Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless GeniusThe 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. |
Contents
The Loneliness of a Gifted Child | 7 |
The End of Innocence | 25 |
I Desired a Happiness of Which I Had No Idea | 43 |
Rousseau Finds a Mother | 69 |
A Year of Wandering | 88 |
In Mamans House | 104 |
The Idyll of Les Charmettes | 125 |
Broadening Horizons Lyon and Paris | 149 |
An Affair of the Heart | 256 |
The Break with the Enlightenment | 284 |
Peace at Last and the Triumph of Julie | 306 |
Rousseau the Controversialist Émile and The Social Contract | 331 |
Exile in the Mountains | 362 |
Another Expulsion | 388 |
In a Strange Land | 403 |
The Past Relived | 434 |
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