Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts

of Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org or you can subscribe,

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Today is October 15th, 2013, and my guest is John Ralston Saul, author of numerous works of

fiction and nonfiction, as well as the president of Penn International, the human rights group that

works to protect writers and freedoms related to writing. John, welcome to Econ Talk.

Thank you very much. Our topic for today is your book with the rather

startling title Voltaire's Bastards, a reference to the central theme of your book, which is the

illegitimate offspring and consequences of Voltaire's ideas, and those of his time in defense of reason.

The book was published in 1992, but it's just been reissued with the new introduction. I want to

ask you to start with a brief sketch of Voltaire and his influence. Reason seems like a good thing.

What went wrong? Well, I think if you actually go back and look at what they were saying in the

context of, you know, late 18th century, mid-18th century, late 18th century, of course they were

pushing reason because it was sort of a counterweight to superstition and stupidity and the ignorance

of the aristocracy and so on. But it was pushed in a much larger context. You see the enemy,

you fight the enemy, but I don't think they imagined that having, you know, since defeated the

enemy in the short term, that the next stage would be to rip reason out of context, out of a broader

context, which is what I wrote about in, because this book is the beginning of four volumes, which

ends with one called unequilibrium, where I talk about multiple sort of six human

qualities of equal value, of which one is reason. And now there's a thing like ethics and intuition

...