‘If this is the best of all possible worlds,” asks Voltaire in his 1759 novel Candide, “what then are the others?” Just asking the question got the great French writer into a bundle of trouble: his mini-masterpiece was promptly banned on the grounds of blasphemy, sedition and intellectual hostility. Whether – and how – social groups can best serve the needs of humanity is a question philosophers have addressed through the ages. So, in more recent centuries, have sociologists, scientists and political theorists. And art, from Voltaire through Jane Austen to Banksy’s subversive graffiti, has played its own shape-shifting role in the creation –...
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