Volume 12, Number 4 · February 27, 1969
Made in U.S.A.
By Alasdair MacIntyre
International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences
edited by David Sills
Macmillan, 17 Volumes pp., $495.00
The dangers of editing encyclopedias are not so great these days as they used to be. When Diderot brought out the first volumes of the Encyclopédie in 1751, he was continuously persecuted by clerical and political authorities: in 1752 the first two volumes were suppressed. In 1759 the license to publish was withdrawn altogether; and during the next four years, Diderot wrote the last ten volumes almost single-handed, in conditions of semi-secrecy. Moreover, in 1875, when William Robertson Smith published the article on The Bible in the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Brittanica, he was so strongly attacked that he was removed from his chair of Hebrew and Old Testament Studies at Aberdeen, and he became editor-in-chief of the encyclopedia that had been instrumental in his downfall.
Review, 1719 words
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