Montaigne and the Life of Freedom

More than any other early modern text Montaigne''s Essais have come to be associated with the emergence of a distinctively modern subjectivity defined in opposition to the artifices of language and social performance. Felicity Green challenges this interpretation with a compelling revisionist reading of Montaigne''s text centred on one of his deepest but hitherto most neglected preoccupations: the need to secure for himself a sphere of liberty and independence that he can properly call his own or himself. Montaigne and the Life of Freedom restores the Essais to its historical context by examining the sources character and significance of Montaigne''s project of self-study. That project as Green shows reactivates and reshapes ancient practices of self-awareness and self-regulation in order to establish the self as a space of inner refuge tranquillity and dominion free from the inward compulsion of the passions and from subjection to external objects forces and persons.