Publisher's Synopsis
The second part of Maurice Cranston's biography of Rousseau. The volume completes and corrects the story told in Rousseau's "Confessions", and offers a history of his most eventful and productive years.;It describes how Rousseau's renunciation of fortune is followed by prodigious literary fame, how his writing of "La Nouvelle Heloise" is intertwined with his most tumultuous love affair, how quarrels and intrigues end his friendships with Voltaire, Diderot and other philosophers of the Enlightenment while intimacy with the "noblesse de race" encourages his resistance to bourgeois conventionality; how his unorthodox defence of religion in "Emile" provokes the hostility of believers and unbelievers alike; and how his idealization of the republican constitution of Geneva in "The Social Contract" is rewarded with a warrant for his arrest.;Maurice Cranston, former president of the Institut International de Philosophie Politique, has taught political science at the London School of Economics since 1959. He has written a biography of John Locke and two translations of Rousseau's works, "The Social Contract" and "A Discourse on Inequality".
