Voltaire’s Skeptical Jurisprudence: Contra Leibnizian Optimism in Candide

While Malebranche’s Recherche de la généralité (“general” law and “general” will) is the dominant strain in French jurisprudence, finally shaping the legalpolitical thought of Montesquieu and of Rousseau, there is a recessive (but not negligible) strain which is “skeptical” (descended from Montaigne and Charron) and which emerges in its strongest form in the legal-political-moral thought of Voltaire. Since généralité and French Pyrrhonisme (between them) dominate French practical thought in early modernity, a chapter on Voltaire is fully warranted.