Life & Wisdom Quote by Voltaire

Voltaire’s “Society therefore is an ancient as the world” (the charmingly mangled grammar only sharpens the aphoristic snap) is less a cozy reminder that humans are social animals than a tactical move in an 18th-century argument about power. He’s insisting that society predates, and in a sense outranks, the institutions that claim to own it: throne, church, aristocracy. If society is as old as the world, then no regime gets to pretend it’s the origin story. Authority becomes a late arrival, not a natural fact.

The intent is Enlightenment judo. Voltaire takes what sounds like tradition - antiquity, permanence, inevitability - and redeploys it against traditionalists. He isn’t praising “the social order”; he’s separating the basic human need to live together from the specific hierarchies that present themselves as sacred and permanent. That’s the subtext: people will keep forming communities even if you dismantle the costumes of legitimacy. The moral universe doesn’t collapse when the wigs come off.

Context matters because Voltaire wrote in a France where “society” was often conflated with “the court” or “good breeding,” and where dissent could be punished as an attack on civilization itself. By pushing society back to the beginning of time, he turns it into a common inheritance rather than a gated club. It’s a quiet democratizing gesture, delivered in the cool voice of someone who knows that the most radical thing you can do to an absolute order is to call it merely historical.