Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius (Hardcover)

by Leo Damrosch (Author)
Key Phrases: copying music, Mme de Warens, Isaac Rousseau, Les Charmettes (more...)

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 The Washington Post
The thinkers who matter are those whom the world can't agree about, and usually the more a writer, philosopher or artist polarizes opinion, the better for all of us. In modern times probably no genius of the Western world still ignites such passionate controversy as Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). Only Marx, Nietzsche and Freud -- in many ways, his successors -- come even close.

Why is this? Because Rousseau blew up the edifice of 2,500 years of classical and Christian thought about the fundamental nature of the soul and society. Until Rousseau, nearly everyone agreed that humanity was by nature sinful and vicious, and that the state, religion and other social structures imposed a needed order on our conduct. Without higher authority to moderate passions, men and women would spend their short, nasty and brutish lives like jungle beasts. From religion and education, we learn self-control and the ways of righteousness; from the laws and customs of society, we are shaped into good and useful citizens.

Not so, said this political visionary: "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains." Our natural impulses are healthy and good; it is society that makes us wicked. Where once we lived in harmony with ourselves and with the world around us, now we dwell in a snake pit of appearance and inauthenticity, of competitiveness and conspicuous consumption, of inequality, prejudice and pervasive baseness. Our institutions and governments disfigure and corrupt everything they touch. We long for happiness, without recognizing that it is the system we live under that taints our souls and leaves us alienated, despairing and hungry for something we cannot even name.

How did we go so wrong? In the myth or thought experiment that Rousseau offers in his discourse On the Origin of Inequality (1755), he concludes that the serpent in the garden was nothing less than Reason. When people lived unmediated existences in accord with Nature and themselves, when they dwelt like Peter Pan in a perpetual present, they found life simple, fulfilling and harmonious. But on some evil day, one man began to compare himself with another. This led to reflection, self-awareness and eventually competitiveness, then to specialization and a division of labor to maximize individual strengths and weaknesses, and before long the floodgates were opened to envy, accumulation and excess. The clever soon exploited their fellows, stockpiled provisions and gained superfluous wealth -- and these inevitably needed to be protected by guards, by armies, by laws and statutes. And so paradise was lost.

And lost forever. Rousseau says there's no real going back. Recorded history is essentially the story of our degradation. But we can and should still strive to ameliorate inequities; we just might establish kindlier small city-states (he thought of Geneva and Corsica) where governmental regulation could be minimized and civic life made human-scaled, but, most of all, we can liberate ourselves.

Rousseau's contemporary, the arch-conservative Edmund Burke, labeled him "the Socrates of the National Assembly" (that is, of the hated French Revolution). Come the 20th century, this radical thinker had grown into the great beast of all who revere traditional institutions, worship in established churches and either fear or exploit the common man. Yet no one, of whatever political or philosophical persuasion, would deny how deeply Rousseau's sensibility pervades the past 250 years, from the poetry of the Romantics ("One impulse from a vernal wood/ May teach you more of man . . . ") to the slogans, pop songs and lifestyles of the 1960s: Drop out, "Let it be," back to Nature, hippies, communes, self-realization. Yet Rousseauian ideals also lie behind our unabated, unassuaged longings to live more humanely in a bureaucratic, technological and often unjust world. Even the staunchest meritocrat or most self-satisfied scion of inherited wealth must find it hard to discount the truth of the discourse on inequality's final ringing lines: "It is manifestly against the Law of Nature . . . that a handful of men wallow in luxury, while the famished multitudes lack the necessities of life."

Such thrilling emotional language has always contributed to Rousseau's powerful appeal. Contrary to a widespread misconception, many philosophers have also been superb prose stylists -- just think of Plato, Hume or William James -- but this largely self-educated former valet may be the finest of all. Rousseau actually had to beg his readers to disregard his "beau style" and just pay attention to his ideas. But this is impossible. His sentences are musical and absolutely limpid, at once classically balanced yet intimate, oracular and confessional. One is simply swept along, no matter what the subject.

So when Rousseau decided to write about two highly moral lovers, the result was Julie, or The New Heloise (1761), the most popular novel of the 18th century. When he published Emile, or On Education (1762), a Utopian pedagogical treatise, mothers turned it into a bible of child-rearing. (For instance, largely because of Rousseau, upper-class women began to breast-feed, rather than wet-nurse, their children.) And when Jean-Jacques finally decided to relate the story of his own checkered past, his Confessions (1782) established the modern autobiography and, to this day, remains the genre's unsurpassed and supreme achievement.

Yet self-revelation, no matter how sincere the pact to tell the whole truth and nothing but, always possesses a strategy, even an agenda. In his Confessions Rousseau hopes to justify his life against detractors and critics by confessing embarrassing intimacies -- for example, his painful need to constantly urinate -- and owning up to his most shameful memories, in particular the incrimination of an innocent servant girl for a theft he himself committed and the abandonment of his newborn children at foundling hospitals. But this public laceration serves a purpose: Before the judgment of God, can any of his readers maintain that their lives were any better? The Confessions is, at heart, an apologia.

Which is why Leo Damrosch's deeply informed biography is so welcome. Even if one knows Rousseau's extensive writing about himself -- and this includes that series of exquisite late prose-poems, the Reveries of the Solitary Walker (written in 1776) -- there is still a need for distance and for perspective, for the integration of the works with the life and the life with the times. Damrosch is an academic -- a professor of 18th-century literature at Harvard -- but he nonetheless writes for ordinary readers, with clarity, a light touch and immense zest.

Just a precis of Rousseau's life shows how remarkable he truly was, especially against the backdrop of ancien regime Europe. Born in Geneva in 1712, Rousseau was brought up by his watchmaker father, his mother having died in childbirth. At the age of 12, he was apprenticed to an engraver, soon ran away and eventually ended up hiking through much of Switzerland, northern Italy and parts of France. Along the way he encountered, like any picaresque hero, beautiful ladies, con artists, kindly priests, disdainful aristocrats. But early on he fell under the spell of a Madame de Warens, whom he called Maman and who subsequently seduced him, rather to his dismay: He says it felt like incest. Only in his thirties did Rousseau finally settle in Paris, at first aiming for a career as a musician. Though he was largely self-taught in composition (as in everything else), his opera "Le Devin du Village" ("The Village Soothsayer," 1752) proved an unexpected success (and is still staged today).

In Paris he met Therese Levasseur, a nearly illiterate young laundress, who ended up sharing the rest of his life. Choosing to earn his way as a copyist of musical scores, he preferred such a life of simplicity to the "slavery" of patronage. But intellectually that simple life proved abundantly rich, with time to think and time to argue with close friends whose names are now among the most honored in French intellectual history: Diderot, d'Alembert, Condillac. Then one day, on a walk to Vincennes to visit the temporarily imprisoned Diderot, Rousseau happened to see an advertisement in the Mercure de France for an essay contest. He entered it with his Discourse on the Sciences and Arts (1750), won and found himself famous. He was 38, and his real career was finally beginning.

During the next dozen years, Rousseau produced all his major philosophical work, including his most famous, The Social Contract (1762), which argues what most Americans believe: that the people alone are sovereign, that they possess inalienable rights and that government exists to carry out the general will. But as the years went by, this upstart thinker inevitably quarreled with the shrewdest mind (and finest writer) in Europe -- Voltaire, bien sur -- and gradually grew apart from his old philosophe friends. He fell in love with an aristocratic lady, already married and with an established lover; and, as you would expect, things ended badly. In due course, the authorities decided to ban (and even burn) The Social Contract, so to avoid arrest Rousseau fled into exile, first to Switzerland (where his house was stoned), then to England (traveling there in the company of David Hume). He was hounded, spied upon, hunted. Yet even those with real enemies can grow paranoid, and Rousseau grew crazily suspicious of those around him. Nonetheless, he found occasional oases of tranquility in his later life and died quietly in a house near Paris provided for him by an aristocratic admirer. His last unfinished works, especially the Reveries of the Solitary Walker, show that his prose remained unsurpassed in eloquence to the very end.

But a passionate eloquence about the human heart and the human condition characterize Rousseau's writing at any point in his life. As a very young man, employed as teacher for a Lyon family, he penned a memorandum outlining his theory of pedagogy. In the middle of these proposals -- which years later found fuller exposition in Emile -- he pauses to ask himself what Damrosch calls "an altogether unexpected question that is prophetic of his entire life's work." Rousseau writes: "Nothing is more depressing than the general fate of men. And yet they feel in themselves a consuming desire to become happy, and it makes them feel at every moment that they were born to be happy. So why are they not?"

We still argue about the answer to that question. Whether you agree or disagree with Rousseau's view of man's natural goodness and the evils inherent in civilization, his is nonetheless a voice that simply won't go away. Why are we not happy? Why? Why? Damrosch's biography provides an ideal introduction to both this complex man and his troubling ideas. It is an important book, but also a provocative and exceptionally entertaining one.

Copyright 2005, The Washington Post. 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 (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #658,719 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 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 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.

9 of 9 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 500 REVIEWER)

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.

8 of 8 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	Stephen J. Snyder "Socratic Gadfly" (Lancaster, Texas United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.