María José Villaverde Rico, Rousseau visto por sus contemporáneos: odio e idolatría (Madrid: Guillermo Escolar, 2025), 223 pp.

This book surveys the wide range of reactions to Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the 18 th century.If there was one thing that man could do, it was polarize.Some people loved him, his books, and his ideas, and some people hated them.The same goes today, although I would guess that more people love him today than hate him, and that a lot of that has to do with his critiques of conventions.María José's book is not an ordinary biography (10).Rather, it is a history and analysis of other people's reactions to him and of his reactions to them.Much of it consists of exploring his feuds with other intellectuals, and he certainly carried on a large number of them.Other books and articles have been written about particular feuds, but this one sets them in juxtaposition and more or less chronological order so we can see a wide panorama and its patterns.One could read all of the following, and many more, on single figures who feuded with Rousseau