The Story of Civilization 

With this volume Will and Ariel Durant bring to a splendid finale their "magnificent and monumental" ten-volume chronicle - over four decades in work - of our cultural, political, philosophical, religious and social heritage, from its roots in ancient Oriental and Greek society to the shaping of the modern world.
Rousseau and Revolution, ranging over a Europe in ferment, centers on the passionate rebel-philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the great exponent of the Romantic impulse toward self-exploration and social revolt, who contended with the great rationalist, Voltaire, for the mind of Europe; who condemned civilization as a disease, glorified the noble savage, proclaimed to the world with equal intensity his own love affairs and the natural Rights of Man, and who became the patron saint of the French Revolution and of its progeny - the worldwide social upheaval of two centuries.
With Rousseau as its focal point, the Durants' incomparable narrative progresses across a whole continent - to a Spain convulsed by the horrors of war, witnessed and preserved for our eternal outrage by Goya; to the Italy of Vivaldi and Tiepolo, of Casanova and Cagliostro; to the Imperial Russian court of Catherine the Great; to Poland, destroyed as a political entity, reborn as as romantic dream of nationalism.
The Durants show us the tragic reign of the Austrian Emperor Joseph II and paint for us a vivid and enduring portait of the life and work of Mozart. We see Frederick the Great rebuilding Prussia, while Germany, still a mass of separated states, undergoes an epochal intellectual revolution - in science and philosophy with Immanuel Kant, in literature with the protean figures of Goethe and Schiller.