Towards the end of his life, after he had completed his editorial labours for the Encyclopédic, Diderot wrote extensively about politics. Some of his earlier writings on the subject, though influential, were unoriginal; much of his later work was unpublished in his lifetime. Our selection of texts has been formed from those which were the most important when they appeared, or which give the fullest treatment of his political thought. The first category includes his articles for the Encyclopédie and his contributions to the Histoire des Deux Indes, works which were widely circulated and attracted much attention. The second category includes the Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville, the most speculative of his political writings, and the Observations sur le Nakaz, his most precise, detailed and also broadest discussion of contemporary issues.

Any selection of course entails omission, and ours does scant justice to the range of Diderot's literary styles and skills, for instance the conversational tone of his Mémoires pour Catherine II or the polemical quality of the Apologie de l'abbé Galiani, a defence of Galiani's critiqueof the physiocrats. If Diderot's forceful attack against the despotism of Frederick II in his Pages contre un tyran has its counterpart in the Histoiredes Deux Indes, nothing in our selection can capture the idiosyncratic flavour of his last work, the Essai sur les règnes de Claude et de Néron (1782), largely devoted to Seneca, but interspersed with reflections on the role of the philosophe in times of oppression and a final volley in the protracted quarrel with Rousseau.