The very idea of an Encyclopedia of Government and Politics raises important questions about the relationship between knowledge and politics. Although the concept originates from the Greek egkuklios paideia or general education, the notion of an encyclopedia in contemporary parlance invokes a far more ambitious and dangerous project. The transition from ancient to modern conception involves a shift from the classical objective of initiating the student into the modes of analysis and domains of inquiry characteristic of an educated person to the radical eighteenth-century objective of systematizing all human knowledge. Even in ancient times cultivating the intellect was acknowledged to pose a threat to established institutions, for education entails a distancing from tradition and the possibility of a sustained challenge to prevailing conventions and norms. The eighteenth-century experience of the French encyclopédistes, however, dramatically reinforced the association between the acquisition of knowledge and the threat to the status quo. When the encyclopédistes’ determination to chart the branches of human knowledge met with the recurrent efforts by church and state to censor and suppress the resulting Encyclopédie, the dynamic of liberation/subversion was irrevocably appended to the concept of knowledge. The first major effort to produce an encyclopedia thus proved itself to be a profoundly political affair.