Ann Hartle’s What Happened to Civility offers an inviting proposition: civility should be understood as a human invention and therefore is ultimately doomed to failure. For Hartle, civility is “the social bond that makes it possible for individuals to live in peace in the political and social structures of the modern Western world” (p. 1), and its inventor Michel de Montaigne’s Essays are “the first act of self-conscious civility” (p. 3). She is not alone is feeling that civility has fallen on hard times. Rather than repair civility, however, What Happened to Civility sees its failure as inevitable and returns to Montaigne to understand why.

I was tempted by the book jacket’s promise of a more fallible civility, inspired by the self-subverting essayist who relentlessly seeks out the exceptional, the improper, and the indigestible within himself and his world. This is not the book that Hartle has written, however. A warning against judging books by their covers would be fair, except that these misplaced expectations flow from insights into Montaigne’s thought from Hartle’s previous work, Michel de Montaigne: Accidental Philosopher (2003). Although remnants of that earlier depiction of Montaigne feature prominently in What Happened to Civility, they now struggle under the weight of a selective narrative of modernity that fails to give coherent shape to the contemporary civility wars animating the final two chapters of the book. Concluding with an extended but unsubstantiated series of complaints about modern university life, the end of free speech, and a specious threat of Islam as a religion “spread by the sword” (p. 140), by the end of the book the philosopher of generous judgment has left the scene.

Montaigne’s exit is the point, or at least part of it. Society and its institutions have degraded to such an extent, Hartle contends, that Montaignean civility no longer works. Civility itself is the source of the problem, even as the loss of the Montaignean civil spirit is also cause for lament. Although it is certainly possible to trace a regrettable loss back to a flawed origin, these two planks of Hartle’s diagnosis do not ultimately harmonize. What Happened to Civility fluctuates between a nostalgia for a distinctively modern and liberal civility and a recommitment to a unitary notion of the good that was already shaky by the time Montaigne picked up his pen a half-millennium ago.

The first four chapters of the book focus on Montaigne in his widely accepted position at the threshold of modernity, enacting a novel mode of individual interiority. Hartle emphasizes Montaigne’s rejection of “sacred tradition,” which she understands in strongly unitary terms: “the foundation of classical-Christian civilization is the sacred tradition, the intellectual and moral inheritance that embodies a certain understanding of Being, of nature, and of man’s place in nature” (p. 15). This bond “is public, common, and authoritative for all” (p. 16). With the Essays, “the West” embarks with Montaigne into a modern era where individuals identify their own good, the social bond rooted in shared tradition is imperiled, and a new liberal order dividing society from state is inaugurated. Civility is key as a new bond between self-inventing subjects: “those who do not need each other for the good life” (p. 87).

The broad contours of this story about ancients and moderns will be familiar to political theorists of many schools. What stands out about Hartle’s account is that it attributes so much to Montaigne. It is one thing to recognize Montaigne’s contributions to modern individuality, including but not limited to the liberal tradition. It strains credulity to the breaking point, however, to write, “Liberalism, as it appears in the Essays, is defined in terms of the rule of reason, the principles of representative government and the rule of law, and the freedom of the individual to pursue the good as he sees fit” (p. 55). The text of the Essays is considerably more modest. The principles of representative government, for example, are based in Montaigne’s distinction between himself as a private person and the political office he occupied for a time, as Hartle herself notes at one point (p. 58). Like many of Montaigne’s contributions, this public–private divide is a necessary but quite insufficient condition for the specific form of the modern state that Hartle improbably locates in the Essays (p. 56).

Through a selective itinerary of political thought routed via Hobbesian sovereignty and Hegelian civil society, Hartle’s Montaigne becomes a standard-bearer for a surprisingly substantive set of political commitments: a liberalism featuring a unitary sovereign state that permits civil society as a space of freedom without politics. Civility, then, is “the moral character that keeps society depoliticized” (p. 89). This notion of civility is deceptively demanding. It is a social bond rooted in “a complete moral character” with a long list of qualities such as promise keeping, generosity, trust, and openness, refashioned by Montaigne from fragments of classical magnanimity and Christian charity. As such, he parasitically draws from the tradition that he otherwise helps suppress.

This refashioning and forgetting of the past are the roots of the deterioration of civility that the book decries. The deterioration is registered in the free institutions of civil society—the family, church, and university—with an emphasis on “the suppression of free speech in both public life and the universities” (p. 109). Civility is doomed from the start, but it also faces a mortal threat in the contemporary politics of the university. Hartle writes, “Civility has to fail, because it originates in the act that forgets the tradition—that is, it originates in the destruction of the very conditions that make it possible: it can survive only as long as and to the extent that the tradition—the source of its elements—is kept alive” (p. 131). Whether civility’s demise was fated or a more recent “moral disaster” is murky, as is the loss of a tradition that can yet be preserved by “defining the liberal arts in terms of the pursuit of truth and knowledge” (p. 120) and realizing “why the sacred is the source of the social bond and why religion is essential to the preservation of civility” (p. 132).

Readers who do not already share the assessment of the modern university, civil liberties, and the role of religion in public life in What Happened to Civility will find little in the way of persuasive argument or empirical evidence to change their minds. A complaint about speech codes lists not one actual statute or rule; a sentence referencing “Muslim scholars” cites none (p. 139). It is self-evident that one can no longer joke about gender and racial differences, which the author laments because “ethnic jokes, jokes about men and about women, actually foster civility” (p. 118). Purportedly part of a Montaignean spirit of laughing at ourselves—begging the question of who is laughing—this appeal to humility is hard to square with the call to a moral center such as this: “The Church is already a multicultural society and, arguably, the only possible multicultural society. Islam, on the other hand, understands itself as the universal religion, but it does not permit either the separation of politics and religion or the harmonization of faith and reason, and that is why it must be spread by the sword and impose itself by force” (p. 140). Such closing remarks bring the book’s call for preserving sacred tradition uncomfortably close to a renewed crusade within the university, a civilizing mission freed from any bonds of civility.

What Happened to Civility’s turn back to religion as an authoritative moral ground seems to forget Montaigne’s most powerful intellectual spirit: the skeptic’s repugnance toward presumption in any form. Although Montaigne took comfort in the habits of his faith beyond the dictates of reason, he did so while eschewing public authority. By contrast, Hartle’s desire for families, universities, and churches to be elevated above contention in the name of a sacred tradition that was once (and might again be?) “authoritative for all” is chilling in its unbounded scope.