This lively new translation of Voltaire's satiric masterpiece is accompanied by a short selection of writings of each of the most prominent optimists to whom Voltaire was responding -- Leibniz, Bolingbroke, Shaftesbury, Pope, Wolff, Rousseau, and Malebranche -- and thus offers a better perspective of the intellectual context in which Candide was written, and of its place in Enlightenment though, than does any other edition.