Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.19 (632 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0618872027 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 576 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2015-04-17 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
. No longer. 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. All rights reserved. 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. 43 b&w illus. Where Damrosch truly excels is in not only masterfully explaining the originality and meaning of Émile, The Social Contract and the Confessions, but in relating those works to their author's conflicted, contradictory psyche. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a
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. 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. The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau burst unexpectedly onto the eighteenth-century literary scene as a provocateur whose works electrified readers. 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. Jean-Jacques Rousseau o
It took me too long to find this book. anonymous It took me too long to find this book. Being a devotee of Voltaire for many years while also devoted to the history and literature of 18th century France, I simply brushed aside the criticism of Rousseau by his contemporaries. A fault of mine to do so before investigation. This book has given me the full picture of the “Enlightenment” and now equipped with both sides of . 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 ar. Philosophy rooted in personality It is no disrespect to a biographer of Rousseau to say that his task is made considerably easier by the fact that his subject had himself, in his fifties, written such a vivid and amazingly self-revealing autobiography, the famous Confessions. Especially as far as the first half of Rousseau's life are concerned, the main task of the biographer is to recount a story that has already