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 mostly free of mystery. But other
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writers are not so straightforward. Diderot himself was an inveterate ironist whose multiple tonalities are often elusive for the unwary translator. Saint-Lambert, a celebrated poet in his own time, has a sometimes mannered style calling for special adjustments. Boulanger, author of one of our longer titles (POLITICAL ECONOMY), writes in a ponderous French full of portentous abstractions and labored transitions. Damilaville, who penned the two lengthiest articles in our collection (POPULATION and FIVE PERCENT TAX), was an ungainly stylist whose many pronouns and awkwardly structured sentences create a number of ambiguities. All told, however, the differences among these styles are somewhat greater in the original French than in our translations.
Foreign-language titles of works referred to by the contributors in text or notes have been translated into English where cognates did not make the translation obvious.
The French texts that we used contain a number of terms and concepts that pose special translation problems. Some of the more problematic and recurring cases are as follows:
commerce. If the context is economic, “trade” or “commerce,” although sometimes the term seems to include all productive nonagricultural activity; see INTENDANTS for this meaning. In French, there is frequently a social meaning as well, as in “the commerce between the sexes” or “the commerce among men”; see MANNERS for this latter connotation.
droit. Usually translated as “law.” Depending on the context, it can also mean “a right” (as in NATURAL RIGHT), “a tax,” “a tariff,” “a duty,” “a fee.” As a moral or political adjective, the word can mean “what is right or just.” We often translate it as “law,” as in “divine law,” “civil law,” “natural law,” “canon law,” or “the law of nations.” See loi, below, for a different set of connotations.
économie. Meaning “frugality,” “household economy,” “management of resources,” the term was not used in our modern sense as a description of a distinct field of study (economics),
