The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau — Complete
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~270,000 words · 1,288 passages
Cite this work
- APAJean-Jacques Rousseau. (n.d.). The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau — Complete. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/jean-jacques-rousseau/the-confessions-of-jean-jacques-rousseau-complete
- MLAJean-Jacques Rousseau. "The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau — Complete." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/jean-jacques-rousseau/the-confessions-of-jean-jacques-rousseau-complete.
- ChicagoJean-Jacques Rousseau. The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau — Complete. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/jean-jacques-rousseau/the-confessions-of-jean-jacques-rousseau-complete.
What it is about
Rousseau's autobiography, written on the promise of telling everything, including what shows him badly.
Context and history
He wrote it between 1765 and 1770 and it was not published until after his death. It has a definite occasion: Voltaire had circulated a pamphlet revealing that Rousseau, the author of Émile, had left his five children at the foundling hospital. It was true, and the Confessions admit it. This is the book that invented the modern way of writing one's own life, and it is worth reading with a sense of what he was defending himself against, because the sincerity it promises is also a strategy.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
Among the notable books of later times--we may say, without exaggeration, of all time--must be reckoned The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau. It deals with leading personages and transactions of a momentous epoch, when absolutism and feudalism were rallying for their last struggle against the modern spirit, chiefly represented by Voltaire, the Encyclopedists, and Rousseau himself--a struggle to which, after many fierce intestine quarrels and sanguinary wars throughout Europe and America, has succeeded the prevalence of those more tolerant and rational principles by which the statesmen of our own day are actuated. On these matters, however, it is not our province to enlarge; nor is it necessary to furnish any detailed account of our author's political, religious, and philosophic axioms and systems, his paradoxes and his errors in logic: these have been so long and so exhaustively disputed over by contending factions that little is left for even the most assiduous gleaner in the field. The inquirer will find, in Mr. John Money's excellent work, the opinions of Rousseau reviewed succinctly and impartially. The 'Contrat Social', the 'Lettres Ecrites de la Montagne', and other treatises that once aroused fierce controversy, may therefore be left in the repose to which they have long been consigned, so far as the mass of mankind is concerned, though they must always form part of the library of the politician and the historian. One prefers to turn to the man Rousseau as he paints himself in the remarkable work before us. That the task which he undertook in offering to show himself--as Persius puts it--'Intus et in cute', to posterity, exceeded his powers, is a trite criticism; like all human enterprises, his purpose was only imperfectly fulfilled; but this circumstance
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