Abstract

The author regards Montaigne as one of the architects of modern political thought, a precursor of Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Adam Smith, and the American Founding Fathers. The Essais, for Schaefer, are notable primarily on account of their formulation of a primitive version of bourgeois liberalism: the doctrine that society functions best when individuals pursue their own self-interest with a minimum of governmental interference. Montaigne, in other words, was an early Modern apostle of the gospel preached in our own time by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.