Periodical Publication and the Nature of Knowledge in Eighteenth-Century Europe

Abstract

Can one truly maintain that the mere fact of publication in continuing serial form, as distinguished from any other method of collecting and disseminating information, is enough to constitute a distinct “form of knowledge?” Is this not merely confusing the container—the form of publication—with the thing contained? It would be difficult to find any specimen of eighteenth-century knowledge published in a periodical that was not also circulated at the time in letters, in printed books, and, of course, in oral discussion. There will no doubt be many who will argue that historians of ideas should put aside the question of the medium in which knowledge was communicated and concentrate on the real issue, namely, the content itself. This is the procedure we expect when we open a scholarly work with a title such as Diderot’s Metaphysics or Voltaire’s Politics: if the venue of publication of the ideas discussed in such a study is treated as an issue, it is normally only in order to determine whether censorship could be considered to have limited the expression of the author’s “true” views.