Ghostwriting and Collective Authorship in the Enlightenment: Denis Diderot, d'Holbach's Coterie, and the Problem of Authorship in Raynal's Histoire des deux Indes

Abstract

In recent decades, researchers have developed enormous interest in both Denis Diderot and Guillaume-Thomas Raynal’s major historiographical work, the Histoire des deux Indes (HDI). Scholars have especially emphasised the importance of Diderot’s role as a ghostwriter, claiming that he has written large parts of the HDI. However, this article demonstrates that scholarship must reject almost all previous attributions of HDI fragments to Diderot. It reaches this conclusion through two distinct methods: source criticism and computational stylometric analysis. The picture that emerges is of a collective work involving many contributors. The HDI was likely the product of a collective – d’Holbach’s coterie, – in which Diderot likely played a subordinate role. D’Holbach might have written a substantial share of the fragments typically attributed to Diderot