Word: alembert
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...intrigue and malevolence. "One could lay a wager that half the court could hardly read, and I would be surprised if more than a third could write," noted Catherine, who was soon wading through the classics of courtcraft (Tacitus, Plutarch, Montesquieu) and such French philosophers as Voltaire, D'Alembert and Diderot. To Encyclopedist Diderot, after her accession, she once wrote: "You philosophers are lucky men. You write on paper, and paper is patient. Unfortunate Empress that I am, I write on the susceptible skins of living beings...
Author Haraszti has culled Adams' choicest comments and neatly arranged them in the form of dialogues. In this play of intellects, Adams clashed most frequently with the French philosophers, e.g., Rousseau, Voltaire, D'Alembert, Condorcet and their disciples. Adams reveals himself as one of the greatest conservatives who ever helped to make a revolution. Sample dialogue between Adams and Mary Wollstonecraft, mother-in-law of Percy Bysshe Shelley, an ardent feminist, and author of an urgent work entitled Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution...
...Alembert wrote on mathematics, Turgot on economics, Quesnay on agriculture, Buffon on nature, Rousseau on music, and Montesquieu on taste. Diderot himself wrote on everything from intolerance and Spinoza to anagrams and onomancy-the "science" of telling a man's fortune by the letters in his name. He treated topics that intellectuals had been apt to ignore before. He spent hours studying iron foundries and gunpowder mills at first hand, imported workers from the factories of Lyons to help him with an article on the velvet trade...