Theodore Besterman… was one of the most remarkable of the long line of remarkable people who have given their support to the Humanist movement.
Nicolas Walter in New Humanist, November/December 1976
Theodore Besterman was a bibliographer, biographer, and translator, who became a leading authority on French Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire. A member of the advisory council of the British Humanist Association (now Humanists UK) and Honorary Associate of the Rationalist Press Association, Besterman played an active part in the organised humanist movement. This included his involvement in the 1954 congress of the World Union of Freethinkers, and as the first speaker in the Voltaire Lecture series, founded by the British Humanist Association in 1968. Of his hero, Besterman wrote:
It is my conclusion that Voltaire was at most an agnostic; and were any tough-minded philosopher to maintain that this type of agnosticism is indistinguishable from atheism, I would not be prepared to argue with him.
Theodore Besterman, ‘Voltaire’s God’ in Question 1, February 1968 (drawn from Besterman’s Presidential address to the Second International Congress on the Enlightenment at the University of St Andrews, 1967)
In the inaugural Voltaire lecture, he described the great Enlightenment thinker’s devotion to justice as ‘the fruit of [his] reason, but… expressed with all the deepest passion of his being’. He continued:
Voltaire was utterly a man of the mind. He lived by the mind, his mind forced his ailing body to accomplish miracles of hard work. He was indeed the most absolute kind of rationalist. He was not prepared to accept the notion that mankind depends on external forces and influences… and therefore he placed squarely on man’s shoulders the responsibility for his own moral evil. He was convinced that evil, that is, injustice, was the result of bad thinking.
Theodore Besterman, ‘The Real Voltaire’, 17 October 1968
Besterman’s extensive influence on the field of Voltaire studies was outlined in his obituary in Humanist Newsletter, following his death in November 1976.
We regret to announce the death on November 10 of Dr Theodore Besterman, a member of the BHA Advisory Council. Dr Besterman was a scholar of international repute, his interests covered an enormous range of subjects but it is perhaps as a Voltairean that he is best known. He founded and directed the Institut et Musée Voltaire at Voltaire’s own house in Geneva (formally opened in 1954). He edited the Voltaire Correspondence running to over 20,000 letters; he started the “Studies on Voltaire and the 18th Century” which now numbers over 160 volumes; in 1969 he published his own biography of Voltaire; he founded and endowed the Voltaire Room in the Taylorian Library at Oxford; he created the International Society of 18th Century Studies, organised the first International Congress on the Enlightenment and presided over two more congresses. Dr Besterman was, until ill health forced his retirement, a member of the Voltaire Committee which organises the bi-annual BHA Voltaire Lectures (the next lecture in the series is to be given by Professor Anthony Flew in the Summer of 1977). His lasting monument will remain the enormous resurgence of Voltaire studies.
Humanist Newsletter, December 1976
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