As Michel de Montaigne will tell you, he is a man of many qualities: a skeptic and a credulous consumer of tales, anxiety ridden and frank speaking, dominated by an intractable nature and a feverish imagination. Amid his many contradictions and digressions, however, Montaigne and his pathbreaking Essais still strike a number of readers as lacking in one crucial dimension: political qualities. To be sure, notable exceptions find political relevance in Montaigne; for example, he plays an iconic role in Judith Shklar’s “The Liberalism of Fear” (in Nancy L. Rosenblum, ed., Liberalism and the Moral Life, 1989) and features in Ingrid Creppell’s account of a personal and cultural mode of toleration (Toleration and Identity, 2003). Yet even then, his political contributions are generally circumscribed within his invention of modern individuality and the ethical comportment suited to it.

Douglas I. Thompson’s engaging and incisive study, Montaigne and the Tolerance of Politics, offers readers a newly political understanding of Montaigne through his roles as negotiator, partisan, and devotee, all enacted with a commitment to “radical moderation.” Bringing Montaigne’s political experiences to bear on the Essais, Thompson draws the essayist out of his famous study and into a world of pragmatic political action. Seen in this way, Montaigne holds greater interest for scholars of politics as he addresses enduring problems of diplomacy and compromise. Thompson deftly leverages this contextualized reading, localized in many creative ways within the politics of sixteenth-century France, to critically engage contemporary debates on toleration that often aspire to transcend such rooted and contentious origins. In highlighting Montaigne’s neglected political qualities, the book delivers a compelling account of a toleration bound up with political action, which in turn demands a “high tolerance for informal conversation and political negotiation across lines of conflict” (p. 2, emphasis in the original).

In composing the Essais, Montaigne pioneered a genre as well as a new conception of the self. Such an innovative mode of writing threatens to obscure the sources and interlocutors that made such creativity possible in the first place. Thompson cautions against such oversight by attending to the shared stylistic practices and innovative turns of Montaigne’s wide-ranging discussions of diplomacy, cultural difference, civility, virtue, and fortune. Among the most valuable contributions of the book is the close relationship of the Essais to Montaigne’s political career and to the genres of political advice books for princes and courtiers circulating widely within Renaissance humanism, if not directly into his study. The style and substance of the Essais combine in this elegant reading to defend and enact a mode of political thinking and judging on both sides of the question, or in utramque partem. Where this practice is often seen as a skeptical exercise that weakens the force of arguments, Thompson aligns it with the classical humanist practice of “discovering and multiplying available matter for robust thinking, judging, and persuading to action” (p. 29, emphasis in the original). This is not just a style but a model of action suited to the intractably riven and potentially violent world of sixteenth-century France, and perhaps today. Montaigne’s dogged commitment to this perspectival approach to disagreement and conflict does not renounce personal commitments, such as faith or party, nor does it ignore reasons of state. Montaignean judgment is more capacious than either of these modes of calculation: It is pragmatic, engaged, and radically moderate.

“Radical moderation” names Thompson’s formulation of Montaigne’s exemplary mode of negotiating the demands of contentious political life. In distinction to stoic withdrawal, we discover a writer who affirms his own political partisanship that resists violent antagonism, as well as his openness to others as they are, all in the spirit of a political realism that cultivates endurance for disagreement and compromise (p. 122). It may be difficult to reconcile Thompson’s portrait of a hard-working negotiator shuttling back and forth between opposing camps, in life as on the page, with cherished images of Montaigne as the faithful skeptic occupied by introspection and the avoidance of cruelty. Thompson’s sophisticated understanding of Montaigne’s radical moderation attends to these ethical and inward-looking aspects of his thought and does so in order to show their relevance for the political qualities of the Essais.

For it is not only political disputes that must be understood on both sides of the question but also Montaigne’s own self that is constituted out of more than one side. Just as Montaigne does not agree with all sides of a political question—he retains his partisan commitments even as he tries to broker peace—he does not claim all of himself as his own, or, in Thompson’s words, he “does not fully possess himself” (p. 144). There is a divided quality to this Montaignean self that comes from the weight of custom in shaping character, which is to say that we are shaped by forces beyond our control. After all, we are born into a world, a nation, a family, and a body that we do not choose. Montaigne was keenly attuned to such conditions of finitude and saw this contingency and alienation in his very own nature. Thompson locates in Montaigne’s response to this condition an attitude worthy of political emulation: He “negotiates this internal tension, not by avoiding or eliminating the irreducibly heteronomous, habitual aspects of his deepest commitments but by dwelling within them” (p. 147). The political and ethical qualities of Montaigne’s thought interpenetrate here. The self is constituted out of the irreducible difference of the political world and political action requires a character that can remain open to deep disagreement without giving oneself over to violent passions.

Thompson favors an approach of both/and over either/or, a generous and generative style that entertains and builds creatively from divergent scholarly views in a Montaignean spirit. This is evidenced in his critical reworking of Shklar’s liberalism of fear by insisting on the fear and pleasure that animates the Essais, infused as they are with a Rabelaisian humor (pp. 64, 58). So, too, with the ethical and political dimensions of the Essais. In drawing out a distinctly political notion of tolerance, in the sense of dialogic and agonistic action, Thompson expands and deepens both the political and the ethical resources of Montaigne’s thought as he “promote[s] an ethical form of inner freedom because it is good for the soul, as it were, and also because it is good for one’s capacity to do politics” (p. 140, emphasis in the original). There is no superficial conciliation here. Thompson challenges the familiar depiction of Montaigne’s thought as limited to a skeptical, ethical individuality by showing that picture to be incomplete.

Indeed, such ethical individualism more closely approximates the contemporary philosophies of toleration, such as Rainer Forst’s, that Thompson juxtaposes with Montaignean tolerance “as a matter of negotium rather than as a matter of privacy, autonomy, and moral self-enactment” (p. 43). Amid the clever turns of Montaigne’s thought, we should not miss Thompson’s own ingenious reversal here, as the promise of a Montaignean politics of toleration depends on our willingness, at times, to look beyond the private, autonomous realm he is thought to have invented and undertake the work of negotiating the conflicts unfolding around us, as partisans who can see both sides of the question.