Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius

“This is a one-volume biography by Leo Damrosch. It’s quite racily-written, very readable. There are other biographies of Rousseau, some of them very scholarly…Rousseau was a biographer of himself, an autobiographer. The most famous of his autobiographical writings is the Confessions, but there’s also Reveries of a Solitary Walker, and the famous Dialogues, where you have a very paranoid Rousseau in conversation with another character, ‘the Frenchman,’ concerning the faults of an alter ego, Jean-Jacques. So Rousseau did tell the story of his own life, but Damrosch tells it very well in English.” Read more...

The best books on Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Chris Bertram, Philosopher