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Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius

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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.

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.

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.

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".

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.

This biography captures the curious development of J.J. Rousseau. It is far less successful explaining the importance or lack of importance of Rousseau's personal events and experiences toward written, especially non-fiction, works. I would be willing to argue Damrosch's resistance toward psychologizing is a strength. However, this book lacks any penetrating analysis of Rousseau's written work of non-fiction.

The strength of this biography is learning the relationships of Rousseau; the tragedy of his many failed romances and friendships. It is a most enjoyable read, but presumes a familiarity (disinterest or indifference) to Rousseau writings.

In the three paragraph book sleeve description we are told "Leo Damroach beautifully mines Rousseau's books." This is quite misleading. Damroach offers very little commentary on Rousseau's books and when he does it rather shallow. I suspect this is not because of Damroach's lack of ability, but rather a lack of intent. Damraoch's intent seems to be on the personal and political experiences of Rouasseau. To put it a little different this is a personal biography much more than an intellectual biography. Damroach only get to Rousseau's first discourse (an essay on whether science and arts have progressed humanity) in chapter 12, more than 200 pages into the book. "Emile" and "Social Contract" share a mere 30 page chapter.

Domroach's academic "mining" is not as much in Rousseau's "books" as much as it is Rousseau's personal correspondence. It is here that is the real strength of this biography. It is a safely written, well documented, description of Rousseau's personal life and political struggles.

In spite of the false advertizing on the book sleeve, I very much enjoyed this book, finding myself inspired by Rousseau's perseverance from each personal and political setback. Damroach's writing is very engaging and lively, although the book is in need of better editing.

Damroach is quite successful in demonstrating how Rousseau's life experiences overtly appear and shape his novel "Julie" and offers penetrating commentary on Rousseau's "Confessions."

For me this book confirmed my experience as an educator, namely genius is quite common and (a rigid or rote) formal schooling may not be the best way to nurture our potentialities. Rousseau himself had no formal education and seemed to have resisted it. Rather it was Rousseau's self-education, in junction with some very important relationships and friendships which allowed for his genius to flourish. Curiously Rousseau experience as tutor was all but a failure. In other words not even his students seemed to benefit much from Rousseau's personal construction of a formal instruction.

Rousseau is a towering figure who deserves careful study. We can learn from his written work and his personal development and achievements. Domroach's biography is a very good book for the latter.

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.

I selected this because of its National Book Award recognition. The winners and nominees I've read have all been good and this one did not disappoint. I mention this to say that you don't need a background in Rousseau or French history to understand and enjoy this book. Leo Damrosch provides a solid background and so that his analysis is easily accessible.

The book explains how Rousseau's life informs his writing. Rousseau's years alone, his highly charged emotions, his co-dependence and later co-dependent, Therese, shaped his views on power, government, economic dependence, and raising children.

As with so many thinkers of his time, he cannot see women as equals. His neediness, exemplified in both his son to parent relationship with Mme de Warens and that of sister/housekeeper/lover/wife Therese show that while he can break the mold in so much other thinking, an equal role for women is a bridge too far.

Damrosch documents the influence of Emile and how far it extended and credits the The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete as the first autobiography (a concept new in an of itself) to explore an inner life. He spends considerably less time on the most famous work, the The Social Contract and Discourses.

This book joins Rousseau's life story with past and present interpretations of his work and the changing acceptance of his ideas in his time and ours. I highly recommend it.

Until Damros published this 2005 National Book Award finalist, there has not been a good single-volume biography of Rousseau in the English language. This is because Rousseau's own auto-biography, "Confessions" (1782), is so well done and the number of sources for Rousseau's first 40 years are otherwise so weak, that writing a new biography is mostly a retelling of what Rousseau has already said. The strength of Damros' biography is to summarize Rousseau's life, his evolving thinking and his major works, including historical significance and context, while weaving in some of the best scholarship available after two centuries of reflection.

His personality can best be describe as immature and "sharp at the edges". He either loved a person with all his heart, or hated them as his worst enemy. Usually, it started with the former and ended with the later, fueled by his paranoia and over-active imagination. These are traits one normally sees in a child, a black and white world view of love and hate unable to deal with the ambiguities of human weaknesses - which makes sense given Rousseau's brilliant genius combined with his abusive child-hood; lacking a mother he needed to trust someone, but at the same time could trust no one because of his abusive past. This fueled his desire for self-sufficiency and subsequent rejection of dependent relationships - thus he was naturally conflicted in an 18th C French society which was based on hierarchies of dependencies, where everyone was either the master of someone, or mastered by someone (and usually both)--Rousseau found a way to both live and preach an isolated life of self-sufficiency and inward reflection, hallmarks of the modern man. The master of no one, mastered by no one, and completely isolated from everyone. All of this is directly reflected in his works and ideas, so it is possible to fully understand Rousseau's works by understanding Rousseau the person - this biography paints the full portrait and answers many questions.

Damrosch's biography of Rousseau is a fine piece of work--complete, readable and attentive to nuance and detail. It is said that a successful biography requires a sympathetic writer, one who respects and, hopefully, reveres his subject. This is not easy for the biographer of Rousseau, who was notoriously difficult with his friends. Suspicious to the point of paranoia, he always suspects plots and betrayals. Sometimes he is available, sometimes not. Sometimes he embraces, sometimes he avoids.

Rousseau's first play was entitled Narcissus, or the Self-Lover, a subject that evokes no surprises from those familiar with his life and thought. A palpitating mass of feelings, with tears flooding from his eyes, he was, nevertheless, an extremely influential writer (for good or ill).

Damrosch calls him a `restless genius' and that is as positive as Rousseau probably deserves. His life was far less eventful than the intellectual and cultural currents which flowed from his writings, but he felt its moments more deeply than anyone might reasonably expect and built a career on them.

The book is a pleasure to read and it includes both contemporary illustrations and photographs taken by the author. The annotation is full, but done with a light hand so as not to impede the reader. My sole disappointment was the brief attention given to Rousseau's works. They are located within the scenes of his life and they are very briefly summarized but the focus of the book falls on Rousseau's life, not his thought and not his writings. The reader who wishes more information on the latter will have to seek it elsewhere, though the rudiments are spelled out here.

This is a serious biography that will be useful to scholars but accessible for the general reader.