ABSTRACT
Christopher Smith enters a discussion of Montaigne and money with the claim that “the Essais display little awareness of economic problems, whether in their immediate or their theoretical aspects” (Smith 1981:147). This is not quite true. While economics does not make up the principal theme of any single chapter, Montaigne demonstrates his concern with the problematics of money and exchange through a studied concern to avoid them. In the first chapter of her book, Les Essais de Montaigne: miroir et procès de leur temps (1984), Géralde Nakam outlines the nucleus of Montaigne’s ideas about economics. It is evident from her presentation, as from Montaigne’s own testimony, that a complex psychology of exchange informed his relationship with the mercantilist economy as well as his social and intellectual relationships. These relationships in turn laid the groundwork for Montaigne’s own textual psychology, making it one of the earliest instances of a bourgeois individualist subjectivity-in spite of his antagonism to bourgeois culture.
