Content area
Full Text
The texts that follow are excerpts from two seminal documents of the Enlightenment debate about intellectual property that Carla Hesse recounts in her essay in this volume, and that Roger Chartier analyzes in detail in his contribution. The first is by Denis Diderot (1713-1784), writer, philosopher, and editor of the Encyclopedie. The second is from the pen of Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794), philosopher, mathematician, and politician executed for his Girondin sympathies during the Terror.
The two texts are a study in contrasts, not only for their contradictory positions on the key issue of authorial rights (Diderot held that authors are the natural owners of their texts, whereas Condorcet emphasized the public's interest in the widest possible dissemination of ideas), but also for their styles.
Diderot is all energy and abundance; Condorcet is poise and restraint. Diderot's torrents of language are meant to sweep opposition away, Condorcet's logic and balance to hold it in check. One is not surprised to find Condorcet conceding, with cavalier nonchalance, that "privileges" - or rights to publish, roughly equivalent to copyrights - "exist only for expressions, for sentences, not for substance or ideas," as if expression were a mere trifle, whereas for Diderot the paramount question is what property a man can own "if a work of the mind - the unique fruit of his upbringing, his studies, his evenings, his age, his researches, his observations; if his finest...