Celebrating Enlightenment Values in 2026: the Example of Voltaire and Slavery

Join the American Philosophical Society on Thursday, March 26, 2026, to welcome Nicholas Cronk for a discussion titled "Celebrating Enlightenment Values in 2026: the Example of Voltaire and Slavery". 

In 2026 we are celebrating a number of Enlightenment milestones: Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations and the first volume of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire were both first published 250 years ago, in 1776; and, most importantly, this is the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Such anniversaries provide an opportunity to reflect on what we owe, if anything, to our Enlightenment inheritance. The question is not a simple one, as the example of Voltaire and slavery shows. Voltaire, like almost all eighteenth-century thinkers, writes about slavery, notably in Candide. Yet his contribution to the debate often leaves commentators unsatisfied. Some would like him to be more radical, more ‘modern’, in his critique. And some go so far as to condemn the whole Enlightenment project as an illiberal sham. To what extent can the writings of the Enlightenment still engage us meaningfully? Thinking about how we should read, and judge, a writer like Voltaire can help us reassess the place of Enlightenment values in our modern world.

Professor Nicholas Cronk, Hon DLitt (McGill), is Professor of European Enlightenment Studies and Director of the Voltaire Foundation at the University of Oxford. He is a member of the Academia Europaea and of the American Philosophical Society. As general editor from 2000 of the Œuvres complètes de Voltaire, he led the edition to completion in 2022, and he is now directing the digital version, Oxford University Voltaire. He has written widely on the French Enlightenment and on Voltaire in particular. His books include Voltaire: A Very Short Introduction (2017) and (with É. Décultot) an edited collection Inventions of Enlightenment since 1800: Concepts of Lumières, Enlightenment and Aufklärung (2023). He has just revised the Norton Critical Edition of Voltaire’s Candide (4th edition, 2026).

Voltaire Foundation
The Voltaire Foundation is a department of the University of Oxford specializing in research in the Enlightenment and the eighteenth century. It organises academic meetings, welcomes postdoctoral students, and has an active publication programme, both print and digital. It oversees (in partnership with Liverpool University Press) the leading book series, Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, founded in 1955, and now numbering over 600 volumes. The core research project of the Foundation has been the preparation of the first ever scholarly edition in French of the totality of Voltaire’s writings. This mammoth undertaking was begun in 1968, and brought to completion, in 205 volumes, in 2022: Robert Darnton has described the Œuvres complètes de Voltaire / Complete works of Voltaire as ‘a great trek, the greatest ever in the history of scholarly publishing’. The digital Oxford University Voltaire, derived from the print edition, was launched in January 2026.