Enjoyable read
(1 of 1 Found this Helpful)
June 25, 2009
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.
Late Bloomer
(1 of 1 Found this Helpful)
May 9, 2009
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.
Master of no one, mastered by no one
January 29, 2007
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.
Much more than just his philosophy.
(13 of 13 Found this Helpful)
July 18, 2006
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.
Dialectic of the Enlightenment
June 2, 2006
This fascinating biography gives a concise and briskly moving snapshot of one the key figures of our contested modernity, indeed, and ironically, of the Enlightenment tradition. Before Hegel mechanically codified dialectic Rousseau lived it in his embrace and intuitive grasp of contradictions that form the unity of life. Perhaps this is the reason he is often misunderstood and why a work such as The Social Contract provokes in turn its own dialectical audience. At a time when a technocractic rendition of the Enlightenment reigns as scientism Rousseau's critique, at the fount of the Romantic movement, still speaks to us. And Rousseau first grasps what Kant will make explicit in his 'critique of pure reason': the place of freedom in the mechanical Newtonian triumph, finally a triumph over man. All in all Rousseau is simply a human puzzle and this cascade through the strange incidents is superb reading.
