Cosmopolitans, Slaves, and the Global Market in Voltaire's Candide, ou l'optimisme
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The cosmopolitan and the slave are the offspring of a global world governed by exchangeability and transportability. In Voltaire's most famous work, Candide, ou l'optimisme (1759), these two juxtaposed characters represent radically different results of globalization. A historical reading that explores the context of colonialism, war, and the increasing world trade of the eighteenth century reveals how migration defines the identities of the cosmopolitan and the slave, and the ways in which both characters challenge a traditional notion of belonging. While the cosmopolitan moves freely, the slave is unfree and only moved by others. Focusing on Candide's encounter with a Negro slave in Surinam, I discuss how the tale deals with the legal and philosophical problems raised by the transatlantic slave trade, and question why Voltaire treats North African slavery differently. Following from these discussions, I examine the attitude towards European colonialism shown by Voltaire's cosmopolitans, arguing that these characters reject the global market on the basis of an ethics of human rights.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".