The encyclopedists and the Republic of Letters

Between the ancient library and the Enlightenment stands one machine: Gutenberg's printing press (c. 1450). Before it, a book was a treasure — copied by hand over months, chained to lecterns, owned by institutions. Within two generations of Gutenberg, Europe had printed more books than its scribes had copied in the previous thousand years, and the price of the written word collapsed. Every project in the rest of this course — encyclopedias, public libraries, free software — is, in a sense, someone noticing that the cost of copying knowledge had fallen again and asking: what should we do with that?

The law noticed too. England's Statute of Anne (1710), the first modern copyright act, did something subtle and profound: it made an author's monopoly over their work temporary — fourteen years, renewable once. The assumption built into that design is the assumption this whole course keeps meeting: published knowledge ultimately belongs to everyone, and exclusive control is a limited-time incentive, not a natural right. The public domain — the growing commons of works whose time has run — was born as a legal idea there.

The Encyclopédie: knowledge as a political act

In 1751, in Paris, a publisher's project became one of the most subversive acts of the eighteenth century: the Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert. What began as a plan to translate an English encyclopedia grew, under Diderot's hands, into something without precedent: twenty-eight volumes over two decades, roughly seventy-two thousand articles, more than a hundred contributors — Voltaire, Rousseau and Montesquieu among them.

Its radical idea was not any single article. It was the premise: all knowledge, organized and explained, placed in the hands of anyone who could read. The volumes documented trades and crafts — printing, weaving, glassmaking, steelmaking — with meticulous engraved plates, treating a tanner's technique with the same seriousness as a philosopher's argument. This scandalized those who believed practical knowledge should stay inside guilds, and it flattened a hierarchy: knowing how was granted the dignity of knowing why.

Even the cross-references carried politics. The article on cannibals ended, deadpan, with see: Eucharist — letting the connection detonate in the reader's mind while each article, read alone, stayed defensible before the censor. Diderot wrote that the work's goal was "to change the common way of thinking". The authorities agreed it might: the Encyclopédie was condemned, its royal license revoked, its volumes at times printed and distributed clandestinely. D'Alembert, exhausted by the persecution, eventually withdrew; Diderot pressed on nearly alone for years — only to discover, late in the project, that his own publisher had been secretly softening the boldest passages at the proof stage. He continued anyway. The thing shipped.

What the encyclopedists established

Three convictions from that fight echo directly into Wikipedia and Open Knowledge:

• Knowledge is a common inheritance. The encyclopedists saw themselves as compilers of humanity's shared achievement, not owners of it.
• Organizing knowledge is itself a service. Raw information scattered across a thousand places serves nobody. Structure — articles, cross-references, plates, indexes — is what turns information into learning, and producing it is real intellectual work.
• Explaining is an act of respect. Writing so that a curious non-specialist can genuinely understand is harder than writing for peers, and more valuable. The Encyclopédie bet that ordinary readers, given real explanations, would rise to them.

Around the same period, the Republic of Letters — the informal network of scholars exchanging correspondence across borders and confessions — was demonstrating the same thing at the scale of a continent: knowledge grows fastest when it circulates freely among people who will never meet, and who owe each other nothing but honesty.

The Enlightenment bet, stated plainly: a society where knowledge circulates freely becomes wiser, freer and more prosperous than one where it is hoarded. Every open-knowledge project since is a renewal of that bet — usually against the same objections, and so far with the same result.