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Frail Happiness: An Essay on Rousseau
Publisher
:
Hachette
Parution date
:
1985
EAN
:
9782010112133
Description
"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, a provocative meditation on the thought and writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Todorov turned to Rousseau, he tells us, because he no longer found the professional language of scholarship an effective means for addressing such questions and because he found in Rousseau a seemingly immediate language that could speak about what is difficult and problematic in human life. Rousseau is often said to have "discovered and invented our modernity," and Todorov's interpretation of Rousseau centers on the question of what sort of life we can live in modern times. Like modernity itself, the answer is complex: there are several ways of life that Rousseau contemplates and that Todorov considers along with him. Rousseau juxtaposes the life of the citizen and that of the solitary individual, and then, Todorov shows us, he reveals a "third way": that of the moral individual. Todorov explores these ways of life and their relevance for us two centuries after Rousseau. Although all have commendable features, it is the third way, that of the moral individual—the path laid out in Rousseau's novel, Emile—that the philosopher recommends without reservation. Frail Happiness is an important interpretation of Rousseau, one suffused with Todorov's own moral seriousness and intellectual depth. While ranging widely through Rousseau's corpus with skill and scholarly authority, he never loses sight of the questions that led him to Rousseau in the first place: he returns, again and again, to the fragile yet persistent hope for human happiness.
Author
Tzvetan Todorov : Tzvetan Todorov is a director of research at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) in Paris. A linguist, literary theorist, and world-renowned essayist, he is the author of numerous books, several of which have been translated into English, including Voices from the Gulag: Life and Death in Communist Bulgaria (Penn State, 1999), Facing the Extreme (Holt, 1996), On Human Diversity (Harvard, 1993), The Conquest of America (HarperCollins, 1984), and Theories of the Symbol (Cornell, 1984). John T. Scott is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California at Davis. Robert D. Zaretsky is Associate Professor of French at the University of Houston, where he holds a joint appointment in the Honors College and the Department of Modern and Classical Languages.
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