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Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Western philosophy > Modern Western philosophy, c 1600 to the present
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The Noble Savage - Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1754-1762 (Paperback, New edition)
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The Noble Savage - Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1754-1762 (Paperback, New edition)
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In this second of his projected three-volume biography of Rousseau
(Jean. Jacques, 1983), Cranston (Political Science/London School of
Economics) continues his dry and detailed reconstruction of
Rousseau's life from primary sources. Here, Cranston starts with
his subject's flight from Paris, covering his life as a guest on
prosperous country estates, the completion of his most important
work, and his escape from arrest for impiety and sedition.
Rousseau's life, as Cranston shows, illustrates the Frenchman's own
thesis - that "Man is born free but is everywhere in chains" - as
Rousseau himself was imprisoned by the contradictions in his own
personality. In Julie, or the New Heloise, Rousseau explored his
fantasies of virtuous love, while he repeatedly betrayed his
lifelong mistress and engaged in petty flirtations with married
women. Self-educated and a writer, Rousseau, in Emile, advocated a
system of education that denigrated books, and he idealized both
the tutor and the child although he abandoned his own five children
in a Paris orphanage. And, even while enjoying the patronage of an
aristocratic family in his own little chateau, he wrote the Social
Contract, attributing all social evils to the privilege he was
enjoying. For all his high-mindedness, Rousseau, Cranston
demonstrates, was the "noble savage," quarrelsome, ill-mannered,
suspicious, tyrannical, jealous, "devoured" by the need to love and
be loved, contemptuous of his patron's courtesies but easily
offended and complaining if they neglected him. While Cranston's
method may indeed "break the chain of books based on books," his
restricting himself to primary sources, avoiding interpretation or
analysis of style, psyche, milieu, even historical and social
context, severely limits the value of this biography, however
illuminating his analysis of the writings. (Kirkus Reviews)
In this second volume of the unparalleled exposition of Rousseau's
life and works, Cranston completes and corrects the story told in
Rousseau's "Confessions," and offers a vivid, entirely new history
of his most eventful and productive years.
"Luckily for us, Maurice Cranston's "The Noble Savage: Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, 1754-1762" has managed to craft a highly detailed account
of eight key years of Rousseau's life in such a way that we can
both understand and even, on occasion, sympathize."--Olivier
Bernier, "Wall Street Journal"
Maurice Cranston (1920-1993), a distinguished scholar and recipient
of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his biography of John
Locke, was professor of political science at the London School of
Economics. His numerous books include "The Romantic Movement" and
"Philosophers and Pamphleteers," and translations of Rousseau's
"The Social Contract" and "Discourse on the Origins of Inequality."
General
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