) the Voltaire-Needham clash over the question of miracles, and (2) the “Dillon Affair” or “Fracas at Ferney”, which led to legal proceedings against a young English hunter. But we have left one key question open: what did Smith really think of Voltaire? To the point, if Smith truly admired this great Enlightenment literary figure as much as Smith’s biographers have led us to believe, then why does Voltaire appear but once in The Wealth of Nations? In fact, Smith refers to Voltaire only in passing toward the end of a lengthy section titled “Of the Expense of the Institutions for the Instruction of People of all Ages” buried deep in the dense pages of Book V of The Wealth of Nations (see WN, Book V, Chapter 1, Part Third, Art. 3, para. 39), where Smith writes:

It is observed by Mr. de Voltaire, that Father Porrée, a Jesuit of no great eminence in the republic of letters, was the only professor they had ever had in France whose works were worth the reading. In a country which has produced so many eminent men of letters, it must appear somewhat singular that scarce one of them should have been a professor in a university. *** The observation of Mr. de Voltaire may be applied, I believe, not only to France, but to all other Roman Catholic countries. We very rarely find, in any of them, an eminent man of letters who is a professor in a university, except, perhaps, in the professions of law and physic; professions from which the church is not so likely to draw them.

To make matters worse, the great Voltaire appears absolutely nowhere (i.e. zero times!) in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS), despite the fact that Smith made substantial revisions to this great work in 1790! For my part (I won’t speak for my colleague, co-author, and friend Alain Alcouffe here), the logical inference I draw from the utter paucity of references to Voltaire in Smith’s two great magnum opera is this: whatever Smith may have first thought of Voltaire (see, for example, the last paragraph of Smith’s 1756 letter to the short-lived Edinburgh Review, which Alain Alcouffe and I discuss here), Voltaire most likely lost most of his luster after Smith had met him in person during his sojourn in Switzerland. Why? Because Voltaire’s pride, vanity, and total lack of “self-command” in the pursuit of his vendetta against John Needham, i.e. Voltaire’s resorting to name-calling and the distorted picture he paints of Needham’s groundbreaking work on spontaneous generation — coupled with his poor handling of the “Dillon Affair”, i.e. Voltaire’s decision to take legal action against the hunter whose dog his own gamekeeper had killed — both of which incidents Smith himself no doubt observed first-hand during his Swiss sojourn — may have simply been too much for the prudent Scottish philosopher to bear.