Key Ideas
Pangloss’s optimism parodies Leibniz.
The Lisbon earthquake and the problem of evil.
El Dorado, the utopia Candide leaves.
The pessimist Martin as counterweight to Pangloss.
We must cultivate our garden.
Published anonymously in 1759 and immediately banned, Candide sold twenty thousand copies within the year. It answers the “optimism” of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Alexander Pope (“Whatever is, is right”) with relentless, absurd catastrophe — and with the vivid reality of the Lisbon earthquake, the Seven Years’ War, the slave trade (the mutilated slave of Surinam: “It is at this price that you eat sugar in Europe”), and the Inquisition.
See Voltaire and the argument “The Best of All Possible Worlds” in the Argument Library.
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related by shared connections
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
Universal genius — co-inventor of calculus, philosopher of monads and pre-established harmony — who argued that ours is the best of all possible worlds.
The Enlightenment
The eighteenth-century movement that put reason, science, tolerance and individual liberty at the centre of human affairs — “Sapere aude!”
Dayānanda Sarasvatī
The Gujarati ascetic (1824–1883) who founded the Ārya Samāj with the cry “Back to the Vedas!” — rejecting idol-worship, caste by birth, and the Purāṇas, and calling for a rational Vedic religion, education for women and the reconversion of those who had left Hinduism.
Critique of Pure Reason
Kant’s masterwork, asking what reason can know without experience — and answering that it can know the forms of all possible experience, but nothing beyond.
Summa Theologiae
Aquinas’s unfinished masterpiece — a systematic theology in some 3,000 articles, each a model of fair argument, synthesizing Aristotle and Christian revelation.
Scholasticism
The method and philosophy of the medieval universities — rigorous disputation, the reconciliation of faith and reason, and the absorption of Aristotle into Christian, Jewish and Islamic thought.