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Overview
The extraordinary life of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the eighteenth-century literary genius who changed the course of history, traced with novelistic verve.
Motherless child, failed apprentice, autodidact, impossibly odd lover, Jean-Jacques Rousseau burst unexpectedly onto the eighteenth-century scene as a literary provocateur whose works electrified readers from the start. Rousseau’s impact on American social and political thought remains deep, wide, and, to some, even infuriating.
Leo Damrosch beautifully mines Rousseau’s books—The Social Contract, one of the greatest works on political theory and a direct influence on the French and American revolutions; Emile, a groundbreaking treatise on education; and the Confessions, which created the genre of introspective autobiography—as works still uncannily alive and provocative to us today.
Damrosch’s triumph is to integrate the story of Rousseau’s extraordinarily original writings with the tumultuous life that produced them. Rousseau’s own words and those of people who knew him help create an accessible, vivid portrait of a questing man whose strangeness—as punishing and punished lover, difficult friend, and father who famously consigned his infant children to a foundling home—still fascinates. This, the first single-volume biography of Rousseau in English, is as masterfully written as it is definitive.
Leo Damrosch is the Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature at Harvard University. He has written widely on eighteenth-century writers.
Praise for Jean-Jacques Rousseau
"Leo Damrosch's vivid biography enables us to plunge deeply into Rousseau's singular life, conjure up its crucial encounters, retrace its twisting paths, and supplement Rousseau's own claims about himself with the detailed, often contradictory testimony of the contemporaries he so unsettled and inspired."—Stephen Greenblatt, author of Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare
"These pages bring to life the Europe of the ancien regime, a desiccated, sybaritic, superstitious, oppressive world about to be terribly and fatally convulsed. And they also bring to astonishing life a great agent of that convulsion, an impossible man whose books helped to make modern life possible. Leo Damrosch not only helps us understand Rousseau, his loves and his hates, his genius and his foolishness. He makes us see Rousseau. And, as he shows again and again in this immensely enjoyable and fast-paced story, that is Rousseau’s special and permanent fascination—because when we see him, we are seeing ourselves."—Louis Menand, author of The Metaphysical Club and American Studies
Synopsis
The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau burst unexpectedly onto the eighteenth-century literary scene as a provocateur whose works electrified readers. An autodidact who had not written anything of significance by age thirty, Rousseau seemed an unlikely candidate to become one of the most influential thinkers in history. Yet the power of his ideas is felt to this day in our political and social lives.
In a masterly and definitive biography, Leo Damrosch traces the extraordinary life of Rousseau with novelistic verve. He presents Rousseau's books -- The Social Contract, one of the greatest works on political theory; Emile, a groundbreaking treatise on education; and the Confessions, which created the genre of introspective autobiography -- as works uncannily alive and provocative even today. Jean-Jacques Rousseau offers a vivid portrait of the visionary’s tumultuous life.
The New York Times - Stacey Schiff
There is no adequate way to explain how a man born in chains became so free. In this case the reader is in no position to complain, however. Rousseau pioneered the concept that ideas fell out of experience, and the erratic, inventive urgency of the life is all here. A delight to read, Damrosch comes as close to Rousseau's authentic self as we are likely to get.
Editorials
Stacey Schiff
There is no adequate way to explain how a man born in chains became so free. In this case the reader is in no position to complain, however. Rousseau pioneered the concept that ideas fell out of experience, and the erratic, inventive urgency of the life is all here. A delight to read, Damrosch comes as close to Rousseau's authentic self as we are likely to get.— The New York Times
Publishers Weekly
Considering Rousseau's prominence and historical importance, it is surprising to discover that (according to the publisher) this is the first single-volume biography in English. Damrosch, a professor of literature at Harvard University, has succeeded in presenting an incisive, accessible and sensitive portrait of this unpleasant, infuriating "restless genius." Sometimes, indeed, perhaps a little too sensitive: Damrosch's admiration can prevent his strongly condemning where condemnation is due. Rousseau (1712-1778) was the man, we should recall, who consigned his own infants to a foundling home, who sent a miserably small sum of money to his ailing former patroness and who bought an adolescent girl for nefarious purposes. Where Damrosch truly excels is in not only masterfully explaining the originality and meaning of mile, The Social Contract and the Confessions, but in relating those works to their author's conflicted, contradictory psyche. As Rousseau himself admitted, "I would rather be a man of paradoxes than a man of prejudices." Also, in vividly delineating the sage's final decade for the first time, Damrosch has performed a signal service: Maurice Cranston, who was writing a three-volume biography, died before completing the last part-thereby leaving readers in the dark as to Rousseau's fate. No longer. 43 b&w illus. Agent, Tina Bennett. (Nov. 1) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.Library Journal
Damrosch (literature, Harvard Univ.; Samuel Johnson and the Tragic Sense) relates the life and works of the 18th-century man who so uncannily prefigured the modern mind. While interweaving Rousseau's own writing, which traversed philosophy, politics, fiction, educational theory, music, and more, Damrosch focuses on his subject's life, imbued by dramatic moments of encounter, departure, and epiphany (some known only from his autobiographical Confessions). There is the 16-year-old's decision to turn his back on Geneva, the meeting and new life with Madame de Warens, the inspired self-teaching, the volatile flirtations and friendships, and the dramatic flights from persecution for publishing "dangerous" works. Over 40 illustrations, plus a time line, will enhance the reader's enjoyment. Raymond Trousson's biography of Rousseau is yet to be translated into English; the most recent biography in English is Maurice Cranston's three-volume study, its attention to Rousseau's final years curtailed by Cranston's death. Damrosch collegially offers tasty quotes from these and other sources (all well documented). His greatest accomplishment may be that he will entice nonspecialists to turn to Rousseau and his world and undertake further study for themselves. Highly recommended for public and undergraduate libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 7/05.]-Margaret Heilbrun, Library Journal Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.Kirkus Reviews
Thoroughgoing life of the often disagreeable, uncharismatic and world-transformative philosopher, he of "Mankind is born free and is everywhere in chains" renown. The French edition of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's complete published works runs to 10,000 pages, though Rousseau, characteristically, wished late in life that he had not written a word. As Damrosch (Literature/Harvard Univ.) shows, anyone who had known young Rousseau would not have bet on his becoming world-famous in his own lifetime. Rousseau, Damrosch writes, was the motherless son of a Geneva watchmaker-no disqualification, for, as an 18th-century thinker noted, the artisans of the city "were fond of reading the works of Locke and Montesquieu" and were in many instances thoroughly radicalized. Rousseau's father spirited away a good bit of the inheritance that was supposed to one day be the son's, and when he remarried, Jean-Jacques presciently went out the door to seek his fortune on his own. He proved a poor apprentice though a sometimes helpful servant, and he insinuated himself in a few noble households while pondering what to do next, one observer volunteering that the best he could aspire to was "becoming a village priest." Rousseau chose another path, devouring a few libraries with the hungriness and half-method of an autodidact, then unleashing a torrent of words on the world of the dawning Enlightenment. One of the chief virtues of Damrosch's always virtuous biography-apart from accounting for Rousseau's late, little-studied years-is his close reading of Rousseau's oeuvre, from minor prose poems to major treatises such as emile and The Social Contract, which reconciles the events of his subject's never easy life with theoften contradictory ideas he came to espouse about such things as the noble savage and social equality, for which he is still remembered. A vigorous, lucid biography of perhaps the most influential thinker of his day, with plenty of juicy gossip about his extracurricular life.From the Publisher
"These pages...bring to astonishing life...an impossible man whose books made modern life possible....Immensely enjoyable and fast-paced."—Louis Menand, author of The Metaphysical Club and American Studies"An incisive, accessible, and sensitive portrait . . . Damrosch has performed a signal service." Publishers Weekly
"The erratic, inventive urgency of the life is all here. A delight to read."—Stacy Schiff The New York Times Book Review