Encyclopaedism, Modernism and the Classification of Geographical Knowledge

general principles, whether of morality, rationality or scientific law. The Encyclopidie sought to connect these separate knowledges and principles. Finally, because such thinking was, as I have tried to show, associated in the Encyclopidie, as elsewhere, with reform and change, it has a strong prescriptive and moralizing tone. Manifest in ideas of progress and varying notions of utility, enlightened thought was concerned with the ways in which a reforming 'ought' could be made to confront the recalcitrant 'is' of contemporary society. Associated with this moral purpose is a new vision, a new modernity which not only breaks up old and stable patterns of thought and authority but also serves as a goal for future action. This may have liberty and intellectual emancipation as a consequence but, as Horkheimer and Adorno argue in their Dialectic of enlightenment and as Foucault notes, it is no accident that 'reason' so often went hand-in-hand with restriction, restraint and with 'absolutism'. Reason and science, far from promoting liberty, can assume an absolute distinction between truth and falsity rather than accommodate tolerance of diversity. This contradiction, which I return to in the case of H G Wells' modernist World brain, should be understood within the context of enlightened claims to the virtue of pure reason.56 The enterprise is talked of both as a dictionary d'Alembert uses the term a 'Reasoned dictionary of the sciences, arts and trades' and as an encyclopaedia exhibiting the order and connection of all human knowledge. In the first term, we can see one reflection of contemporary interests in definition evident in geographical and other dictionaries advocating terminological and disciplinary precision, and the use of such knowledge by appropriate social groups. The forward-looking claims of the Encyclopidie did not come from prophetic vision of the yet-to-be French and industrial revolutions. They came rather from attempts to map the world of knowledge according to new boundaries determined by reason, to measure all human activity by rational standards and, thus, to provide a basis for rethinking the world. These texts were themselves disciplining knowledge. In the second term, we should consider this connectedness of world learning and the intent to order new knowledges encyclopaedism as 'the order and concatenation of human knowledge'57 to use Diderot and d'Alembert's terms as a profoundly modern geographical enterprise. I mean by this two things: first, the role of geographical metaphors by which the text was to be understood and used as the sum of human knowledge; and, secondly, the detailed definition and position of geography relativ to other dis iplines in that sum of knowledge. Metaph rs abound in describing or situating the Encyclopidie. In addition to the organic tree of knowledge with particular disciplin s forming the branches or even the fruit on the boughs,58 the authors saw their work as the universe of knowledge. D'A embert's ideals for the project have been considered those of the geometer, believing in a regular universe and operating with measurable axioms and p inciples. Elsewhere, e compared the formation of the text to the foundations of a great city and saw encyclopaedic order as a machine, whose parts all fit together but which can also be assembled in new ways. As a text, the crossreferenced Encyclopidie was to be an open-ended conversation amongst members of a cite scientifique.59 The Encyclopidie could, then, be interrogated, circumnavigated and mapped: 'mappe monde' is a metaphor crucial to the comprehension of their intentions given not only the parallels in contemporary enlightenment mapping projects, in France and throughout Europe, but also the idea of the text as summation of modern world knowledge. For Diderot and d'Alembert, the Encyclopidie