Encyclopedic Liberty. Jean Le Rond d'Alembert
families. Born in Paris, he distinguished himself at the Sorbonne and became one of the leading protegés of the liberal controller-general Vincent de Gournay. His first publication, a translation of part of the Englishman Josiah Tucker’s Reflections on the expediency of a law for the naturalization of foreign Protestants (1755), grew out of that association. In the early 1750s he drafted a number of highly original works on the historical evolution of the human mind and on economic development among other topics, and soon acquired the reputation as a polymath genius. By 1755 he was collaborating with the Encyclopédie.
His articles, all anonymous, were few but important. His essay ETYMOLOGY is a sophisticated application of recent epistemology to the question of the origins and history of language. EXISTENCE is a searching critique of Cartesian metaphysics, and EXPANSIBILITY is a precursor of Lavoisier’s work on the chemical properties of air. He also wrote FOIRE (Fairs), on the marketplaces of old Europe. He dissociated himself from Diderot’s project in the aftermath of the controversy of 1758 that led to its temporary suppression, perhaps for a variety of reasons: a prudent regard for his government position, a concern that the enterprise was becoming dogmatic,
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and the defection of d’Alembert, who had been his main friend and contact there.
In 1761, he became provincial intendant for Limousin, where he remained for thirteen years, developing a reputation for reformist vigor and effectiveness in an undynamic province. During that period, he became the leading exponent of free trade in grain, though his relations with the Physiocratic school usually associated with that policy were cool. He also found time for some writing, including his Reflections on the formation and distribution of wealth (1766), a short tract that was one of the most far-reaching works in economic theory before Adam Smith.7 Smith himself knew and greatly respected Turgot’s work.
In 1774 he was elevated to controller-general of France, where he attempted to implement on a national scale the reforms he had reflected on, described, and attempted locally for many years. His far-reaching changes such as the abolition of the guilds and of corvée (compulsory labor) on public roads met with a backlash, and he was disgraced and forced from office nineteen months later in early 1776, after which he mainly ceased both his writing and his government service. One exception is a long 1778 letter he wrote to the English philosopher Richard Price in which he praised the new American republic as “the hope of the human race.” “It should give the example,” he continued, “of political freedom, religious freedom, and freedom of commerce and industry. The asylum that it offers to the oppressed of all nations should console the earth.”8 But he also warned against the lack of centralization in the Articles of Confederation and against the comfort given to vested interests in the system of checks and balances built into each of the states, prompting John Adams to write three volumes in refutation a few years later (A Defence of the Constitutions of Government, 1787–88). He died in 1781.
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The articles in this volume are drawn from the original twenty-eight-volume edition, the so-called first Paris folio, whose full title was Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, par une Société de gens de lettres. It was edited by Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert and published in Paris, in 1751–72, by Briasson, David, Le Breton, Durand. The eleven volumes of plates were produced from 1762 to 1772, while the seventeen volumes of text appeared from 1751 to 1765. All citations are from this edition, which is accessible online from the ARTFL database (Project for American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language), a collaborative effort of the University of Chicago and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), at http://encyclopedie.uchicago.edu. That website contains both a scanned electronic version of each entry and image links to a photographic reproduction of every page in the work.
The entries in this collection are arranged in alphabetical order by their original French titles. This has the advantage of presenting them in the chronological order in which they appeared off the press in the first edition.
Where it seemed necessary or appropriate, an entry that we have translated is introduced by a brief editorial note in italics. Within the text of an item that we have translated, we have used brackets for clarification, though sparingly. For the fifteen entries translated in whole or in part by others, we use brackets to indicate where we have completed the translation (if applicable). Any note that has been added to those offered by the original editor is followed by the initials HC. The 1751 Encyclopédie did not contain a great many footnotes; virtually all notes in the present volume are either by the present editor or by the translator of the article, and the few exceptions are clearly marked.
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In using the 1751–65 edition, the aim has been to provide modern readers with as much of the experience of their eighteenth-century counterparts as possible. Toward that end, many of the features of the original publication have been duplicated. Perhaps the most important of these concerns the identification of contributors. Those authors who agreed to have identifying markers alongside their entries did so in various ways. In the early volumes, for example, there was a systematic effort to place an asterisk before the title of any article by Diderot, a practice adopted in this edition. There are other articles missing the asterisk but known to be by Diderot. For his part, Jaucourt’s articles are almost always signed, though in inconsistent ways: sometimes his name appears in full, other times only his initials in parentheses appear (D. J.), the latter being a method also deployed by Véron de Forbonnais (M. V.D.F.). For other authors, a one-letter code was developed; among those included in Encyclopedic Liberty are Boucher d’Argis (A), Mallet (G), and d’Alembert himself (O). Italics and capital letters are often used to set off the author identifications at the end of articles, and we follow that practice as well as the practice of citing article titles themselves in capital letters.
Because one of the pleasures of reading the Encyclopédie is to observe the subtle ways in which the editors and their collaborators were continually trying to outwit the censors, and because some authors were more willing to identify themselves to the public than others, we have chosen to preserve as much of this original apparatus as possible.
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Schleiermacher once wrote, “Either the translator leaves the author in peace, as much as possible, and moves the reader towards him; or he leaves the reader in peace, as much as possible, and moves the author towards him.”1 Since the intended audience for the Encyclopédie was, in eighteenth-century parlance, mainly mondain (worldly) rather than narrowly érudit (learned), and since the intended readership for Liberty Fund editions is similar, we have generally made the authors do the moving in our translation.
Thus, we have often simplified syntax and broken up long sentences rather than try to duplicate the authorial eccentricities of the contributors. Within these constraints, we attempt to be as editorially unobtrusive and unambiguous as possible. On those occasions where alternative interpretations have been inescapable, we have indicated this in the footnotes. Because a significant share of the content of the entries was derived more or less directly from such earlier authors as Locke and Montesquieu, and because the original project was conceived as a reference work, the number of such ambiguous passages is relatively small.
On the other hand, our volume represents the original contributions of at least thirteen French authors (one entry remaining anonymous), and these authors do present differences in style along with corresponding translation problems. The Chevalier de Jaucourt, author of by far the largest number of our selections, writes in a fairly plain and direct style that poses relatively few problems. That is more or less true of other authors too, such as Boucher d’Argis and Forbonnais. Faiguet de Villeneuve writes in a pugnaciously chatty prose that is also