« La comparaison des phénomènes s’appelle Philosophie » : Comparer l’Encyclopédie grâce à l’intelligence artificielle

This article examines the relevance of comparison in the history of ideas through the case of Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie and its relationship to eighteenth-century political economy. By confronting the Encyclopédie with Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws, it shows how contributors – particularly Jaucourt – appropriated and transformed Montesquieu’s arguments, especially on slavery. The use of artificial intelligence tools, based on the detection of textual borrowings, makes it possible to systematically identify these references and to measure the variations they undergo. This approach highlights both the role of the Encyclopédie in the economic and political debates of its time, and the methodological challenges raised by digital humanities, as well as the theoretical issues involved in understanding texts within the polemical literary space of the Republic of Letters.