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The Cambridge Companion to Rousseau
Rousseau, the great political theorist and philosopher of education, was an important forerunner of the French Revolution, though his thought was too nuanced and subtle ever to serve as mere ideology. This is the only volume that systematically surveys the full range of Rousseau's activities in politics and education, psychology, anthropology, religion, music, and theater. New readers will find this the most convenient and accessible guide to Rousseau currently available, while advanced students and specialists will find a conspectus of recent developments in the interpretation of Rousseau.
466 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 2001
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August 18, 2025
When I first picked up Patrick Riley’s The Cambridge Companion to Rousseau, I expected the usual academic fare: sober essays on political theory, religion, aesthetics, maybe a touch of musicology.
What I didn’t expect was that I would be reading it while still reeling from Rousseau’s Confessions.
That book is less philosophy than voyeurism in the first person—a philosopher stripping down both metaphorically and, quite often, literally. And once you’ve read it, it becomes impossible to approach the Companion’s earnest scholarship without hearing Rousseau’s voice muttering in the background, trousers half-off.
Rousseau is the great paradox of intellectual history: the man who proclaimed “man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains,” and yet confessed his lifelong fetish for being spanked. As a reader, I found myself toggling between awe and disbelief.
The Confessions reads like the original overshare—a document in which Rousseau gleefully admits to exposing himself in public as a boy, recounts how Mlle. Lambercier’s disciplinary whippings awakened his erotic imagination, and coolly describes depositing his five children at the foundling hospital as if they were inconvenient manuscripts. All this, from the man who would later lecture the world on education in Émile.
So when I turned to Riley’s Companion, I couldn’t stop reading the essays with this other Rousseau in mind—the one who lived in shadows, indulged his kinks, and still had the audacity to blueprint modern democracy.
Every solemn commentary carried a faint comic aftertaste. A chapter on The Social Contract stressed Rousseau’s enduring influence on theories of freedom. I kept thinking: yes, unless freedom involves voluntary submission to a birch rod.
Another essay praised Émile as a radical pedagogical experiment; I heard Rousseau whispering, “Don’t ask me about my own kids.” Even the pieces on music—his operatic ambitions, his dictionary of musical terms—felt tinged by the rhythm of a different sort, a hidden metronome beating from the remembered sting of childhood correction.
And yet, here’s the thing: this doesn’t make me dismiss Rousseau. It makes him feel more alive, more painfully human. Too often, philosophers come down to us embalmed in marble, heads tilted toward heaven, untouchable in their dignity. Rousseau refuses that posture. He is messy, contradictory, and shamelessly confessional.
And precisely because of this, his ideas burn with an odd vitality.
He was willing to show the whole human tangle—the noble ideals and the ridiculous compulsions—without editing out the embarrassing parts.
That’s where my reading turned oddly personal. As I navigated Riley’s essays, I thought of my own relationship to books, to teachers, and to the temptation to project a life of neat ideas while privately being a creature of contradictions. Don’t we all, in smaller ways, live this double life? We curate what we show to the world, but if the curtains were pulled back, others might find habits and desires that undercut the noble mask.
Rousseau just beat us to the punch: he tore away his own curtain before anyone else could, turning his shame into philosophy.
Riley’s Companion deserves credit for not getting lost in the gossip. The essays do the important work of situating Rousseau in intellectual history—his politics, his aesthetics, his religion—without which we’d have only the eccentric memoirist. But if you’ve read both, you end up reading one through the other. For me, the result was like listening to a string quartet while the percussionist keeps slipping in a tambourine off-beat. You hear the brilliance, but you can’t ignore the odd rhythm underneath.
So, my verdict? Riley’s Cambridge Companion is indispensable if you want to understand Rousseau’s ideas, but reading it after Confessions is like attending a lecture in a cathedral knowing the speaker once used its back wall for exhibitionist thrills.
It is both hilarious and humbling. And maybe that’s the best way to encounter Rousseau—not as saint, not as monster, but as proof that the human condition is at once sublime and absurd.
What I didn’t expect was that I would be reading it while still reeling from Rousseau’s Confessions.
That book is less philosophy than voyeurism in the first person—a philosopher stripping down both metaphorically and, quite often, literally. And once you’ve read it, it becomes impossible to approach the Companion’s earnest scholarship without hearing Rousseau’s voice muttering in the background, trousers half-off.
Rousseau is the great paradox of intellectual history: the man who proclaimed “man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains,” and yet confessed his lifelong fetish for being spanked. As a reader, I found myself toggling between awe and disbelief.
The Confessions reads like the original overshare—a document in which Rousseau gleefully admits to exposing himself in public as a boy, recounts how Mlle. Lambercier’s disciplinary whippings awakened his erotic imagination, and coolly describes depositing his five children at the foundling hospital as if they were inconvenient manuscripts. All this, from the man who would later lecture the world on education in Émile.
So when I turned to Riley’s Companion, I couldn’t stop reading the essays with this other Rousseau in mind—the one who lived in shadows, indulged his kinks, and still had the audacity to blueprint modern democracy.
Every solemn commentary carried a faint comic aftertaste. A chapter on The Social Contract stressed Rousseau’s enduring influence on theories of freedom. I kept thinking: yes, unless freedom involves voluntary submission to a birch rod.
Another essay praised Émile as a radical pedagogical experiment; I heard Rousseau whispering, “Don’t ask me about my own kids.” Even the pieces on music—his operatic ambitions, his dictionary of musical terms—felt tinged by the rhythm of a different sort, a hidden metronome beating from the remembered sting of childhood correction.
And yet, here’s the thing: this doesn’t make me dismiss Rousseau. It makes him feel more alive, more painfully human. Too often, philosophers come down to us embalmed in marble, heads tilted toward heaven, untouchable in their dignity. Rousseau refuses that posture. He is messy, contradictory, and shamelessly confessional.
And precisely because of this, his ideas burn with an odd vitality.
He was willing to show the whole human tangle—the noble ideals and the ridiculous compulsions—without editing out the embarrassing parts.
That’s where my reading turned oddly personal. As I navigated Riley’s essays, I thought of my own relationship to books, to teachers, and to the temptation to project a life of neat ideas while privately being a creature of contradictions. Don’t we all, in smaller ways, live this double life? We curate what we show to the world, but if the curtains were pulled back, others might find habits and desires that undercut the noble mask.
Rousseau just beat us to the punch: he tore away his own curtain before anyone else could, turning his shame into philosophy.
Riley’s Companion deserves credit for not getting lost in the gossip. The essays do the important work of situating Rousseau in intellectual history—his politics, his aesthetics, his religion—without which we’d have only the eccentric memoirist. But if you’ve read both, you end up reading one through the other. For me, the result was like listening to a string quartet while the percussionist keeps slipping in a tambourine off-beat. You hear the brilliance, but you can’t ignore the odd rhythm underneath.
So, my verdict? Riley’s Cambridge Companion is indispensable if you want to understand Rousseau’s ideas, but reading it after Confessions is like attending a lecture in a cathedral knowing the speaker once used its back wall for exhibitionist thrills.
It is both hilarious and humbling. And maybe that’s the best way to encounter Rousseau—not as saint, not as monster, but as proof that the human condition is at once sublime and absurd.
Displaying 1 of 1 review