Authors’ Response: Liberal Education and the Restless Soul

We are grateful to the contributors for exemplifying the kind of conversation we hoped Why We Are Restless would inspire. Each embraces the spirit of the book, taking seriously our effort to clarify the Tocquevillean paradox: that citizens of modern liberal democracies are freer and more prosperous than almost anyone in human history, yet are restlessly discontent in ways that unsettle both our individual lives and our capacity for free and orderly politics. We seek to understand the origin and nature of this discontent through the work of Montaigne, Pascal, Rousseau, and Tocqueville—who are likewise concerned with inquietude. Zuckert, Halikias, Yarbrough, and Callanan assess our scholarly work by the high standard of their own penetrating readings of those authors. Their lucid summaries of and objections to our arguments helped clarify our own thoughts. In particular, they prompted further thought about two important questions: first, what it means to write in public about the questions our authors raise; and second, what contribution liberal education can make to ameliorating the problems we describe. Zuckert seeks to offer a more Montaignean reading of Montaigne than our own. We welcome this approach and appreciate her attention to the detail of Montaigne’s text, consideration of his intentions, and defense of his distinctiveness as a thinker. Her central criticism concerns our contention that the search for “unmediated approbation” is a central theme of Montaigne’s thought. We use this term to describe the core of Montaigne’s distinctive understanding of friendship, patterned on his experience with Étienne de La Boétie. We believe that thinking about friendship so understood can be useful for assessing some distinctive social aspirations of modern people. Although Zuckert acknowledges that friendship was important to Montaigne, she writes that after La Boétie’s death “there is no evidence in the Essays or his biography that he actively sought another such friend” (379). Instead, she claims that Montaigne retired to the solitude of his estate and that it is “such a solitary life that he recommends to his readers” (379). She is further concerned that our characterization of the aim of Montaignean