Abstract

Michel de Montaigne was among the first to call for toleration as a political principle. He justifies toleration on a skeptical basis, without appealing to metaphysics or relying on custom alone. Though his views were influential on Locke and Montesquieu, these later thinkers appealed to metaphysical notions of natural or divine rights when they formulated institutions to secure toleration. Few, if any, contemporary political theorists find these metaphysical foundations credible, yet they are unwilling to abandon the rights originally supported by metaphysics. Montaigne is therefore a major asset today in exploring ways to justify toleration on non-transcendent grounds. ;Montaigne combines skeptical epistemology with moral psychology to construct a politics that allows a private sphere of free conscience and free political judgment while securing public peace. His skepticism undermines motives for intolerance, while his phenomenological and substantive view of the human good as sensual self-seeking supplies reasons based on self-interest to be tolerant. Montaigne's skepticism does not require the self to defer to any notion outside itself, while his moral psychology establishes a self-interest in toleration. Toleration is grounded not on self-denial but on self-knowledge. Tolerating others and self-interest are united; Montaigne makes a positive claim on its behalf, while his substantive view of the human good makes him a skeptic without being nihilistic. ;The dissertation also shows Montaigne's important but under-appreciated place in the history of ideas. Modern skepticism arose through Montaigne, and he contributed to the emergence of epistemology as a preoccupation of modern thought. Montaigne was also the first to make the subjective self the center of ethical and epistemological thought. He created the notion of the noble savage, which is often attributed to Rousseau. While many of these innovations have been noticed in isolation from one another, interweaving his whole thought makes the political stakes of Montaigne's thought emerge, especially his revolutionary arguments for toleration and a private sphere.