Author Archives: F. E. Guerra-Pujol

What did Adam Smith discuss with Voltaire during his three-month sojourn in Switzerland? One topic of conversation may have been the Voltaire-Needham controversy that was then playing out in real time in the summer and fall of 1765. In July … Continue reading →

In our previous post “Adam Smith and the Voltaire-Needham Affair“, Alain Alcouffe and I introduced “Collection des lettres sur les miracles: écrites a Geneve, et a Neufchatel” (better known today as Questions sur les Miracles), a series of twenty witty … Continue reading →

What did Adam Smith and Voltaire discuss during the five or six times that they supposedly met in late 1765 and early 1766? Alas, no one really knows for sure. One source (Samuel Rogers, via Smith’s biographer John Rae) identifies … Continue reading →

Although Alain Alcouffe and I have already described what we call “the fracas at Ferney” or “Dillon Affair” in our previous two posts (see here and here), we shall now restate the relevant facts and main sequence of events below … Continue reading →

What really happened at Voltaire’s estate in Ferney during the morning hours of 7 December 1765, and why was the Scottish philosopher Adam Smith notified of this incident just a few days later? Among Smith’s surviving correspondence from his grand … Continue reading →

One of the precious few pieces of actual contemporary evidence we have of Adam Smith’s sojourn in Switzerland is a legal memorandum dated 10-11 December 1765 signed by one Madame Denis. (See Letter #89 in Mossner & Ross, editors, The … Continue reading →

Alain Alcouffe and I will resume our series on Adam Smith in Geneva in the next day or two (our upcoming installments will be titled “Fracas at Ferney”); in the meantime, here is the song “High” by the pop duo … Continue reading →

As Alain Alcouffe and I have mentioned in our previous two posts (see here and here), much of the scholarly attention to Adam Smith’s sojourn in Switzerland has been devoted to Geneva’s proximity to Ferney, where Smith’s hero Voltaire lived … Continue reading →

Why did Adam Smith decide to visit Geneva in the fall of 1765? As it happens, the Scottish philosopher and travelling tutor would have had many good reasons for wanting to visit this pious and prosperous republic with his pupils … Continue reading →

Why did Adam Smith go out of his way to travel to the little Swiss city-state of Geneva in the fall of 1765? At the time, Geneva was an independent and self-governing republic, but she was much smaller than now, … Continue reading →