Julie Or The New Heloise

A novel in which Rousseau reconceptualized the relationship of the individual to the collective and articulated a new moral paradigm

A new English translation, the first to be based on the definitive French Pléiade edition.

An epistolary novel. The novel's subtitle points to the history of Héloïse d'Argenteuil and Peter Abelard, a medieval story of passion and Christian renunciation. The novel was put on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum.

Romanticism and Civilization examines romantic alternatives to modern life in Rousseau’s foundational novel Julie. It argues that Julie is a response to the ills of modern civilization, and that Rousseau saw that the Enlightenment’s combination of science and of democracy degraded human life by making it bourgeois. The bourgeois is man uprooted by science and attached to nothing but himself. He lives a commercial life and his materialism and calculations penetrate all aspects of his existence. He is neither citizen, nor family man, nor lover in any serious sense: his life is meaningless. Rousseau’s romanticism in Julie is an attempt to find connectedness through the sentiments of private life and wholeness through love, marriage, and family.

An epistolary novel. The novel's subtitle points to the history of Héloïse d'Argenteuil and Peter Abelard, a medieval story of passion and Christian renunciation. The novel was put on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum.

This meticulously edited collection is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents: Emile, or On Education The Social Contract Discourse on the Origin of Inequality Among Men Discourse on the Arts and Sciences A Discourse on Political Economy Confessions New Heloise (An Excerpt)