Episode 42 | The Encyclopedists

From The Knowledge Architects: Building Wisdom in the Information Age · 23:43

Show by ElysFlow

AI-generated audio: the two voices and their conversation in this episode are created by AI. The hosts are not real people.How we make it: our team chooses each topic and edits the audio. The research and these notes are drafted with AI and read by us before publishing.Why AI? It lets us bring peer-reviewed science to you for free, in English and German. Sources are below.Episode SummaryIn March 1759 the French King's Council explained why it was banning a book. Not because it was useless or full of errors, but because, once finished, it would be "a complete dictionary and a general treatise of all the sciences", and so "far more sought after by the public and far more often consulted". The work was dangerous because it would be useful. The book was the Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert. What made a reference work so threatening?In this episode we follow the Encyclopédie from a Paris bookseller's plan to translate an English dictionary, a plan that ended with the bookseller and his translator exchanging punches, to 28 folio volumes and about 74,000 articles published over 21 years. We look at how it organised knowledge: a famous tree of memory, reason and imagination, borrowed from Francis Bacon and quietly rearranged so that theology sat under reason; an alphabet that actually ordered the book; and some 61,700 cross-references that Diderot hoped could "secretly overturn" opinions nobody dared attack openly. The editors themselves called their tree partly arbitrary, one map among as many as there are projections of the globe. We ask who could actually afford it (a full set cost about 65 weeks of a skilled artisan's pay), what it said about crafts, authority, slavery and women, and why it was banned twice, condemned by the Pope and, most effectively, cut in secret by its own publisher. Then we follow its design to Britannica and Wikipedia, where the links can finally be counted, and most of them are rarely clicked.Key Topics CoveredEphraim Chambers's Cyclopaedia (1728): two folio volumes held together by cross-references, and the promise that such a work "would answer all the Purposes of a Library, except Parade and Incumbrance"The 1745 contract to translate Chambers into French, the fistfight between the bookseller André-François Le Breton and the translator John Mills, and the court case that followedHow a translation became a new work: the two editors appointed in 1747, aged 34 and 29, and the 1750 Prospectus with its verdict that "Chambers read books, but he scarcely saw any craftsmen"Ten volumes promised by December 1754, twenty eight delivered by 1772The scale: 17 volumes of text, 11 of plates, about 74,000 articles, about 22 million words, about 140 identified authors, and why the often quoted 72,000 is an older countThe Chevalier de Jaucourt, who wrote about one article in four with six or seven secretaries, thirteen or fourteen hours a dayNeither the first nor the largest: Pliny, Isidore of Seville, Vincent of Beauvais, the Yongle Encyclopedia, Bayle, and Zedler's German Universal-Lexicon with nearly four times as many entriesHow the word "encyclopaedia" was coined by Renaissance humanists from a corrupted Greek phrase, and meant education long before it meant a bookToo many books: Ann Blair's history of early modern information overload, and why it fuelled ever larger reference worksThe tree of knowledge: Bacon's three faculties of memory, reason and imagination, reordered, with theology placed under reason on the same branch as superstition and black magicThe plagiarism charge by the Jesuit Berthier in the Journal de Trévoux, and why the quarrel was about how much was owed to Bacon, not about concealmentD'Alembert's world map: as many systems of knowledge as there are projections of the globe, and Diderot's admission that arbitrariness cannot be banishedRobert Darnton's reading of the tree as an exercise of power, and the editors' own, epistemological reason for itWhy the book was alphabetical, and the three devices meant to rejoin alphabet and system: the tree, the subject labels and the cross-referencesSubject labels in practice: some 2,600 to 2,900 distinct classes, most of them not on the tree at allDiderot's theory of cross-references, from showing how subjects connect to quietly undermining "ridiculous opinions"The satirical reference from CORDELIERS to Capuchon, and Diderot's own unease with such referencesA myth retired: "Cannibals, see Eucharist" was written by a doctor of theology, explains a pagan slander against the early Christians, and was never cited by DiderotDiderot's admissions: missing, useless and false references, and articles "by turns dwarfs and giants"What the network looks like today: 61,700 cross-references, no centre, two "hemispheres" joined on the sparsest map by a single link between chemistry and physics, and polemical arguments hidden under the harmless label "Grammar"The Encyclopédie's links compared with Wikipedia's: more often across…

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