What reading Montaigne during the Second World War can teach us about just war

Datos Bibliográficos

ID12923213
AutoresDaniel R Brunstetter (0000-0002-3443-2552, University of California, Irvine, autor de correspondencia)
Año2022
Volumen18
Número3
Páginas355-374
Fecha de publicación2022-02-10
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaJournal of International Political Theory (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 1755-0882 • E-ISSN: 1755-1722
EditorialSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/17550882221074397
OpenAlexW4211209447
IdiomaEN
Referencias citadas27

Revisionist just war scholarship employs the rigors of analytical philosophy to make arguments about the deep morality of war. Accepting the individual and cosmopolitan are paramount to making sense of war as many revisionists do, this essay looks outside the just war canon to Montaigne—a sixteenth century French humanist hailed for his exploration of the self and cosmopolitan musings—for alternative insights. It explores how Montaigne was read during the Second World War by three intellectuals to make sense of war: Stefan Zweig, Jean Guéhenno, and François Mauriac. While Montaigne’s skepticism and turn to the self as an act of preservation was, in the 1930s, rejected as a strategy to combat rising authoritarianism in Europe by philosophers such as Max Horkheimer of the Frankfurt school, the thinkers studied here shed light on Montaigne as a source of active humanism based in reflective action that leads to Resistance. Building on trends in just war thinking that call for paying greater attention to the lived experience of war, the article identifies several psychological and moral processes—the inward turn, the cosmopolitan gaze, casting an existential anchor, and the humanist’s wager—to shed light on the doubt-laden process of making individual moral choices amidst the rising dogmatic forces that war tends to impose

Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · Existentialism · Humanism · Just war theory · Literature · Morality · Political science · Scholarship · Skepticism · Spanish Civil War · Hannah Arendt's Political Philosophy · Law · Philosophy · Political Theology and Sovereignty · War, Ethics, and Justification