Democratic Thinking: Lessons from Montaigne
We should accept Montaigne as a founding father. He can teach us to be better citizens.
When we speak of our founders, we usually include Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, Washington, Jay, and Adams. We don’t include Montaigne, the French noble who published the first edition of his Essays in 1580. But Montaigne not only created a new genre, the personal essay; he also created a new ontology, a new way of being in the world, a new self that remained unfinished, that explored options endlessly, that never reached a final conclusion, that remained open to change.
I understand that including Montaigne as one of our founders might seem outrageous. Maybe so. But I am going to push this idea a bit further, maybe to the realm of the absurd: Without Montaigne we would have never had the Declaration of Independence, European generals would never have joined Washington to help train the Continental Army and lead them into battle, the French would have never come to the aid of the Americans at Yorktown, and the Bastille would have never been stormed.
I understand that is a bold claim, maybe an outlandish statement. I stand by it. Others have come to the same conclusion. For example, David Lewis Schaefer, a Political Science professor, wrote that Montaigne’s Essays should be considered “a founding text of modern liberalism” (The Political Philosophy of Montaigne, Cornell UP, 1990). He means liberalism as is the Enlightenment ideas that are embodied in all modern democracies.
Here's my support for this claim: We could not have had a revolution to establish the first modern democracy without first having a democratic self—individuals who were able to think democratically. We would not have had a democratic self if not for Montaigne and his rigorous examination of who he was, how he connected to his time and place, and how he might become more human. Not more perfect—more human.
I am not saying that every individual in the thirteen colonies who supported the revolution had read Montaigne. They didn’t have to. The ideas of great authors can spread throughout a culture. People who have never read Freud, for example, often use his terminology. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Montaigne was read widely, including in the colonies. The first English translation of his Essays was in 1603. Montaigne influenced many American authors, including Emerson.
The form of a Montaigne essay is about remaining open to new ideas. It shocks us to our core.
As one enters a Montaigne essay for the first time, it should feel like familiar ground. Almost every essayist who came after Montaigne writes, to some degree, like Montaigne. Yet, when we first read him, we are off balance, confused, disoriented. We have been taught that an essay has a thesis statement backed up by logical arguments in a linear line of thought. This is a narrow description of how many teach academic writing, but it is not Montaigne. This approach to the essay is more aptly described as the kind of writing that emerged out of the Industrial Revolution—the kind of writing that trains students for factory work.
This is not the form of a Montaigne essays. This is not how Montaigne thinks. He begins with a subject, which might be as mundane as bees or the human thumb, and then he follows his thoughts as they wander through moments of his mundane life, centuries of books, and all the emotions a human being is capable of feeling.
A few years ago, when I was teaching a graduate seminar on the theory of creative nonfiction, we began with Montaigne’s “On Experience,” one of his last essays and one of his longest, about thirty-five pages in the Frame translation. One of my students keep saying, “I just don’t get him.” I kept trying to explain what I saw in Montaigne—his deep dive into the self, which was both discovering who he was and creating a new way of being in the world. One day, the student said, “Oh, I get it. He’s punk rock.” I responded, “Yes, you got it.” The next day, she emailed me an image of Punk Rock Montaigne, the image at the beginning of this essay, which I have used to brand this Substack, with her permission. I cannot think of a better way to describe Montaigne than to say he is punk rock.
How is the open form of a Montaigne essay related to the democratic self? Montaigne’s essays are a project. They are a project that examines the self, completely, including the author’s defects. In “To the Reader,” a preface to the Essays, Montaigne explains his purpose:
If I had written to seek the world’s favor, I should have bedecked myself better, and should present myself in a studies posture. I want to be seen here in my simple, natural, ordinary fashion, without straining or artifice; for it is myself that I portray. My defects will here be read to the life, and also my natural form, as far as respect for the public has allowed.
Montaigne first published his Essays in 1580. For the rest of his life, he added new essays and revised the old ones. Sarah Bakewell wrote of Montaigne’s revision process: “Although he returned to his work constantly, he hardly ever seemed to get the urge to cross things out, only to keep adding more.” What he kept adding was new thoughts and perspectives. He wanted to understand himself. He wanted to understand his connection to his world. This takes a lifetime.
The project of understanding the self never ends, and so the self remains unfinished. This means being willing to recognize and accept one’s faults. This means grounding the self in the here-and-now and the mundane events of the moment.
In our age, as we live in digital worlds, it is even easier to lose touch with who we are and our core values. It is easy to lose our sense of normality.
More than any other writer, Kafka captures the loss of normality. He was writing as Hitler was rising to power. In the Penal Colony, for example, he writes about a traveler to a penal colony who listens to an officer who describes an “apparatus” of torture as if he were explaining a machine that slices bread. The apparatus inscribes the crime of a man onto his back. He is never told what his crime is, and he cannot read what is inscribed on his back. (We later learn that the apparatus doesn’t actually inscribe any words. It just repeatedly stabs the “criminal.” It is a form of pure, automatic, efficient torture.) The official sees this process as normal, a practice that makes sense, a process that should not be questioned. Only the traveler sees the horror of the apparatus. To the officer, the apparatus seems normal, just, and necessary.
This is why we need a pluralistic society, with diverse experiences and perspectives. What is “normal” needs to be constantly questioned. If we become too much alike, we will not be able to question anything.
Montaigne traveled. He experienced other cultures and other perspectives. He wrote about his travels and reflected on diverse cultures. He teaches us the importance of viewing the world from a variety of perspectives.
At the same time, he immersed himself in the world of his estate. He teaches us how to ground ourselves in our physical world and our community. Part of grounding ourselves is questioning everything.
In the Divided America series, I discussed the authoritarian personality and what it says about the MAGA movement. This kind of personality feels inner chaos. To maintain a sense of control, they project their own faults onto others. They do not reflect. Montaigne is constantly reflecting, pulling back from his topic, viewing it from different perspectives.
Stefan Zweig, an Austrian Jew who fled fascism, read Montaigne for solace and insights during his exile. He distilled eight lessons from the Essays, which Bakewell calls “the eight freedoms”:
Be free from vanity and pride.
Be free from belief, disbelief, convictions and parties.
Be free from habit.
Be free from ambition and greed.
Be free from family and surroundings.
Be free from fanaticism.
Be free from fate; be the master of your own life.
Be free from death; life depends on the will of others, but death on our own will.
If more Americans embraced these freedoms, we would not be so divided.
If we further distilled these eight freedoms into a single lesson, it would be: Remain skeptical. Doubt everything.
Further reading:
James B. Atkinson and David Sices. Montaigne’s Selected Essays. Hackett, 2012.
Sarah Bakewell. How to Live; or, A Life of Montaigne. Other Press, 2010.
Michael Perry. Montaigne in Barn Boots. Harper, 2017.