The Greatest And Noblest Pleasure Which

This passage appears in Frederick's personal correspondence and reflects the Enlightenment epistemology he absorbed through his friendship with Voltaire and his reading of Locke, Bayle, and the French philosophes. Frederick's court at Sanssouci Palace in Potsdam became a gathering point for Enlightenment intellectuals, and he saw the questioning of received opinion — religious, political, philosophical — as both an intellectual virtue and a royal duty. His Anti-Machiavel (1740), edited and published by Voltaire, was his most ambitious attempt to apply Enlightenment reason to the theory of government.