Michel de Montaigne (1533–92) is often considered a pioneering thinker for his skepticism, his “essay” style of explorative writing, and his appealing conception of the self that places the moral focus on the individual. He rejects religious fanaticism and urges freedom of conscience, toleration, and the creation of a private sphere of free judgment.

Toleration and combating religious fanaticism are timely issues, but Biancamaria Fontana tells us that her book does not aim to shed light on these topics for today or to articulate Montaigne's place in the development of liberalism. Rather, it situates Montaigne's theoretical inquiries in the immediate politics of sixteenth-century France. Fontana limits her focus because her conclusion, which is really her presupposition, is that Montaigne has nothing to tell us about “allegedly timeless” truths or anything outside his immediate context (p. 141). The author regretfully notes that seeing Montaigne as a precursor of liberalism is “perhaps inevitable,” but she deems this irrelevant to his “own intellectual project” (p. 141).

Accordingly, the book's strength is in its accounts of the political disputes of Montaigne's France and the thought of his contemporaries. One learns many interesting facts about specific sixteenth-century French political controversies and the thought of Pasquier, l'Hospital, La Boétie, and Duplessis-Mornay, and of the circle around Henry of Navarre. In some sections, however, so much space is dedicated to others that treatments of Montaigne's thought are short and sketchy.

It is puzzling that Fontana takes such a narrow view of Montaigne's “own intellectual project” since she notes throughout the book how he is distinctive and so unlike other thinkers of his age. For example, she describes him as having “invented a radically novel, breathtakingly modern way of writing about the self” (p. 1), based on “a distinctive personal approach” (p. 10) containing “some radical, novel insights” (p. 142) that led to “a novel, highly distinctive type of work” (p. 12) characterized by “the extreme originality and depth of Montaigne's experiment” (p. 22). She avers that Montaigne's “complex account of human interaction stood in sharp contrast with the argument that dominated most contemporary writings on the subject” (p. 115). Indeed, she finds Montaigne to be so radical that “[h]e did not write in order to reach an audience as much as create one, in the same way in which he had fashioned himself through his book” (p. 25). But if Montaigne had to create a new audience because he deemed his contemporaries unready or unable to hear his message, does not his “intellectual project” in some sense need to be understood, not merely in light of, but as attempting to transcend, his immediate political context? Fontana's own account of what she calls Montaigne's “ambition to construct an independent standpoint from which to express his critical judgment” (p. 22) based on “his own universal being” (p. 23) seems to return us to the “allegedly timeless” truths that she rejects.

However this may be, Montaigne's “intellectual project,” as Fontana sees it, is about overcoming the cruelty and corruption inherent in his age but which was exacerbated by its civil wars. To remedy this situation, Fontana says that Montaigne aimed to build “sociability” and “trust” where they did not exist. In the course of doing this, Montaigne articulated a new vision that “evolved” from the ancient philosophic “ideal of independence” into the “vision of an entire community of independent agents, living freely under the law, a peaceful society held together by the civil bonds of economic exchanges and by legal agreements” (pp. 62, 63). Throw in Montaigne's calls for toleration and freedom of conscience, and it begins to sound like the ethos of liberalism.

The political paradox as Montaigne sees it, however, is that society needs artificial customs and untrue opinions to unite it, but that people are often persecuted in the name of these instituted ideals. Fanatical or misguided application of values and opinions leads to cruelty. In healthy polities this is not a problem because there people agree to what Fontana calls “the obligation to share the prejudices of our fellow human beings,” while nonetheless protecting “the absolute autonomy of the individual conscience” (p. 44). Combining these two seemingly opposite imperatives is difficult.

Part of Montaigne's answer to the problem of cultivating toleration, on which Fontana focuses, is to communicate openly and truthfully with one's neighbors. Here, she describes Montaigne's Essais as a model for engagement and openness, a written embodiment of the policy he recommends. One wonders, however, if Montaigne is truly fully open. Sometimes he says he is; other times, such as in his initial note to the reader, he says he is not. Fontana herself acknowledges that Montaigne “strategically concealed” some points and “artfully presented” others (pp. 15, 11). And if total openness is the way, according to the author, to freedom of conscience, how does total openness square with Montaigne's irony?

A more important part of the answer, which Fontana only touches on, is for individuals to communicate with, or essay, themselves. Essaying oneself is necessary, according to Montaigne, because people hold unreflective opinions that are, in Fontana's words, “often only distantly related to the real circumstances and interest of the people who hold them” (p. 98). Essaying oneself is essential to clarifying one's real interests and is thus paramount to finding a solid foundation on which to build trust with others. Unfortunately, this book does not explore the necessity of self-exploration and thus never specifies what one's real interests are or systematically probes how Montaigne says they should be determined.

One might well aver, however, that promoting self-exploration and the discoveries to which it leads—whatever they are—is the core of Montaigne's “intellectual project.” Fontana clearly states that the “radical change in individual attitudes” (p. 102) that Montaigne seeks is “not immediately accessible to political power” (p. 100); government control is “bound to prove inadequate” in bringing about this change (p. 103). Fontana is also clear that “the only effective ‘cure’” for the lack of trust “involved a long-term process of reeducation of society as a whole” (p. 100). Since this change cannot be done through politics, it must be done by Montaigne one reader at a time over the “long term.” This process of long-term moral reeducation is the heart of Montaigne's intellectual project, and it takes us far from his immediate political context on which Fontana focuses.

Two omissions create further difficulties for this book's argument. First, although the subtitle is on “authority,” Fontana focuses only on political, not religious, authority. This is surprising given the religious wars that dominated Montaigne's context. Second, although this book cites an admirable amount, though not all, of the relevant scholarship, it does not engage it. For example, to stay on the question of religion, the author acknowledges that Montaigne's views of religion are contested but simply asserts that Montaigne was a sincerely believing Christian (pp. 9, 19, 65). She nicely recounts Montaigne's argument that all opinions come from human imagination but repeatedly says that Montaigne exempts Christianity from this. The only gesture toward opposing interpretations is the assertion that any other possibility is “far fetched” because “involvement with skeptical philosophy was not incompatible” with “religious sentiments” or a “general attachment to Christian values” (p. 93). This lack of argument is crucial because Fontana asserts that Montaigne's desire to build human sociability is based on “Christian universalism” (p. 65). She repeatedly cites his “values,” such as humility, love, sociability, and peace, that she calls Christian, but could Montaigne not possibly hold these “values” on different grounds, as Karl Löwith and Hans Blumenberg have argued that many early modern thinkers did? Indeed, Fontana cites pagan sources for these values as well.

This lack of thoroughness leads her to a torturous rationale for why Montaigne does not use the phrase “original sin” (p. 125) and to unwarranted conflations, such as these two uses of parenthesis: “good fortune (in other words, to God's grace)” and “law of nature (the law of God)” (pp. 123, 131). Not only is no evidence cited to justify these conflations, but the former one contradicts her claim that “[u]nlike other Christian writers, Montaigne was uninterested in establishing any association between ‘fortune’ and ‘providence’” (p. 126).

Finally, Fontana tries to clarify Montaigne's unorthodox Christianity by describing it as close to the Franciscan tradition. This is a novel interpretation, and one needing exploration. Yet the book offers not a single piece of evidence or argument for this view. It simply states three characteristics of this tradition that one assumes she thinks Montaigne shares, including “a benevolent vision of human nature” and “a militant commitment to Charity” (p. 47). It is hard to recognize Montaigne in these characteristics.

In conclusion, this book valuably recreates for us some of Montaigne's immediate political context. In doing this, it argues that this is all there is to Montaigne's project, while at the same time indicating otherwise.