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The Good, the Beautiful, and the Useful: Montaigne's Transvaluation of Values*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2014

David Lewis Schaefer
David Lewis Schaefer*
Affiliation:
Holy Cross College
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Abstract

Historians of political thought have failed to appreciate the importance of Montaigne's Essays as a major work of modern political philosophy. The neglect of the Essays as a political book is traceable to a widespread belief that Montaigne's thought is too fluctuating and unsystematic to embody a coherent and profound political teaching.

This study challenges the prevailing interpretation of Montaigne's thought by analyzing his critique of the classical understanding of supreme or “heroic” moral virtue, concentrating especially on the chapter entitled “Of Cruelty.” A careful reading of this chapter reveals that underlying the seeming disunity or inconsistency of its argument is a carefully worked out political intention. The essence of Montaigne's political project involves the replacement of a traditional morality based on “beauty” (i.e., one in which humanity aspires to share in the divine) by one embodying “utility” (one in which we understand our needs in the light of what we share with the beasts). The analysis of this “transvaluation of values” helps one to comprehend the foundations of the “bourgeois” morality that characterizes modern liberal regimes.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 73 , Issue 1 , March 1979 , pp. 139 - 154
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1979

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Footnotes

*

This article was first presented at the 1978 annual meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association. I should like to express my gratitude to the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Earhart Foundation, and Holy Cross College for their support, and to the Centre Universitaire International and the Rockefeller Foundation (through its Cultural Center in Bellagio, Italy) for the provision of research facilities. Thanks are also due to Professor Roger Masters of Dartmouth College for his perceptive comments on a previous draft of this article.

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