The Political Philosophy of Montaigne (review)

286 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 31:2 APRIL i99 3 he did not provide at the end of the book an Index Auctorum to the whole volume. Such an index of passages of Ficino, Plato, Plotinus, Proclus, etc., would, have made still more useful what is without a doubt an already immensely valuable contribution to Platonic studies and Renaissance intellectual history. JOHN MONFASANI State University of New York, Albany David Lewis Schaeffer. The Political Philosophy of Montaigne. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 199o. Pp. xv + 4o7 . Cloth, $41.5o. Paper, $x3.95. By 'political philosophy', Prof. Schaeffer means, with Strauss and Fortin, philosophizing about any subject that is "deliberately accommodated to the opinions of the society in the midst of which the philosopher lives.''1 In sharp contrast to those Montaigne scholars who have argued for some developmental stages from the a58o edition of the Essais to its posthumous x595 edition, Schaeffer reads Montaigne as having designed his masterpiece not only deliberately to accommodate it to the opinions of his time, but to have intended and achieved a rhetorical mastery by which irony and the appearance of a highly personal, even wandering pathway turns out, in fact, obliquely and beguilingly to have led the alert reader to the foundations of modern liberal republican democracy and capitalism: "Montaigne's substantive purpose, I shall argue, is to undermine those moral and religious conventions that obstruct freedom of thought and discourse as well as the freedom to indulge in earthly pleasures" (32); "Montaigne's greater undertaking is to reconstitute the foundations of political life, so as to secure our well-being from dependence on such accidents as the royal succession or shifting religious currents" (156). Schaeffer opens with three chapters interpreting Bk. II, Ch. 12, the "Apology for Raimond Sebonde," both for its physical centrality in the book and because it provides the foundation for the remainder of the argument. These chapters are to establish Montaigne's undermining of conventional religions and dogmatic philosophies, in order to cast doubt on those who assign to us either intellectual powers which we lack, or spiritual or moral ends which in fact horribly distort us (because of the cruelty and ambition we justify as means to those ends). This same undermining prepares the foundation for toleration of a variety of personal and social goods, and for a political climate more hospitable to philosophy. Chapters 4 through i i argue that Montaigne then replaces classical moral philosophy with the beginnings of modern, secular, and liberal moral philosophy by rejecting the notion of a summum bonum in favor of plural goods and, more specifically, rejecting the ethics of "inward government" and spiritual well-being in favor of other-directed social utility and a more earthly, personal, bodily well-being. In the strife between l E. L. Fortin, Dissidenceetphilosophieau moyendge (Paris, 1981), 19, cited as footnote a, pp. ixx . Leo Strauss's What Is PoliticalPhilosophy?(Glencoe, IL, 1959)is also cited in this context. BOOK REVIEWS 987 honor and utility, the former gave vent to cruelty and ambition. Once this becomes apparent, a personal ethic of corporeal goods and a political ethic of the minimal state and maximal marketplace allow for a new foundation for order, security, and a plurality of personal life-plans. The final portion of Chapter 11, and all of the final, twelfth chapter then conclude with "liberal politics'--Montaigne's reasons for preferring a republic, his egalitarianism , and, in sum, his reworking of Machiavelli and anticipation of Hobbes and Locke as the founders of "classical political liberalism" (376). Only two brief evaluative comments are possible here: (1) Schaeffer cites passages where Montaigne rejects body/soul dualism in favor of a close union, even interdependency between the two (cf. lo9, 299), t yet he also builds his interpretation on a rejection of goods of the spirit and mind in favor of those of the body because the soul is "malleable" but the body is not (cir. 2 t 3, 37 t). He thus argues a Montaigne who both rejects dualism but also relies on it in order to opt for the more earthly side of it. (2) Schaeffer depicts classical philosophers as holding that only...