Setting the world to rights

Wicked Company is the collective biography of a group of men with little in common, apart from a generalised dissatisfaction with the state of the world around them. Perhaps that is true of most intellectual coteries. The kings of the Parisian Enlightenment of the 18th century were the mathematician Jean d’Alembert and the playwright and journalist Denis Diderot, joint editors of the great Encyclopédie. Their work brought them into contact with a remarkable group of men, who populate the pages of Philipp Blom’s quirky and original book: the economist and journalist Raynal, who never quite shook off his Jesuit origins; the mass of obscurer contributors to the Encyclopédie; the moody and quarrelsome romantic Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who rejected many of their fundamental values; the occasional outsiders like the Scots David Hume and Adam Smith, who were more considerable philosophers than any of them; and Voltaire, a distant and malevolent presence, living in exile in Switzerland, the author of many pungent letters and pamphlets but no serious intellectual work.