Encyclopedie: Ou, Dictionnaire Raisonne des Sciences, des Arts et des Metiers (41 tomes)

Denis Diderot, Jean Le Rond d' Alembert;  Voltaire; Rousseau; Montesquieu; Louis de Jaucourt

Geneva: Pellet, 1777-79;  Neuchatel: La Societe Typographique

[The Organization of Enlightenment Thought: The Revolution in Ideas] 41 of 45 volumes. Quartos, 25 x 19.5 cm.  Bound in handsome catspaw calf.  All edges red.  Good bindings and covers. Clean, unmarked pages.  Includes Vol. 1-36 of the Encyclopedie (important note: lacks 3 text volumes, 23, 30, 31); Vol. 37-38: Recueil de planches, pour la nouvelle edition du dictionnaire raisonne des sciences, des arts et des metiers; (lacks the final plate volume, v.39) Vol. 40-45 Table Analytique Et Raisonnee Des Matieres. <br> Diderot's famous Encyclopedie was initially a modest translation of Chambers's Cyclopaedia.  It grew as a project into a massive project which attempted to collect human knowledge from a rationalistic perspective instead of by nature or theology.  In organizing knowledge from a position where human reason was paramount, the supremacy of the Church was imperiled. As a result, the Encyclopedie was widely controversial and placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum by the Catholic Church.  In discussing fundamental philosophical issues such as on political authority and natural rights, articles in the Encyclopedie shifted the basis of governmental authority from the divine right of Kings to radical concepts popular consent was the basis of legitimacy and the ideals of a social contract. The work was banned by the King of France.  It spread the foundational ideas of the French Revolution and enlightenment thinkers. "No encyclopaedia perhaps has been of such political importance, or has occupied so conspicuous a place in the civil and literary history of its century. It sought not only to give information, but to guide opinion." "It was a war machine; as it progressed its attacks on both the church and still more on despotic government, as well as Christianity itself, became bolder and more undistinguished, and it was met with persecution and opposition unparalleled in the the history of encyclopedias." - Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th ed, p. 1483.