The man who wrote two books that helped propel him to the presidency has his favorites. “The writings of Lincoln, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi and Nelson Mandela, Mr. Obama found, were ‘particularly helpful’ when ‘what you wanted was a sense of solidarity,’ adding ‘during very difficult moments, this job can be very isolating.'”
Tag: 01.16.17
Montaigne Was The Inventor Of Liberalism. But What Do We Really Know About Him?
“What do I know?” was Montaigne’s beloved motto, meaning: What do I really know? And what do we really know about him now? We may vaguely know that he was the first essayist, that he retreated from the world into a tower on the family estate to think and reflect, and that he wrote about cannibals (for them) and about cruelty (against it). He was considered by Claude Lévi-Strauss, no less, to be the first social scientist, and a pioneer of relativism—he thought that those cannibals were just as virtuous as the Europeans they offended, that customs vary equably from place to place.