Ok. So, Voltaire's philosophical outlook. He was all about the intellectual-laziness. One can twist his (or her) mind into all kinds of crazy loops, and come up with nothing worth a farthing. Unless one has some factual information, based on worldly experience, thoughts are irrelevant. In Candide, Voltaire is criticizing Liebniz's theories of optimism, and of the fate of the world. Voltaire was a thinker of the Enlightenment, and his work shows that men were placed on the earth and given the ability to reason, and the world they live in is the result. Everything does not happen for a reason, and Voltaire proves this through Pangloss' faulty logic (STD's bring about chocolate, the sea was created so that the Anabaptist could be drowned, etc.). Candide is Voltaire's means of attacking everything from religion to racism, but the general idea is that a person needs to learn for themselves what is right for them, and how to do what makes them happy, rather than just going with the flow, letting the world fall to pieces, and relying on fate. It is important to realize how powerless men are, in both the ability to understand the world, and the vain belief that it can be conquered.
             Candide could be used to describe the flirt Russia had with Communism. In Candide's search for something that he thought was beautiful (but it turns out that she was just a nigology-studying wench who used sex to manipulate men), his life was almost destroyed. In Russia's search for the most beautiful principle of all, equality, they stumbled upon this ridiculous idea of Communism. Once again, philosophizing (if that can be considered a verb of any sort) is all well and good, and makes the world perfect, but in all practicality, I'm sorry, Communism just ain't the way to go. Unless, of course, one enjoys being poor and unhappy and having every last detail of his life controlled. Then perhaps Communism could work. In at...