Rousseau and Revolution
by Will and Ariel Durant
Summary
Rousseau and Revolution is the tenth of the eleven volumes of The Story of Civilization, the series Will Durant began in 1935 and later shared with his wife Ariel as credited co author, a project they had begun in 1935 and would not finish for another eight years after this volume appeared. This installment covers France, England, and Germany from 1756 onward and the rest of Europe back to 1715, using Jean Jacques Rousseau's life and ideas as the thread that pulls together philosophy, religion, art, music, and politics across an entire continent moving toward revolution. The Durants follow Rousseau's own turbulent biography, his quarrels with Voltaire and Diderot, his wandering exile, and his writing on education and government, alongside the broader intellectual ferment of the Enlightenment that his ideas both grew from and eventually helped overturn.
The book's ambition is total coverage of an age rather than a narrow argument: the Durants range from court politics to popular religion to the state of European painting and music within the same chapters, trying to give a general reader the texture of an entire period rather than a single specialized thesis about it. They wrote for the largest possible audience of nonspecialists, a choice that shaped the whole eleven volume series and helps explain why, decades after publication, the complete set had sold more than two million copies in nine languages and become a mainstay of serious general readers building a home library.
Reading any single volume of the series means accepting long, discursive chapters that move associatively across a whole civilization's culture rather than following one narrow argument to its conclusion, and it suits a reader who wants an accessible synthesis of an era's ideas and events rather than a tightly focused monograph. The Durants originally planned this volume as their last, then decided the project was not finished after all and went on to write one more.
Historical Context & Significance
The volume appeared in 1967, and it won the 1968 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, honoring a series that had already become one of the best selling works of popular history ever written in English. Reviewer Alfred J. Bingham praised the volume enthusiastically on its release, part of a critical reception that had greeted nearly every installment of the series with similar warmth from its first volume in the 1930s onward.
The Durants had intended Rousseau and Revolution as the conclusion of the whole project, but they changed course afterward and spent several more years on an eleventh volume, The Age of Napoleon, covering European civilization from 1789 to 1815, before finally closing the series in 1975, forty years after they began it. The full set remains in print and is still often the first place general readers encounter a synthesis of European intellectual history spanning this many centuries in one continuous narrative.