Share This Page
Frail Happiness
An Essay on Rousseau
104 pages | 1 illustration | 5.5 x 8 | 2001
ISBN 978-0-271-02110-2 | cloth: $39.95
ISBN 978-0-271-02400-4 | paper: $21.95
“All the same, Frail Happiness remains possibly the most successful of Tzvetan Todorov’s writings on the history of ideas: if the text is little more than a collage of quotations and well-chosen images, it is sustained by great intuition and emotional sympathy; crafted with admirable modesty and sparing means, it succeeds in conveying the essence of Rousseau’s thinking, offering an excellent, reader-friendly introduction to anyone wishing to approach his works.” —Biancamaria Fontana, Times Literary Supplement
“Frail Happiness remains possibly the most successful of Tzvetan Todorov’s writings on the history of ideas. . . . It is sustained by great intuition and emotional sympathy; crafted with admirable modesty and sparing means, it succeeds in conveying the essence of Rousseau’s thinking, offering an excellent, reader-friendly introduction to anyone wishing to approach his works.” —Biancamaria Fontana, Times Literary Supplement
“In Frail Happiness, Todorov argues for the coherence of Rousseau, against those who prefer to underscore his contradictions. In its very simplicity it is an elegant presentation, one that will doubtless attract many readers.” —Philip Stewart, Duke University
“This translation . . . is doubly welcome. . . . [It] offers readers both an insightful interpretation of Rousseau, one that presents him explicitly as a moral theorist, and an introduction to Todorov’s own contributions to what he calls a ‘critical humanism’.” —Zev M. Trachtenberg, Ethics
“Todorov accomplishes remarkably much in this brief book, and he does so with a clarity and grace that reflect his humanism and his intention to confront life honestly, characteristics he particularly admires in Rousseau.” —Laurence D. Cooper, Review of Politics
"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, 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 persistant hope for human happiness.
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, among them: 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 Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California at Davis. He is translator of The Essay on the Origin of Languages and Writings Related to Music (volume seven of Collected Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, New England, 1999) and author of articles on various aspects of Rousseau's thought.
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. He is the translator of Voices from the Gulag and author of Nímes at War: Religion, Politics, and Public Opinion in the Department of the Gard, 1938-1944 (Penn State, 1995), which won the 1997 Hans Rosenhaupt Memorial Book Award of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation.