The curious enlightenment of Professor Caritat

Professor Nicholas Caritat is a scholar of the Enlightenment and therefore, he reasons, a man with no role in the political struggle in Militaria, the autocratic state in which he lives. He is wrong. In the space of twenty-four hours, Caritat is arrested by the police, then liberated by the guerrillas of the Visible Hand. They give him the codename Pangloss and send him on a mission which only a philosopher could undertake: to find the best of all possible worlds.

The Curious Enlightenment of Professor Caritat is a whirlwind journey through a series of vividly imagined political landscapes where eighteenth-century ideas confront twentieth-century concerns. Caritat, a middle-aged Candide, walks naively through worlds of ideological extremes, equipped only with a small travelling bag and a knowledge of such thinkers as Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant and Hume.