‘The First Liberal’: Kwame Anthony Appiah on Montaigne

“Liberalism, at its core, is not so much a doctrine as a disposition, a habit of mind, and it’s compounded of two principal elements: An abhorrence of cruelty and a sense of the provisional nature of human knowledge. These two currents run through Montaigne’s own sensibility, and to see how distinctive it was, it helps to recall [his place and] times” – 16th-century France, wracked by religious wars.