Practice question · Select all that apply
What made the Encyclopédie politically consequential, beyond the content of individual articles?
Hints
- Three of these describe its method and its distribution; one gets its sponsorship backwards.
- The work was repeatedly suppressed, which is a poor fit for a royal commission.
Show the answer
- B. It treated crafts, trades and machines as knowledge worth systematic description
- C. It was sold commercially by subscription across Europe despite suppression
- D. It organised knowledge by survey and cross-reference rather than by received authority
Why
The form was the argument. Putting glass-blowing beside metaphysics asserts that useful knowledge is knowledge; cross-referencing lets a bland article point at a subversive one; and selling by subscription created a European readership that no censor could reach at once. The crown suppressed it more than once.
Practise The Late Eighteenth Century and the Debate over Modernity
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