But the great sociologist Robert Nisbet rose to the challenge and produced a philosophical dictionary, with the saucy title Prejudices, that was infinitely more charming and enlightening than its French model. The project petered out rather quickly, presumably because there turned out to be so few scholars around who had the breadth and wit to write such a book.

Editors’ note: The following is an edited version of remarks delivered for The New Criterion ’s fifth annual Circle Lecture on September 28, 2023.ī ack in the 1980s, an editor at Harvard University Press had the bright idea of asking some of the leading lights of the day to write their own version of a philosophical dictionary, modeled on Voltaire’s Dictionnaire philo­sophique (1764).