His Life Spoke Volumes
DIDEROT AND THE ART OF THINKING FREELY
BY ANDREW S. CURRAN
Other Press, 520 pp., $28.95
DENIS DIDEROT (1713–1784) has never burned with the reputational brightness of French Enlightenment stars like Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Rousseau. Leading-man status has perpetually eluded the philosophe associated with that age’s Encyclopédie.Four years before his death, Diderot himself wistfully acknowledged that he had never, in his lifetime, published a masterpiece.
Moreover, as Andrew S. Curran recounts in his deeply researched and absorbing new biography, Diderot’s was not even the world’s first encyclopedia. Such works stretched back to ancient times, and the immediate antecedent for Diderot’s enterprise,was published in London in 1728. (Indeed, the began as an aborted project to translate Chambers’s volumes into French.) Diderot was not even the sole editor of the ambitious encyclopedia with which his name became linked. Not until the late 1750s, with the departure of his coeditor, mathematician Jean le Rond d’Alembert, did he achieve that status. Until then, Diderot and his partner jointly oversaw the entirety of the volumes’ contents. Moreover, then and later, as time allowed, Diderot wrote entries on a broad range of topics—from politics, history, economics, and the arts to religion, philosophy, and the sciences.
