Perfection and Disharmony in the Thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. By Jonathan Marks. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 200p. $65.00.

Many of us feel we know Rousseau, perhaps better than we do any other modern political thinker. For this we have Rousseau himself to thank; his Confessions, though often opaque and perplexing, still give us a vivid sense of the person who wrote them—ardent, dramatic, petulant, grandiose. Anyone who has read Rousseau's own account of his life will surely be puzzled by the cool, muted tones Jonathan Marks uses to portray him: Marks's Rousseau is a sober, measured thinker who tempers his most radical ideas with a sharp awareness of human limitations. This portrait, so deliberately drawn, looks the way it does for several reasons.