Major Works

• Emile

  - Recommended translation: Emile or On Education, ed. and trans. by Alan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, 1979). Originally published in 1762.
  Published in 1762, Emile, or On Education, outlined a process of education that would prevent man from being corrupted by society and instead nurture his natural virtues and goodness. Part-treatise, part-novel, the work recounts the life of a fictional… More

• Julie, or The New Heloise

  - Julie, Or, The New Heloise: Letters of Two Lovers Who Live in a Small Town at the Foot of the Alps, translated and edited by Philip Stewart and Jean Vaché, University Press of New England, 1997. First published in 1761.
  From the publisher: Rousseau’s great epistolary novel, Julie, or the New Heloise, has been virtually unavailable in English since 1810. In it, Rousseau reconceptualized the relationship of the individual to the collective and articulated a new moral… More

Commentary

• The Sexual Politics of Jean-Jacques Rousseau

  - Joel Schwartz, The Sexual Politics of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
  From the publisher: Joel Schwartz presents the first systematic treatment of Rousseau’s understanding of the political importance of women, sexuality, and the family. Using both Rousseau’s lesser-known literary works and such major writings as… More

• Gendered Community: Rousseau, Sex, and Politics

  - Penny Weiss, Gendered Community: Rousseau, Sex, and Politics (New York: NYU Press, 1993).
  From the publisher: Rousseau’s writings reflect paradoxes and apparent inconsistencies with his principled commitments to freedom and equality. In this engrossing work, Penny Weiss wrestles with issues of gender in the works of Rousseau. Weiss attempts… More

• Rousseau and the Romantic Project by Allan Bloom

  - Allan Bloom, “Rousseau and the Romantic Project” in Love and Friendship. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993).
  From the publisher: The author of The Closing of the American Mind argues that basic human connections–love and friendship–are withering away, asserting that humans’ impoverished feelings are rooted in an impoverished language of love.

• Rousseau, Nature, and the Problem of the Good Life

  - Laurence D. Cooper, Rousseau, Nature, and the Problem of the Good Life. (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999).
  From the publisher: The rise of modern science created a crisis for Western moral and political philosophy, which had theretofore relied either on Christian theology or Aristotelian natural teleology as guarantors of an objective standard for ‘the good… More

• Jean-Jacques Rousseau: A Friend of Virtue

  - Joseph R. Reisert, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: A Friend of Virtue (Cornell University Press, 2003).
  From the publisher: Scholars have long debated the contribution Rousseau has made to political thought. Is he a theorist of radical individualism, a reactionary advocate for authoritarianism, or just a brilliantly paradoxical but ultimately incoherent… More