Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

I have found this line online, attributed to Voltaire. "It is not inequality which is the real misfortune, it is dependence." Now: Voltaire is one of those figures to whom things  (passive voice) get attributed . Or, as I believe Benjamin Franklin wisely put it, "You can't believe all quotations you find on the internet." The inequality/dependence line seems as if it might have been created by someone intent on arguing against the New Deal, or some subsequent welfare-state sort of development, and backdated to Voltaire to give it some Enlightenment cred. Not that that's a bad cause. Regular readers of this blog know my sympathies. But deception mars every cause for which it is employed. [And a reasonable induction is that it is employed for all human causes.] So: I open this to my readers. What are the odds that actually comes from Voltaire? Or from anyone speaking or writing earlier than, say, 1932?

Jean-Jacques Rousseau's role in the creation of romanticism has been exaggerated in some circles, says Isaiah Berlin. In making this case, he says that there isn't as sharp a break between the canonical Enlightenment figures on the one hand and Rousseau on the other as is sometimes thought, at least if we look to actual content. "If we consider what it is that Rousseau actually said, as opposed to the manner in which he said it -- and the manner and the life are what are important -- we find that it is the purest milk of the rationalist world....Rousseau's actual doctrine is not all that different from that of the Encyclopaedists. He disliked them personally, because temperamentally he was a kind of dervish from the desert. He was paranoiac, savage, and gloomy in some respects ... he did not have much in common with the people at Holbach's rather irreverent table or at the elegant receptions with Voltaire held at Ferney. But this was to a certain degree a per...

Something French would seem to be called for today. Also, I happen to have a thing about Broadway musicals. Okay, so should I riff on Les Mis ? No, I think I'll go further back than that. In 1973, a production of Candide trod the boards. This of course was a work of satirical prose fiction by Voltaire, adapted for Broadway by Hugh Wheeler, with music by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by Richard Wilbur and Stephen Sondheim. I will quote some of those lyrics today, I trust within the limits of whatever counts as "fair use" of a 44 year old play.  I don't know how the whole notion of "intellectual property" is going to survive the case of the monkey selfie, though.... Anyway, the below is from what is known as the "Lesson Song." The character of Pangloss is introduced as the house intellectual of a patron's castle. When we first see him, he is giving a lesson on his Leibnizian theodicy. PANGLOSS. PRAY, CLASSIFY PIGEONS AND CAMELS. P...