Rousseau (Volume 1 and 2)

A two-volume biography follows the subject from youth through formative apprenticeships and wanderings, his relations with key women patrons and domestic tensions, his literary breakthroughs (the Discourses, a sentimental novel, an educational treatise, and a theory of the social contract), his experiments in music, and his quarrels and persecutions among contemporaries. The narrative interleaves personal temperament and episodes of exile with sustained exposition of central ideas: the critique of civilisation, the notion of natural man, the primacy of sentiment and education, and tensions between private life and public controversy.