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

Dados Bibliográficos

ID12923213
AutoresDaniel R Brunstetter (0000-0002-3443-2552, University of California, Irvine, autor correspondente)
Ano2022
Volume18
Fascículo3
Páginas355-374
Data de publicação2022-02-10
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoJournal of International Political Theory (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 1755-0882 • E-ISSN: 1755-1722
EditoraSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/17550882221074397
OpenAlexW4211209447
IdiomaEN
Referências 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