Page "Age of Enlightenment" Paragraph 3

Similarly, in The Business of Enlightenment.

A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie 1775 – 1800, Darnton states that there is no need to further study the encyclopædia itself, as " the book has been analyzed and anthologized dozen of times: to recapitulate all the studies of its intellectual content would be redundant ".

He instead, as the title of the book suggests, examines the social conditions that brought about the production of the Encyclopédie.

This is representative of the social interpretation as a whole – an examination of the social conditions that brought about Enlightenment ideas rather than a study of the ideas themselves.