Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius

by Leo Damrosch

Book Overview

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... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0618446966
• ISBN13: 9780618446964
• Release Date: January 2005
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Length: 566 Pages
• Weight: 2.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.7" x 6.2" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Much more than just his philosophy.

This fine biography traces one of those lives that would not be credible if it were fiction. After his mother died and his father abandoned him, Rousseau wandered from place to place without receiving any formal education. He failed at just about every job he attempted. Through a course of self study, however, his genuis slowly fermented, and then, in a mind bogling 5 year period around the age of 40, produced The Social Contract plus two of the most popular and influential novels of the 17th century, Emile and Julie. The story of his life, as told by Damrosch, serves the purpose of explaining where his philosophy came from. In Damrosch's view, Rousseau's outsider status and his ability to learn on his own provided the prespective from which he could see through the assumptions of his day and emerge with a unique view of life. Damrosch does a superb job of weaving between Rousseau's life, his personality and his philosophy. My only slight criticism is that the substance of The Social Contract, the book for which he's best known today, fills just a few pages. I would have preferred more on that. Damrosch, a professor of literature, seems more at home analyzing the two novels and the later autobiography, Confessions, which he considers the first modern autobiography in which a person tries to look at his childhood and inner life to see how he became the person he became. Damrosch does a first rate job examining all aspects of Rousseau's thought as revealed in the novels and the autobiography. In short, an extremely well written biography of a both intriguing and important man.

Who is Rousseau? He is us.

I had previously read a good deal about Rousseau in general histories of the Enlightenment, and inspired by Prof. Damrosch's course for the Teaching Company, I had re-read a few of Rousseau's own works, but I was still intrigued and puzzled by his place in history and by his personality. Prof. Damrosch's book is so comprensive, insightful, and readable that my questions have now been answered to my complete satisfaction. In addition, Prof. Damrosch encourages and enables readers to compare themselves to Rousseau in terms of the unique individuality that we all share. I think that I now understand my own similarities and differences to Rousseau better than I did before. But I am not only a fellow human being but a participant in the history and culture of the modern world, which has been more profoundly affected by Rousseau than most of us realize.

The gripping legacy of a troubled genius

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was an 18th century literary writer whose works on politics had a direct influence on the French and American revolutions, whose educational analysis affected the world of schooling, and whose Confessions fostered the art of autobiography: the many facets of his original writings and influences which produced them are revealed in Leo Damrosch 's Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genuis, the first single-volume biography of Rousseau published in English for the general reader. The focus on his last decade of life - also his most productive and paranoid years - makes for the gripping legacy of a troubled genius.

A sympathetic, yet in-depth and unhedged psychological portrait

Leo Damrosch is indeed sympathetic toward Rousseau. Of course, unless he or she has an ax to grind, that goes without saying for a biographer; after all, the dead have no money to pay for their portraits to be painted in words. Damrosch portrays Monsieur Rousseau sympathetically, but, nonetheless, warts and all. Many of those warts stem from his childhood. A mother who died shortly after his birth, with a father on the outs with his in-laws and sliding downward socially and financially, were the starters for his Geneva early development. Further traumas resulted in a lifelong fetish for punishment, along with a strong revulsion to human sexuality. (Other than with his Parisian mistress of his mid-30s and onward, by the time he was 40, Rousseau was almost virginal.) At the same time, being poor, from a disrupted family with Rousseau eventually fobbed off by his father, he did not have much of a chance for formal intellectual development. Nor did he shine in any early apprenticeship. (Beyond Rousseau's well-known aversion to outwardly imposed discipline, Damrosch suspects he might have had dyslexia.) But, from this, he was eventually (like a Swiss-French Abraham Lincoln) able to fulfill his drive toward greatness in learning and practical philosophical thinking. Damrosch goes on to portray how he stood his ground against Diderot, Voltaire and others, often at great personal sacrifice and picking up more warts and flaws along the way. The author of "The Social Contract" greatly influenced our Founding Fathers. This volume makes clear why he should be a known influence for more Americans today. Some national reviewers suspect that this sympathy gets too much in the way of a neutral portrait. One example some people might cite is Damrosch's wondering whether Rousseau actually committed five childen by his Paris mistress to a foundling home, noting that Rousseau himeself, while mentioning five children once, only goes into any detail -- brief as it is -- about one, the first. (And perhaps his hang-ups about sexuality may lend some credence to this.) No matter; Damrosch still points out the contractions between this and Rousseau later establishing himself as a child-rearing expert. Nor does Damrosch overlook Rousseau's other failings, such as not giving his juvenile benefactor, Mme de Warens, a promised full share of his inheritance. Some of these failings do come out in his Confessions, his greatest work. Augustine may have invented the genre of biography with his own Confessiona; however, Rousseau invented the modern genre, with its psychologizing and self-analysis in a way that an Augustine could never even have understood. Perhaps that is part of why Rousseau has been handled with tongs -- or with hammers -- by many of the more conservative elements of American intelligentsia. (Note the claim that he is the intellectual forefather of Freud, Marx and Nietzsche.) First, that's not entirely true; second, to the degree it is true, he's not t

Wonderful!

Having read Damrosch's Fictions of Reality in the Age of Hume and Johnson, I find this text to be an easier read, but no less brilliant. He is on the money 99.9% of the time in this book, and that 0.1% I'll set aside as Rousseau's "quirkiness".