Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius [Hardcover]

Leo Damrosch (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1, 2005

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

Editorial Reviews

From 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 Émile, 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.
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From Booklist

*Starred Review* "An interesting madman" in the eyes of a contemporary critic, Jean-Jacques Rousseau tested the limits of all that his age considered sane. Indeed, Damrosch asserts that English-speaking readers need this new biography largely because Cranston's definitive three-volume work (1982, 1991, 1997) ignores the strong strain of eccentricity running throughout the life of this French genius. That eccentric strain, Damrosch shows, estranged Rousseau both from the defenders of the ancien regime and from the rising generation of freethinking philosophers. Readers, therefore, see the same man horrifying aristocrats with the secular and democratic principles of his Social Contract and infuriating Enlightenment progressives with the moral pieties of his Letter to D'Alembert. Damrosch acknowledges that Rousseau cleared the ground for the orthodoxies erected by Freud and Marx, but he adduces considerable evidence that Rousseau himself never lived by any consistent body of doctrines. A gifted Harvard scholar, Damrosch translates revealing excerpts from letters, memoirs, and (of course) the infamous Confessions to show just how often Rousseau's public writings reflected erratic private impulses and not the rigor of rational logic. It was these unpredictable and wavering impulses that made Rousseau the father of five children that he abandoned at foundling homes and the author of numerous books that he subsequently could not even understand and regretted having written. A compelling portrait of a vagrant titan. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 576 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (November 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0618446966
• ISBN-13: 978-0618446964
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #469,202 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

For photos and information about all of my books, particularly "Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius" (National Book Award finalist in nonfiction, 2005) and "Tocqueville's Discovery of America" (2010), please visit my web site:

leodamrosch.com

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Much more than just his philosophy., July 18, 2006

By 

jjo (Chicago, Illinois United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius (Hardcover)

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.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Philosophy rooted in personality, February 18, 2006

By 

Ralph Blumenau (London United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius (Hardcover)

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 been written, correcting the occasional misremembering or misrepresentation, and to comment upon it. Damrosch's own writing always reads pleasantly and easily, and he also alerts us in advance to how Rousseau's descriptions of his own childhood and adolescence would inform later writings, like Julie (1761) and Émile (1762), and how much his youthful resentment about the way he was treated by social superiors would be the foundation for his later political theories.

For the first 37 years of his life, Rousseau had not revealed himself as the genius in the subtitle, though he was certainly restless: constantly on the move physically and psychologically highly labile. One wonders, in fact, how interested one would be in those 37 years if he had not shown himself a genius thereafter. I for one became a little impatient that as much as 2/5th of this long book is devoted to this early period, which by itself is not all that interesting, in which there are a lot of trivial incidents and in which we are told more about Rousseau's marginal acquaintances than perhaps we want to know. True, there emerges a good picture of the aristocratic segments of society which took Rousseau up and in which he moved with an understandable touchiness about his own status; and we also learn, for example, that Rousseau's behaviour in placing his five children to a Foundling's Hospital as soon as they were born (not left on the doorstep, a story later spread maliciously by Voltaire) was not as unusual in those days as one might think: more than a quarter of all newborn babies in Paris were abandoned in this way. Most of them were illegitimate, as Rousseau's were, and some of them, like Rousseau's later friend d'Alembert, were the illegitimate children of aristocrats.

To me the book became really interesting when Rousseau made his break-through into real originality, and from that point onwards it gains immensely in power. Damrosch's analysis of Rousseau's writings is excellent. It does several things: it explains the ideas clearly and succinctly; it shows their originality at the time and the way they have influenced later thought, and it invariably links the ideas up with Rousseau's psychology. In this respect Damrosch goes against some literary theorists who insist that one should read texts as if one knew nothing about the lives of their authors; but many of Rousseau's books deliberately reflect his personal experiences in such a thinly disguised form that such arid theories are even more than usually inappropriate. Outstanding, I think, is the analysis, near the end of the book, of the Confessions, and I was particularly taken with his comparisons between Rousseau's autobiography and the autobiographical writings of his contemporaries, Voltaire, Diderot, Hume, Gibbon, and Benjamin Franklin. (Damrosch is an American professor, and he comments: "Contemporary American culture talks the Rousseau line but lives the Franklin life").

Damrosch's account of Rousseau's emotional, prickly and suffering personality amply bears out David Hume's famous judgment: "He has only felt, during the whole course of his life; and in this respect his sensibility rises to a pitch beyond what I have seen any example of, but it still gives him a more acute feeling of pain than of pleasure. He is like a man who were stript not only of his clothes but of his skin, and turned out in that situation to combat with the rude and boisterous elements, such as perpetually disturb this lower world."

The book is attractively illustrated with contemporary engravings and portraits and with photographs of places where Rousseau lived.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A sympathetic, yet in-depth and unhedged psychological portrait, January 4, 2006

By 

S. J. Snyder "De gustibus non disputandum" (Various, United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius (Hardcover)

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 their only forebearer; and third, what if he is? (Besides, he's really better seen as the forefather of French existentialism, above all, Camus.)

Rousseau deserves to be read and understood on his own, and Damrosch lets us do that.