Book excerpt: This is the first book to set out comprehensively Rousseau's theoretical statements on the arts: music and opera, theatre, fiction, poetry, the visual arts and dance. These statements are seen in terms of the phases of his intellectual development: the early years, the social criticism of the 1750s, the future-orientated theory of Emile and other texts, and finally the increasing self-scrutiny. This approach, conscious at all times of the element of personal commitment in his thinking, permits a sympathetic understanding, if not a resolution, of the famous paradoxes. The chief of these, his simultaneous condemnation and practice of drama, music and literature, is seen less as a personal contradiction than as a pointer to the ills of society which outrage him. Despite the huge social, political and economic upheavals since his death in 1778, Rousseau emerges as a thinker who has much to teach those concerned for the health of the arts in a modern world and for the moral values which attend them.