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Abstract
Political theorists and historians of political thought usually view the Essais of Michel de Montaigne as an expression of withdrawal from politics and of a principled turn to political inactivity, in reaction to the violence of the French Wars of Religion. From this dominant perspective, contemporary receptions of Montaigne in political theory most often identify him as a "proto-liberal" thinker concerned in the first instance to carve out and affirm a private space for a life of otium—of leisure, solitude, and withdrawal—and as an important forerunner of modern conceptions of individualism, selfhood, and personal autonomy.
In this dissertation, I seek a new interpretation of political themes in Montaigne's Essais. Drawing on recent historical and biographical scholarship, I reassess Montaigne's political ideas in light of his intensive activity as a high-level negotiator between warring Catholic and Protestant parties during the last decades of the sixteenth century. The dissertation poses two questions. First: How might we read the Essais , not primarily as an expression and celebration of a life of otium, but rather as an articulation and extension of Montaigne's life of negotium (political activity; not leisure)? Second: What new perspective(s) might a negotium reading of the Essais give us on the political activity of negotiation more generally?
I proceed through investigation of Montaigne's treatment of three great political themes of his time: the emerging discourse of raison d'état ; humanist politics of classical virtue; and the pressing question of religious toleration. I argue that Montaigne models for his readers a flexibility and capacity to negotiate between different positions and perspectives on these often fraught matters of political contest and conflict. In doing so, Montaigne provides us in the present with an example of a mode of political activity that is often overlooked by political theorists. Rather than bolstering liberal politics of privacy and mutual forbearance between different groups holding ostensibly irreconcilable values, as political theorists often claim today, Montaigne allows us to imagine a more active civic life consisting of the ongoing negotiation of cohabitation with different others.
