ABSTRACT
Devoted to the promise of the modern age, the French intellectuals of the eighteenth century, the philosophes, began by outspokenly repudiating the Stoicism of resignation and self-denial that they had inherited from times past. Intellectually, what Rousseau sought in his Discourse on Inequality was to marry two seemingly quite disparate intellectual traditions: the old world of Stoicism with the new world of philosophical history. Michel de Montaigne’s reversal of the Stoics on the emotions had direct implications for the moral outlook of his intellectual heirs, especially for the humanitarian concern that figures so prominently in the ranks of Enlightenment intellectuals. One can practice Stoicism without being a Stoic. Such was Montaigne’s fate or rather his strategy for controlling his own fate; such would also be the eventual fate and strategy of his eighteenth-century admirers. It is easy to abjure Stoicism when all goes well; less easy when formidable problems arise. Stoicism would have its revenge.
