Word: alemberte
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Letters are more likely to contain great thoughts and to make great thinkers of frequent writers. Try to imagine Rousseau writing an "E-mail to D'Alembert," or Paul sending an e-mail to the Thessalonians. Or, for that matter, Burke composing an "E-mail Intended to Have Been Sent to a Gentleman in Paris." Indeed, most of Burke's published writing is in the form of letters--one wonders how many Burkes we are losing these days...
...more than our response to a debased liberalism. Dean Ford finds the source of our "destructiveness" in the tradition of Voltaire's "ecrasez l'infame." I think he would be more accurate to recognize our debt to Rousseau's refusal to accept the false culture Voltaire proposed--through D'Alembert--to introduce into Geneva. For I detect in Dean Ford's article an unwillingness to consider seriously the possibility that much of bourgeois culture and much of the culture of the university is fraudulent. I find such a stance as blind and unacceptable as he finds our refusal to bend...
...Young U.S. Living in the times of the French Enlightenment, Houdon became one of the first sculptors to live independent of noble patronage. He did the great intellects: Voltaire, Diderot, Condorcet, D'Alembert, Buffon. Commissions then brought him to the young U.S. to sculpt Washington in his stolid soldierliness, Franklin in his honest wisdom, Jefferson in his aristocratic brilliance...
...intrigue and malevolence. "One could lay a wager that half the court could hardly read, and I would be surprised if more than a third could write," noted Catherine, who was soon wading through the classics of courtcraft (Tacitus, Plutarch, Montesquieu) and such French philosophers as Voltaire, D'Alembert and Diderot. To Encyclopedist Diderot, after her accession, she once wrote: "You philosophers are lucky men. You write on paper, and paper is patient. Unfortunate Empress that I am, I write on the susceptible skins of living beings...
Author Haraszti has culled Adams' choicest comments and neatly arranged them in the form of dialogues. In this play of intellects, Adams clashed most frequently with the French philosophers, e.g., Rousseau, Voltaire, D'Alembert, Condorcet and their disciples. Adams reveals himself as one of the greatest conservatives who ever helped to make a revolution. Sample dialogue between Adams and Mary Wollstonecraft, mother-in-law of Percy Bysshe Shelley, an ardent feminist, and author of an urgent work entitled Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution...