Clever

Confessions

Jean-Jacques Rousseau — 2000

When it was first published in 1781, The Confessions scandalised Europe with its emotional honesty and frank treatment of the author's sexual and intellectual development. Since then, it has had a more profound impact on European thought. Rousseau left posterity a model of the reflective life - the solitary, uncompromising individual, the enemy of servitude and habit and the selfish egoist who dedicates his life to a particular ideal. The Confessions recreates the world in which he progressed from incompetent engraver to grand success; his enthusiasm for experience, his love of nature, and his uncompromising character make him an ideal guide to eighteenth-century Europe, and he was the author of some of the most profound work ever written on the relation between the individual and the state.

Reviews

Gavin@gl

Mar 9, 2023

I am prejudiced against Rousseau, him with his straightforwardly false anthropology, melodramatic politics, and preposterous egotism. His three big legacies are even easier to disparage – ‘Revolution as salvation’, ‘Feelings as truer than thoughts’, and the ‘Noble savage’ idea. This much arrayed against him, it’s miraculous that Confessions (‘the first modern autobiography’) is as clear and wise as it is – a deeply honest story by a deeply deluded man. (Just one instance of courage: to talk about being a sexual sub, as a man, in eC18th Europe!) Still he is a stroppy Forrest Gump – blundering into great events, loudly blaming them for the collision – but he is also big enough to test the great iconoclasts of his time. (Strong parallels with DH Lawrence, another supremely wilful, influential, and ridiculous soul.) Skim heavily.