Rousseau (volume 1 and 2)

John Morley's two-volume biography captures one of history's most combustible intellects: a philosopher whose ideas about human nature, education, and governance helped ignite the French Revolution, yet a man whose personal life was shadowed by abandonments, paranoia, and contradiction. Morley traces Rousseau from his troubled Geneva childhood through his volatile partnership with Thérèse Levasseur, his friendships and feuds with Voltaire and Diderot, to his final years as a hunted, melancholic exile. The biography excels at showing how Rousseau's acute sensitivity to suffering and his suspicion of civilized society arose from his own wounded experience. This is intellectual biography at its Victorian best: learned, sympathetic to its subject's genius, yet clear-eyed about the gaps between Rousseau's philosophy of natural virtue and his own all-too-human failures. The result illuminates both an extraordinary mind and the turbulent era it helped reshape.