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In addition to the great Voltaire and his mistress Madame Denis, Adam Smith met and befriended many other noteworthy men and women during his extended sojourn in the picturesque Swiss city-state of Geneva (pictured below, circa 1780). Among these illustrious … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

Alain Alcouffe and I will resume our series on Adam Smith in Switzerland soon; in the meantime, pictured below is a Genevan coin for six sols minted in 1765, the year of Smith’s first and only visit to the small … Continue reading →

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 →