"All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds"
It was the indifferent shrug and callous inertia that this "optimism" concealed which so angered Voltaire, who found the "all for the best" approach a patently inadequate response to suffering, to natural disasters, not to mention the questions of illness and man-made war. Moreover, as the rebel whose satiric genius had earned him not only international acclaim, but two stays in the Bastille, flogging, and exile, Voltaire knew personally what suffering entailed. In Candide he whisks his young hero and friends through a ludicrous variety of tortures, tragedies, and a reversal of fortune, in the company of Pangloss, a "metaphysico-theologo-comolo-nigologist" of unflinching optimism. The result is one of the glories of eighteenth-century satire.
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- ISBN10 0140440046
- ISBN13 9780140440041
- Publish Date 30 June 1950 (first published 15 January 1946)
- Publish Status Active
- Out of Print 20 March 2021
- Publish Country US
- Publisher Penguin Books Ltd
- Imprint Penguin Classics
- Format Paperback (US Trade)
- Pages 144
- Language English
- URL https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9780140440041