Things like this happen with appalling frequency in Candide: the slave that Candide and Cacambo meet in Surinam has lost both his left leg and his right hand (such, after all, is the price of sugar) and Cunégonde is gang-raped and disemboweled (though, somehow, not fatally) by Bulgar troops. Catastrophes pile upon catastrophes and, in the larger scheme of things, the Old Lady’s loss, though obviously important to her, seems but a trifle. Given all that is going on in Candide, it is understandable that Pagden might lose track of a buttock. On the other hand, the Old Lady had one of hers removed (and eaten) by besieged (and starving) Janissaries. But Pagden is mistaken about the fate of Pangloss’s buttocks: at the end of the book, he still has both of them. The lessons in “experimental physics” performed on the “very pretty and very pliable” servant girl by Pangloss’s “sufficient reason” (and let us pause here to ask: has anyone other than Voltaire ever used a philosophical concept as a euphemism for the male member?) result in his contracting a disease whose genealogy he traces and necessity he demonstrates. ![]() He’s is right about Doctor Pangloss’s unflagging optimism and unrelenting syphilis. ![]() Pangloss, his face half eaten away by syphilis, one buttock cut off, insists that, all appearances to the contrary, this world is nonetheless the ‘best of all possible worlds’ … (114). Recounting the sufferings inflicted on the protagonists of Voltaire’s Candide, Pagden observes, In the face such an ambitious, informed, and energetic account of the Enlightenment it is perhaps pedantic to note that the book has a minor problem: it misplaces a buttock. Inescapably, the heirs of the architects of the Enlightenment ‘science of man.'” For this, then, if for no other reason, the Enlightenment still matters (415). Cosmopolitanism, expressed as a firm belief in the possibility of a truly international system of laws, has been the animating principle behind both the League of Nations and the United Nations and is the main assumption that underlies the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (413). “Global governance,” “Constitutional Patriotism,” globalization, multiculturalism are not only topics of debate they are also, in many parts of the world, realities. And where Gay’s account culminated in an examination of the ways in which the Enlightenment inspired the creation of a republican government on the North American continent, Pagden traces the legacy of the Enlightenment down to the present, arguing thatĪlthough the central Enlightenment belief in a common humanity, the awareness of belonging to some world larger than the community, family, parish, or patria, may still be shakily primitive and incomplete, it is also indubitably a great deal more present in all our lives - whoever “we” might be - than it was even fifty years ago. As a result, his book devotes considerably more attention than Gay did to the role of modern natural law theories in the development of the Enlightenment and features a fine discussion of the ways in which the attempt to articulate the “science of man” implied by these theories was informed by and tested against the strange peoples and stranger customs that voyagers across the Pacific encountered. And, in keeping with the current emphasis on global history, Pagden shows how Europeans became modern by learning what it was that they shared with the rest of the world. ![]() Like Gay, Pagden’s aim is to demonstrate the ways in which the Enlightenment made Europeans modern. Anthony Pagden’s The Enlightenment and Why It Still Matters (New York: Random House, 2013) is perhaps the most ambitious account of the period published by a major commercial press since Peter Gay’s two-volume survey from the 1960s.
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