- Length
- 18000 pagesThe original folio edition, 17 volumes of text and 11 of plates, 1751-72
- Reading
- OpenWritten for a general reader and readable without preparation
- Availability
- Free onlineA usable out-of-copyright text is freely available
Encyclopédie
The great collective project of the Enlightenment, assembled over twenty-one years against censors, the Church, the courts and finally its own publisher. Its most radical act was structural: it put human faculties at the root of the tree of knowledge and left theology as a branch.
- Date
- 1751-1772
- Attributed to
- Diderot and d'Alembert, with some 140 contributors
- Region
- Paris
- Language
- French
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Solitary — No documented reply on either side
- Form
- Compiled
- Method
- Analytic — Clarification of language and logical form
- Transmission
- Suppressed — Held back, banned or circulated privately before print
- Standing
- Historical — Read for what it shows about its moment
Privilege revoked, formally suppressed, condemned by the papacy, secretly censored by its own publisher, and completed anyway.
What the book says
Twenty-eight volumes attempting to hold everything known, arranged so that the arrangement is itself an argument. It began as a translation of an English reference work and became something else: d'Alembert's opening discourse sets out a tree of knowledge growing from three human faculties - memory, reason and imagination - a scheme adapted from Bacon, in which theology is one branch among many rather than the trunk everything else depends on. That single decision is the book's politics. The articles run from metaphysics to the making of pins, and the plates are half the point: eleven volumes of engravings showing how glass is blown, cloth is fulled, type is cast and locks are made, produced by sending draughtsmen into workshops, on the argument that the practical arts are knowledge and had been left out because the people who possessed them did not write. The cross-references do work the articles cannot do openly - an innocuous entry sends the reader to a damaging one, and the effect accumulates. Diderot's own articles on the sects, on toleration and on Pyrrhonism are among the sharpest, which is why they suffered most.
What it argues
That knowledge is a single connected thing that human beings make, and that the order in which it is presented is not neutral. The Preliminary Discourse argues the case explicitly - knowledge originates in sensation, is organised by the mind's own operations, and forms a whole whose parts illuminate each other, so that the encyclopaedia's job is to display the connections rather than to list items. The corollaries are political without being stated as politics. If theology is a branch, its authority over the other branches has no structural basis. If the mechanical arts are knowledge, then the people who practise them know something. And if everything is connected, then anyone who can read can follow the connections wherever they lead, which is what the cross-references were for.
No work is recorded as the target of this book, and none is recorded as answering it.
How it argues
By arrangement, by accumulation and by indirection. The dangerous claims are seldom in the articles where a censor would look for them: a piece on a minor pagan cult carries the argument about Christianity, and a reference at the end of a harmless entry directs the reader to it. Diderot described the technique himself. Alongside this runs something quite different in temper - the enormous, patient, entirely unsubversive labour of describing how things are actually made, which is where the plates come in and which was as new as anything in the philosophy.
The moment
France between the 1740s and the 1770s, with the Jesuits, the Jansenists, the Parlement and the crown all in a position to stop the work and none of them quite able to. The pressure was continuous: Diderot had already been imprisoned at Vincennes in 1749 for an unrelated book, d'Alembert resigned as co-editor in 1758 after the storm over his article on Geneva, Helvetius' De l'esprit was burned and the Encyclopedie suppressed with it, and Clement XIII condemned the whole work. Voltaire urged Diderot to move production abroad; he refused, and finished it in Paris.
How it travelled
Through obstruction, and then through a betrayal discovered too late. After the privilege was revoked, the last ten volumes were printed with a false Swiss imprint and distributed anyway. Then in the autumn of 1764 Diderot found that his own publisher, Le Breton, had been secretly cutting the proofs for years - striking out passages, altering others, and suppressing three articles entirely, including the one on toleration - to avoid prosecution. The volumes were printed and bound; the original manuscripts had been burned. Diderot wrote that he lost all appetite for eating, drinking and sleeping. In 1933 a set of the Encyclopedie surfaced in Berlin that had been Le Breton's own, containing a bound volume of the pasted proof sheets, so that the extent of the cutting could finally be measured: 284 pages, forty-six articles, and by one count some 12,800 alterations.
The strongest objection
That its confidence outran its evidence, and that the same structure which liberated the sciences from theology installed something else in the place. Later critics - Rousseau first among them, from inside the project - argued that the equation of knowledge with progress and of progress with improvement was an article of faith rather than a finding. The twentieth-century version, pressed hardest by Horkheimer and Adorno, is that a reason which recognises no authority above itself becomes an instrument for domination rather than a check on it. Neither objection touches the plates, the workshops or the pins, which is worth remembering when the Enlightenment is discussed as though it were only a doctrine.
Why read it
Not as a book - nobody reads it through. Read the Preliminary Discourse, which is short and is the manifesto, and then browse the plates, which are freely available and are the most immediate surviving evidence of what the eighteenth century actually knew how to do. The Chicago project's translated articles are the way into the text.
- First printed
- 1751
- First in English
- 0
- Digitised
- Yes
Volumes eight to seventeen appeared in 1765 with a false Neuchatel imprint after the privilege was withdrawn. Later reprints at Lucca, Livorno, Geneva and in quarto and octavo formats spread it far more widely than the expensive folio ever could.
Never translated entire. The University of Chicago's collaborative project has been putting individual articles into English for years, and those translations are in copyright.
Where it stands
Historical as a reference work and permanently present as a model. Nothing in it is consulted for information now, but the idea that knowledge should be organised by human reason rather than by authority, published in the vernacular, and made available to anyone who can read, is so completely the modern default that it is hard to recognise as a proposal.
On quoting this book
The French is public domain, but there is no complete English version and the individual article translations in circulation are modern and in copyright. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
How much Le Breton's censorship damaged the work is still argued: Diderot thought it ruinous, and scholars working from the recovered proofs have generally found the damage narrower than he feared, concentrated on passages likely to provoke the religious parties. The relative contributions of the many contributors are hard to establish, since attribution is uneven. And whether the Encyclopedie is best understood as a work of philosophy, a commercial venture that survived by being profitable, or a technical compendium with philosophy attached is a genuine question - it was all three at once.