Why would someone like Diderot, who could presumably have published a record of his own bowel movements and had at least a few people read all about it, decide not to publish a fairly amusing, often insightful text like RN, that clearly required a lot of work?

One reason might be that it's kind of a mess, which is fitting, since the Nephew himself is kind of a mess, but the other reviews on goodreads suggest that it doesn't add much to the reading experience.

Or, maybe Diderot was a bit worried about the fairly unpleasant satire of living people in his work and decided, as a good Horatian would, that it was best to restrict his satire to general types or historical figures. So this languished in the desk drawer.

Or because this was written as a response to Palissot's 'Les Philosophes,' which the internet suggests was a French 18th century version of Aristophanes' 'Clouds' only not much good... and in that case, why publish this and publicize this play that attacks you?

But I don't think either of these really explains it. I think Diderot refrained from publishing because the Nephew does a bit too well in conversation with the dialogue's quasi-stoic, rationalist, enlightenment narrator. The Nephew is a wonderfully self-satirizing creation, who sees through the silliness of polite society while also participating in it; the narrator says things like "there's one person who's exempt from playing a part in the [social] pantomime. I mean the philosopher," whom he alternately identifies with or holds up as an ideal.

But by the time he says this, the Nephew has already pointed out the similarities between the ideal philosopher and the impoverished masses, all of whom have to sit waiting for drops from the tables of the rich. And he's already broken down the philosophical appeal to 'nature' as opposed to society by pointing out that though there *are* people who "don't value riches as the most precious thing on earth," "people aren't born like that. They become like that, for it isn't to be found in nature." And if that's true, the only way one can become a philosopher is to be highly educated, that is... completely socialized out of nature. At this point the narrator refuses to continue the conversation, and asks the Nephew to talk a bit more about music--a discussion which at this time in France was, unfortunately for him, also about the contrast between 'nature' and 'artifice.'

In other words, in this dialogue Diderot uncovers all the gaps and mistakes in the 'natural' ideals of the enlightenment, and would be forced to conclude that enlightenment itself is a construct that might not have any necessary legitimating foundations. And therefore Hegel loves this piece.

But I suspect that Diderot was unwilling to go down that particular road, and only the 19th century would give us reasons for allegiance to enlightenment values that weren't based on nature or God. In short, this was utterly fascinating.

On the other hand, this translation was utterly dull. I compared a bit with the French, and even with my graduate student French-for-reading level of comprehension I could tell that Mauldon fails completely to give her readers any sense of Diderot's charming style. At one point her Nephew complains that he's "a damnably absurd kind of style, half high-class and literary, half from the gutter." You wouldn't know it from this; he sounds like he speaks translationese. Diderot's Nephew, on the other hand, has "un diable de ramage saugrenu, moitie de gens du monde et des lettres, moitie de la Halle," if you'll excuse my lack of accents.

So there's room for a new translation, and anyone interested in the project of enlightenment should take this text to heart enough that they want to translate parts of it, at least. ( )