capitalism

340 Montaigne, Michel de (1533–1592)
peculiarities that made him who he was. His focus on the
individual spirit, and the individual voice, was characteristic
of Renaissance humanism. Montaigne’s intense originality
and devotion to the study of the self place him in the
first rank of individualist thinkers.
Montaigne’s individualism did not drift into a dogmatic
egotism, however, and he developed both a humility about
mankind’s limitations and a cosmopolitan attitude toward
the various modes of life he encountered during his travels
throughout Europe. “If it were up to me to train myself in
my own fashion,” he wrote,
there is no way so good that I should want to be fixed in it
and unable to break loose. Life is an uneven, irregular, and
multiform movement. We are not friends to ourselves ...
we are slaves, if we follow ourselves incessantly and are so
caught in our inclinations that we cannot depart from them
or twist them about.
Nor was this an idle boast. Montaigne strongly mistrusted
easy certitudes. Although he was a devout Catholic,
he steadfastly worked for peace between Catholics and
Protestants, a view that set him apart from the vast majority
of his contemporaries. He even went so far as to attempt,
during the worst of the French Wars of Religion, a mediation
between Henri de Guise, leader of the Catholic League,
and Henri de Navarre, the future King Henri IV, who was
still a Protestant. Montaigne was skeptical of the supernatural
in general and particularly of the divine mandate of
government, yet he remained loyal to his faith and to the
French state for fear, he explained, that innovations would
prove worse than the established institutions. In this he was
both a new kind of conservative and a skeptic concerning
the power of human knowledge.
Although he was traditional in his faith and allegiance,
Montaigne abhorred cruelty, torture, and arbitrary rule. He
seldom, if ever, sought to excuse these vices in rulers, and
he often sided with the victims of persecution against their
oppressors. Libertarians are apt to see Montaigne as an intellectual
cousin, and nowhere is this kinship more evident
than in his essay “Of Sumptuary Laws,” where he writes,
The way in which our laws try to regulate ...expenditures
for the table and for clothes seems to be opposed to their
purpose. ...For to say that none but princes shall eat turbot,
or shall be allowed to wear velvet and gold braid, and
to forbid them to the people, what else is this but to give
prestige to these things and increase everyone’s desire to
enjoy them?
Our lack of insight into the minds of others poses a serious
obstacle to any straightforward, systematic attempt to
regulate the conduct of others.
Libertarians are apt to fault Montaigne in one significant
respect—namely, his view of economics. He held that, in
any exchange, one party must gain while another loses. He
appears not to have considered the idea that exchanges
might be mutually beneficial. Ludwig von Mises went so
far as to term this notion the “Montaigne dogma,” and he
devoted a section of his seminal work Human Action to
refuting it. Yet the Montaigne dogma was and remains so
ubiquitous that it may not be wholly fair to assign it to one
individual except insofar as a pervasive fallacy requires a
convenient name.
Although he often appears to be a thinker well ahead of
his time, Montaigne’s upbringing and surroundings seem to
have done much to shape, or at least suggest, his character.
He was born near Bordeaux to a mother of Jewish converso
heritage; three of his siblings would later convert to
Protestantism. A member of the minor nobility, his father
had served in the French army in Italy and developed an
appreciation for humanistic learning. His son Michel was
given peasant godparents and a tutor who spoke no French;
the younger Montaigne spoke only Latin until he was 6
years old. He later made a career in the Parlement of
Bordeaux, where he befriended Étienne de La Boétie and
was among the first to read La Boétie’s Treatise of
Involuntary Servitude, which impressed him deeply.
Montaigne struck up a close friendship with La Boétie,
which ended only at La Boétie’s death.
Considered as a whole, Montaigne’s work presents
something of a paradox. Although he was deeply skeptical
about the ability of any one man or group of men to grasp
absolute truth, still, he manifestly valued the more pedestrian
work of simply trying to understand what one could.
He exhibited remarkable insight into human character at
the individual level, while, by libertarian lights, his understanding
of economic interactions was simplistic.
However, the fact that he had missed the mark might not
have greatly surprised him. Much would always remain
unknown, Montaigne believed, and this fact was to be
accepted with a fortitude that he drew from ancient Stoic
sources.
Libertarians still appreciate Montaigne’s views on the
limits of understanding, inasmuch as many libertarians tend
to view society as a complex interplay of local knowledges
and practices, beyond the ability of any one person or government
to comprehend. In addition, libertarians, following
Montaigne, tend to reject the more ambitious systembuilders
and planners who believe that they can fully master
anything as complex as social institutions or even as
complex as another individual. “I do not see the whole of
anything,” Montaigne wrote, “nor do those who promise to
show it to us.”
See also Humanism; La Boétie, Étienne de; Liberty in the Ancient
World; Republicanism, Classical; Skepticism; Stoicism
JTK