Montaigne is an emotional, not a contractual, liberal. He didn’t give a damn about democracy, or free speech, or even property rights. They were outside his experience or his sense of possibility. Even equality before the law he saw as impossible—not even aristocrats could get it in the regime under which he lived. That’s why he made the crack about the towers of Notre-Dame. But he had a rich foundational impulse toward the emotions that make a decent relation between man and state possible—a far-reaching skepticism about authority, compassion for those who suffer, and a hatred of cruelty.
