Ockham seems to me a careful and skilful writer. He does not seem to have aimed at literary distinction, however; his one aim seems to have been to convince the Christian world of certain vital truths, especially that John XXII and Benedict XII had become heretics and ought to be removed from office. His political and literary tactics seem well adapted to his purpose. (On the political tactics see the note at the end of Book vi.) The Franciscans needed to win readers among people initially hostile or indifferent to their views. The form of the “recitative” works, those which merely compare positions and arguments without asserting any conclusions, made it easier for neutral or pro-papal copyists, librarians, and readers to copy, keep, and read the book, since disputation and the consideration of opposed viewpoints, including those opposed to the truth, was recognized as legitimate.

The first of the “recitative” writings, the OND, was a detailed commentary on a text, namely John XXII's Quia vir. The difficulty of this form is to introduce the points the writer wishes to make within a framework determined by the opponent's text; Ockham manages this, in my opinion, with great skill. It was also an achievement to write a telling piece of polemic without at any point asserting any opinion of his own about the matters at issue. The price of this achievement is frequent reference to the opinions of the parties to the controversy.

CHAPTER I

If the skilful investigator of imperial rights takes careful note of what has gone before, he will not doubt that imperial rights are to be defended chiefly by means of sacred literature, and that rash action against those rights falls, not only into iniquity, injustice, and error, but also into the wickedness of heresy. From this it is clear that Catholics must not neglect this subject, but must examine it with the greatest attention. Therefore, making another beginning, before answering other arguments by which some try to prove that the Empire is from the pope, I must support the opposite truth more strongly, and afterwards show who it is that the Roman Empire is from.

That the Roman Empire is not from the pope is shown as follows. The Empire existed before the papacy, as is plainly certain from sacred literature, because it existed before the birth of Christ: for Octavian was true Augustus before Christ was born of his mother, as is clear from Luke, chapter 2. Therefore the Empire was not from the pope.

Further, the Empire existed among unbelievers before it existed among believers, as the Scriptures, both the gospels and the apostolic writings, make clear: for Christ and the apostles and blessed John the Baptist regarded the Roman emperor as a true emperor.

Harrington's life and writings

Not much is known of James Harrington (1611–77) beyond what his published works tell us. There are next to no surviving personal papers or manuscripts of his various writings. Not all of these were published in his lifetime, however; a number of his works, including A System of Politics, are stated by John Toland (1670–1722) to have been preserved in manuscript by Harrington's sister Dorothy BeUingham and published by Toland in the first collected edition of 1700. These manuscripts no longer seem to exist, and since we know that Toland extensively rewrote the memoirs of Edmund Ludlow before publishing them, caution is in order. The Commonwealth of Oceana, on the other hand, was printed in 1656, and most of what we consider Harrington's major works between that year and 1660. In all these cases we can compare what he published with what Toland edited, and find the latter to have been no unreliable editor where printed originals already existed.

But we are also dependent on Toland – together with John Aubrey and Anthony Wood – for most of our information about Harrington's personal life. He was a country gendeman, of an old family with Yorkist antecedents established in Northamptonshire and Lincoln shire. Notwithstanding his criticisms of primogeniture, he was an eldest son with younger brothers; but he remained unmarried until late in life and seems to have played no part in county or national politics, before or during the First Civil War.

Editorial preface

The first volume of the Encyclopéedic announced that Diderot was the author of the work's unsigned articles, and the editor of articles marked with an asterisk. The second volume, however, stated that unsigned articles could be by different authors, including persons who did not wish their identity to be known, while Diderot's asterisk was to prove scarce after the publication of volume VIII, and to vanish altogether after volume x. In the absence of surviving manuscript or other evidence, the correct attribution to their authors of Encyclopédic articles has therefore proved difficult and sometimes a matter for conjecture. Diderot seems to have been responsible for over 5,000 articles or editorial additions in all (many of just two or three lines), of which more than 3,000 appeared in the first two volumes alone. Even when their authorship is not in question, the originality of these contributions often remains doubtful, especially with regard to two subjects on which he wrote extensively: synonyms, for which he drew heavily on the work of the abbé Girard; and the history of philosophy, for which he relied largely on Brucker. Sometimes Diderot cited his source, merely adding a few comments of his own; sometimes he so modified the original text as to make a wholly novel point, not least by diverting his readers' attention to a second article, which informs the real sense of the first.

Editorial preface

Diderot drafted his review of Bougainville's Voyage autour du monde in 1771, shortly after the work was published. Although in the Voyage the material on Tahiti occupied just two brief chapters, it was that material which most attracted Diderot's attention; and his treatment of it, together with an amplification of his direct appeal to Bougainville in the review to leave Tahiti as he found it, forms the major part of the first two sections of the Supplément. By October 1772 Diderot had recast and expanded the review as a dialogue within a dialogue which took up themes from two of his short stories that would first be circulated in Grimm's Correspondance littéraire in 1773, and in this new form the Supplément, now described as a ‘Suite des contes de M. Diderot’, was also circulated in successive issues of that manuscript periodical. He thereafter continued to enlarge the work, mainly in the final section, to which some of the additions may even be by his disciple and editor of the 1798 collection of his Œuvres, Jacques-André Naigeon; and he then intercalated the episode devoted to Polly Baker, drawn from the original (1770) edition of Raynal's Histoire des Deux Indes. The Supplément was first published, from an unknown manuscript, and without the Polly Baker episode, by Bourlet de Vauxcelles, in 1796, in a collection of pieces entitled Opuscules philosophiques et littéraires.

Editorial preface

Catherine's Nakaz was published in Russian in 1767 and in French in 1769. The work was translated into many European languages and was widely read, going through thirty editions in four years. A critical edition by M.D. Chechulin was published in St Petersburg in 1907. An English translation appears in W.F. Reddaway, Documents of Catherine the Great (Cambridge University Press, 1933).

Diderot began writing his Observations sur le Nakaz on his return journey from Russia in 1774. Another unpublished commentary was written by the physiocrat G.F. Le Trosne, under the title L'Esprit de l'Instruction, which has recently been rediscovered in St Petersburg by Georges Dulac. Diderot must have seen this work in 1775, before it was sent to Catherine, because he cites it and uses it as the basis of his discussion of physiocratic ideas in his Observations. From certain parallels between passages in the Observations and the third edition of the Histoire des Deux Indes, which Diderot was working on between 1777 and 1780, it seems that a final revision of the text must have taken place during those years.

After Diderot's death a copy of the work was sent to Catherine, together with other unpublished material and Diderot's library. Catherine reacted angrily to what she read and may have had the copy destroyed; no version of the work has been found in St Petersburg.

Towards the end of his life, after he had completed his editorial labours for the Encyclopédic, Diderot wrote extensively about politics. Some of his earlier writings on the subject, though influential, were unoriginal; much of his later work was unpublished in his lifetime. Our selection of texts has been formed from those which were the most important when they appeared, or which give the fullest treatment of his political thought. The first category includes his articles for the Encyclopédie and his contributions to the Histoire des Deux Indes, works which were widely circulated and attracted much attention. The second category includes the Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville, the most speculative of his political writings, and the Observations sur le Nakaz, his most precise, detailed and also broadest discussion of contemporary issues.

Any selection of course entails omission, and ours does scant justice to the range of Diderot's literary styles and skills, for instance the conversational tone of his Mémoires pour Catherine II or the polemical quality of the Apologie de l'abbé Galiani, a defence of Galiani's critiqueof the physiocrats. If Diderot's forceful attack against the despotism of Frederick II in his Pages contre un tyran has its counterpart in the Histoiredes Deux Indes, nothing in our selection can capture the idiosyncratic flavour of his last work, the Essai sur les règnes de Claude et de Néron (1782), largely devoted to Seneca, but interspersed with reflections on the role of the philosophe in times of oppression and a final volley in the protracted quarrel with Rousseau.

The Encyclopédie

The reign of Louis XIV, le roi soleil, may have marked the epitome of absolutist government in Europe, but that achievement did not survive him. Although monarchical power, buttressed by divine right, had become unlimited in theory, it was in practice often ignored and occasionally even defied. The separate regions of France preserved their own traditions and administration, while the legal and tax privileges of the hereditary nobility and Church ensured that some of the most prosperous sections of society retained a vested interest in resisting the dominance of the throne. In the eighteenth century, moreover, new intellectual forces appeared which undermined thes piritual and moral authority of the French state. In their battleagainst superstition and intolerance, and by their call for a rational exercise of power, the philosophes of the Enlightenment challenged the assumptions of absolutism and condemned the brutalities of autocraticrule. Montesquieu, Voltaire and Rousseau each championed liberal principles of toleration against religious bigotry and the despotic tendencies of unrestrained government, and they were rightly perceived by their contemporaries as opponents of the same dark forces of prejudice and injustice which still held sway under the ancien régime. Although they envisaged disparate, even in compatible, programmes of reform, they were united in seeing the prevalent institutions of politics, religion and society as corrupt. Each espousedideals of freedom against the despotisms of their day, and at least to this extent upheld a common cause of enlightenment.