Quotation
Last reviewed:
“Each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice.”
Michel de Montaigne · Renaissance humanism · Renaissance · 1580
What does it mean?
The usual reading takes the sentence as a diagnosis of ethnocentrism: the word barbarian often means only not us, and so cannot do the moral work people want from it. He uses reports of Brazilian peoples to embarrass French cruelty, including torture in the wars of religion. A rival reading thinks he is saying no practice can be judged, which would blunt his own attack on European atrocity. The line is in On the Cannibals, a sceptical essay, not a claim that every custom is excellent.
Did Michel de Montaigne really say this?
The library’s label is Paraphrase or translation. Screech's translation of On the Cannibals, Essays book one, chapter 31. Montaigne is puncturing European certainty about the peoples of the Americas. The French is his. This wording is a translation.
Where it comes from
Essays I.31
Approximate date: 1580.
How to use it
A comment under a local news story in Leicester calls a neighbour's mourning rite barbaric because it is not the rite the commenter grew up with. Montaigne's sentence asks whether any description has been given beyond the difference. It does not require the commenter to approve every practice; It requires the word to mean something more than unfamiliar, especially when the commenter's own society has cruelties it does not call by that name.
A mindset reading
The line is a check on a label, not a proof that judgement is impossible. He thinks some acts are cruel, and he thinks Europeans are bad at seeing which ones are theirs. Using the sentence to shut down every criticism of harm exports a scepticism he did not hold in that blanket form; The target is the automatic promotion of one's own custom to the status of nature.
Understand the philosophy
On the Cannibals belongs to his sceptical testing of what Europeans think they know about the world opened by travel. The key term is barbarism, a charge he turns around: calling others barbarous by the standard of local habit is not yet a moral judgement, and by a standard of cruelty the home country may be worse. Screech translates the essay's sting without turning it into modern relativism as a system. The chapter is full of reports he knows are second-hand.
- society
- knowledge
- ethics
FAQ
What does it mean?
The usual reading takes the sentence as a diagnosis of ethnocentrism: the word barbarian often means only not us, and so cannot do the moral work people want from it. He uses reports of Brazilian peoples to embarrass French cruelty, including torture in the wars of religion. A rival reading thinks he is saying no practice can be judged, which would blunt his own attack on European atrocity. The line is in On the Cannibals, a sceptical essay, not a claim that every custom is excellent.
Did Michel de Montaigne really say this?
Paraphrase or translation. Screech's translation of On the Cannibals, Essays book one, chapter 31. Montaigne is puncturing European certainty about the peoples of the Americas. The French is his. This wording is a translation.
Which work is it in?
Essays I.31 Approximate date: 1580.