Richard Sennett, on page 91 of The Craftsman (2008), writes:
❇ ❇ ❇To understand this bible of craftsmanship one has to understand its author’s motives. Diderot was a poor provincial who migrated to Paris, where he talked endlessly, had too many friends, and spent other people’s money. Much of Diderot’s life was wasted in literary hackwork to pay his debts; the Encyclopedia seemed to him at first just another way to stave off his creditors. The project began as a translation into French of Ephraim Chambers’s English Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (1728), a charming and rather disorganized collection of pieces by a “virtuoso” of the sciences—a “virtuoso” meaning in the mid-eighteenth century an amateur with a lively curiosity. One trade of the literary hack consisted of feeding the curiosity of the virtuoso, providing digestible bits of information and perhaps a few well-turned phrases the virtuoso could produce as his own in polite conversation.
The prospect of translating several hundred pages of such tasty morsels quite rightly depressed a man of Diderot’s gifts. Once launched into the work, he transformed it. Chambers’s text was soon cast aside; collaborators were enlisted to provide longer and deeper entries. The Encyclopedia aimed, it is true, at the general reader rather than serving as a technical manual for practitioners. Diderot wanted to stimulate the philosopher rather than the virtuoso in his readers.
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