Other Works

• Letter to d’Alembert on the Theatre

  - Recommended translation: Politics and the Arts: Letter to M. D'Alembert on the Theatre (Agora Paperback Edition); trans. by Alan Bloom (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968) [First published by Agora Editions, 1960].
  In October of 1758, Rousseau published the Letter to d’Alembert to refute Jean d’Alembert’s suggestion that Geneva establish a public theater. Rousseau’s essay critiqued the immorality of the Parisian theater and argued that a… More

Commentary

• [Book] Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Moralist

  - C.W. Hendel, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Moralist (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merril, 1934).
  Excerpt: Late in the manhood of Rousseau the moralist was born. Ordinary men who mature under parental care and acquire their moral principles through the slow and unconscious processes of habit scarcely know such discovery of themselves as moral beings. But… More

• “Rousseau” in Protestant Thought

  - [Essay] Karl Barth, “Rousseau”, Chapter II of Karl Barth, Protestant Thought: from Rousseau to Ritschl (Translated by Brian Cozens from eleven chapters of Die Protestantische Theologie im 19. Jahrhundert) Harper & Brothers: New York, 1959, p 58-117
  Excerpt: With Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in the middle of the eighteenth century,  the new age begins which we call the age of Goethe, the age which  presented Protestant theology after Schleiermacher with the problem  with which it chose to concern itself,… More

• Rousseau the Pessimistic Evolutionist

  - Bertrand de Jouvenel, “Rousseau the Pessimistic Evolutionist,” Yale French Studies, No. 28, (1961), pp.83-96.
  Scanned excerpt: Rousseau had a profound impact upon the way of life of the late XVIIIth century: thanks to him many parents became aware of and  attentive to their  children; he fostered enjoyment of natural beauties and contributed to a change in the… More

• Frail Happiness: An Essay on Rousseau

  - Tzvetan Todorov, Frail Happiness: An Essay on Rousseau, Translated by John T. Scott and Robert D. Zaretsky (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005).
  From the publisher: “We are all confronted, at one time or another, with choices as to what sort of life we will lead.” So Tzvetan Todorov begins Frail Happiness, an important interpretation of Rousseau, one suffused with Todorov’s own moral… More