Jean Jacques Rousseau: Een Beeld Van Zijn Leven En Werken

Henriette Roland Holst's 1912 biography traces the making of philosophy's most radical outsider. Jean Jacques Rousseau emerges here not as a marble bust but as a sensitive, restless boy shaped by Calvinist Geneva's iron discipline, his mother's death, and a father's flight from responsibility. The young Rousseau found refuge in books and in the orbit of a nurturing aunt, his imagination ignited by romance and wandering before Paris turned him into the philosopher whose words would topple thrones. Roland Holst, herself a revolutionary thinker, brings particular insight to Rousseau's emotional life: his years as a wandering musician, his passionate entanglements, his talent for self-dramatization that would culminate in the revolutionary autobiography Confessions. This is biography as excavation of the forces that forged a mind capable of declaring that man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.