By way of its conception, production, and distribution, the Encyclopédie illustrates, more forcefully than any other publishing venture of the eighteenth century, how innovative philosophies of the period came to be disseminated, and how the market of ideas in the age of Enlightenment was organised. Current research on the Encyclopédistes, and on their allies and enemies, makes plain that both the economic and social forces which underpinned their enterprise, as well as those which resisted it, were for technical and political reasons joined together in the same ideological world. Thanks to the growth of literacy and the economic, cultural, and scientific institutions which literacy served, books came throughout the eighteenth century to acquire an unprecedented significance. The advent of commercial society allowed for the wide circulation of the printed word through newspapers, magazines, and other publications. Authors could manage to earn a livelihood from their writings alone. Intellectuals could become a political class. A system of signs could be transformed into systems of thought, and by way of their diffusion to readers impressed by them, revolutionary ideas could come to have revolutionary implications.

This ‘immortal work’, as Voltaire once termed the Encyclopédie, has for virtually the whole of the period since its completion appeared the emblematic monument of eighteenth-century culture. While in principle conceived as a work of reference and a compendium of knowledge distilled from other sources, the vast collection of more than 70,000 articles assembled in 25,000 folio pages, comprising seventeen volumes of text, eleven tomes of plates and seven volumes of supplements and tables, in fact came to occupy a central place within Europe’s republic of letters and even managed to help shape its political landscape.