Diderot, Rousseau and the Politics of the Arts in the Enlightenment

Gerardo Tocchini’s Diderot, Rousseau and the Politics of the Arts in the Enlightenment is a recent contribution by the Voltaire Foundation of the University of Oxford to a rising field of interdisciplinary scholarship that focuses on the integral importance of the arts to evolving concepts of civil governance forged over the course of the Enlightenment. Aimed at redressing increased theoretical and formalist emphasis in art historical discourse that arose during the nineteenth century, Tocchini’s project investigates eighteenth-century artistic expression in France through the writings of its philosophe-literati for evidence of veiled and often not-so-veiled political commentary. Anchored by Denis Diderot’s writings on the arts, especially entries for the Encyclopédie that he edited with Jean-Baptiste D’Alembert between 1713–1759 and his critiques of the biennial art exhibitions presented by the French Académie royale de l’art et de sculpture collected in Salons, the book sets out to reposition Diderot’s writings in areas...