Pierre Manent’s monograph on Montaigne is a difficult book to describe. On the one hand, it is brimming with the considerable erudition for which Manent is justly famous as a philosopher and public intellectual in France. Manent performs a virtuoso close reading of the Essays, taking readers on a thrilling ride through many of the twisting thematic turns, cheerfully unexplained self-contradictions, and dramatic changes of subject that have drawn readers to Montaigne for centuries. Paul Seaton, the translator, has done a masterful job capturing Manent’s gripping prose.

On the other hand, it is a perplexing book. Manent does not cite any of the abundant, growing scholarship on Montaigne’s ethical and political ideas or any other secondary sources. This makes the book’s original contribution difficult to specify, because it ends up traversing some familiar paths. But Manent’s purpose seems to lie elsewhere—in contemporary politics.

In the book’s introduction, Manent invokes a contemporary “European malaise,” for which the Essays might serve as an antidote (p. 1). But then he does not identify the content or direction of this malaise, and he never returns to this framing. Instead, he just gets on with a detailed exposition of a variety of familiar themes in the Essays, from Montaigne’s criticisms of humanist rhetorical culture (ch. 3) to his skeptical questioning of the status of religious belief (ch. 9). Nor does Manent provide an explanatory conclusion at the end of the book to tie its various threads together. Eventually, the book just ends, as if in the middle of a chapter.

This is clearly a conscious choice. Earlier in his career, Manent was a close associate of Raymond Aron, but the line of influence that informs his approach to Montaigne is his evident appreciation for Leo Strauss. Manent reads Montaigne as an esoteric writer (e.g., pp. 37, 78, 139, 150, 194), and I suspect that Manent is doing some esoteric writing of his own here. To what end?

I believe the answer lies with another Straussian feature of the book: a high confidence in drawing sharp lines of historical periodization and long-term ideational causality. In “modernity,” people have “abandoned, or rather, explicitly rejected, every idea of an objective human good, a good that could be discerned as such by human reason and on which, consequently, people could agree” (p. 175). In Manent’s telling, this condition was made possible by the loss of confidence in Thomistic natural law and in the authority of the Church that took root in Europe by the first decades of the sixteenth century (pp. 3, 175).

Manent portrays Montaigne as one of three reformers “of the experience of the truth” who emerged after the loss of confidence in this particular version of the good, yet before the hardening of the “modern” assumption (as Manent sees it) that there can be no objective human good of any sort (p. 7). In his view, Calvin relativized the moral truth of scripture by making its interpretation a matter of individual judgment, while Machiavelli relativized the moral regulation of political action by revealing the “effectual truth” that it is all about power (p. 7). But Calvin and Machiavelli were only addressing a small minority: the exceptionally pious in Calvin’s case and the exceptionally ambitious in Machiavelli’s (p. 7). By contrast, Montaigne wrote “for the ordinary person,” extending “the reforming gesture” of early modernity “to embrace the anecdotes of ordinary life and the little secrets of private life,” thereby bringing “the modern revolution” to “the majority of human beings” and preparing the way for the “morality of the moderns” (pp. 4, 7, 95).

As a piece of esoteric writing, the Essays must deliver one message to “the ordinary person” and another, more dangerous message to attentive, philosophically minded readers. In this vein, Manent makes much of Montaigne’s chapter “Of Vain Subtleties,” which is located “at the exact center of the entire work”—an esoteric signal (p. 150). In this chapter, Montaigne distinguishes between three “conditions of human beings” (p. 145). First, there are the many, who obey customary authority blindly; second, there are the few exceptional “sages” and “philosophers,” who can see through the arbitrariness of custom yet keep this knowledge to themselves for the sake of social stability; and third, there are people of middling intellect who are nonetheless reasonably literate.

In Manent’s interpretation, these middling intellects can sense that traditional authority is arbitrary, and yet they lack the wisdom to keep quiet and instead “hastily critique customs and trouble the world” with half-baked revolutionary schemes (pp. 153–54). For Manent, Montaigne gives these “irritable and clever members of society” an exoteric “critique of critique” (pp. 151, 171)—an exhortation to follow prevailing custom, which Manent calls a form of “conservatism” (p. 176). At the same time, Manent’s Montaigne presents an esoteric message “that there exists a way of escaping from the power of custom,” which is “reserved to philosophers and which the ‘weak minds’ would do best not to seek” (p. 214).

What light does this shed on Manent’s earlier claims of a contemporary “European malaise”? Manent contends that the middling “irritable and clever members of society” have become the dominant force in the modern world (p. 180). With their corrosive critique of traditional authority, they tore down the old world and built a new one grounded in their clever fiction of the “rights of man.” But they were not clever enough to see that this was indeed a fiction, and human rights have now, ironically, become an object of blind customary reverence by the middling majority today (p. 178).

For Manent, contemporary societies now push the perpetual modern liberal rights revolution further and further. Stirred by blind attachment to “the rights of man,” the majority claim that “nothing must hamper, or even slow, the movement without-rule of goods, persons, and lives” (p. 180). Manent seems to be talking, in a slightly veiled way, about liberal free trade and immigration regimes: two growing preoccupations of conservative parties and voters in Europe and elsewhere. Furthermore, the “half-wise” members of the modern multitude “have no patience for the words or the writings that would betray any dissatisfaction with regard to the established laws” of the modern liberal rights regime (p. 180). This seems to be an expression of concern about “political correctness,” another preoccupation of contemporary conservative parties and voters. Is this why Manent avoids explicit direct argument in the book—because he wants to say something conservative while avoiding liberal censure? This seems odd, given that Manent has been an especially well-known conservative thinker for decades.

And why enlist Montaigne in this project? I think it is because Montaigne has no time for Thomistic natural law, yet he does not try to replace it with a system of natural rights, as other thinkers would subsequently do. In this sense, Montaigne invites us to imagine “another modernity” structured by something other than narrowly construed liberal rights, as Raymond Geuss has argued. An explicit argument to this effect would, I think, make a clearer and more compelling case. So, too, would a greater attunement to the joy and lighthearted humor that Montaigne brought to his own investigation of the world.