What reading Montaigne during the Second World War can teach us about just war
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12923213 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Daniel R Brunstetter (0000-0002-3443-2552, University of California, Irvine, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2022 |
| Volume | 18 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 355-374 |
| Publication date | 2022-02-10 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of International Political Theory (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1755-0882 • E-ISSN: 1755-1722 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/17550882221074397 |
| OpenAlex | W4211209447 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 27 |
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
Montaigne and the Tolerance of Politics
Cosmopolitan War
Killing in War
War Stories
“A ‘sucking chest wound’ is nature's way of telling you to slow down….”
Keeping Tradition Alive
Sad and Laughable and Strange
From war memoirs to milblogs
Looking Inward Together
War and moral stupidity
Joy and war
The Case for the Nonideal Morality of War
Montaigne's Conception of the Self
Pacifism is dirty
The Montaignian Moment
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |