1. Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 1:62 (see chap. 1, n. 47). Subsequent references to this work will be given in the text.
2. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, “Relation de 1’etat present de la Republique des Lettres,” in Samtliche Schriften und Briefe, herausgegaben Preussischen Akademie derWissenschaften, vierte Reihe, Politische Schriften, erster Band, 1667–1676 (Darmstadt: Otto ReichlVerlag, 1931), 568.
3. Voltaire, Letters concerning the English Nation, “A New Edition” [trans. John Lockman] (London: J. and R. Tonson, 1767), 83–84 (letter 14). Subsequent references to this work will be given in the text.
4. Friedrich Klopstock, Die deutsche Gelehrtenrepublik (1774), quoted in Daston, “The Ideal and Reality of the Republic of Letters,” 373 (see chap. 2, n. 3).
5. D’Alembert, Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia, 88–89 (see chap. 2, n. 66). While acknowledging the use the Encyclopedists have made of Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopedia or an Universal Dictionary ofArts and Sciences (1728), d’Alembert describes Chambers’s compilation as simply a “translation” of various French writings, and positions the project he himself is engaged in as not so much itself a translation of Chambers as a transcendence of his work (109–11). Similarly, in his discussion of the relationship between Bacon’s division of the various branches of the arts and sciences of memory, reason, and imagination, and the classificatory scheme adopted for the Encyclopédie, d’Alembert again walks a fine line between acknowledging derivation from and asserting superiority to the prior work (49–50, 76–77, 159–64). More generally, after a discussion of the achievements of Bacon, Descartes, Newton, and Locke, d’Alembert writes: “We may conclude from all this history that England is indebted to us for the origins of that philosophy which we have since received back from her” (85)—as though the question of national indebtedness were precisely what was at stake in his historical retrospective.