Under the guise of unobjectionable, factual information, the Encyclopédie would be used to disseminate dangerous ideas. Even its very form would be subversive. Unlike other dictionaries, which listed entries by subject and piously gave precedence to topics like theology, church history, and aristocratic houses, this work would be organized strictly alphabetically—a planning nightmare in an age before computers, but a phenomenally potent method. Now all subjects would be mixed, the hierarchies of society (both socially and conceptually) toppled from the outset. Princes and pimps, counts and cabbages would be sharing the same letter, the same space. The entire map of knowledge would be redrawn.

From Philipp Blom’s A Wicked Company: The Forgotten Radicalism of the European Enlightenment, New York: Basic Books, 2010, p. 38.