JeanJacques Rousseau Restless Genius Author:Leo Damrosch 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 b... more »eautifully 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 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 prople who knew him help create an accessible, vivid portrait of a questing man whose strangeness—as punishing and punished lover, difficult employee, and father who famously consigned his children to foundling homes—does not go away. This, the first single-volume biography of Rousseau in English, and the first to treat the final ten years of his life, is as masterfully written as it is definitive.« less