WHAT HAPPENED TO CIVILITY: The Promise and Failure of Montaigne’s Modern Project, hard disagree with author

WHAT HAPPENED TO CIVILITY: The Promise and Failure of Montaigne’s Modern Project
ANN HARTLE
University of Notre Dame Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$26.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 1* of five

What is civility, and why has it disappeared? Ann Hartle analyzes the origins of the modern project and the Essays of Michel de Montaigne to discuss why civility is failing in our own time.

In this bold book, Ann Hartle, one of the most important interpreters of sixteenth-century French philosopher Michel de Montaigne, explores the modern notion of civility—the social bond that makes it possible for individuals to live in peace in the political and social structures of the Western world—and asks, why has it disappeared? Concerned with the deepening cultural divisions in our postmodern, post-Christian world, she traces their roots back to the Reformation and Montaigne’s Essays. Montaigne’s philosophical project of drawing on ancient philosophy and Christianity to create a new social bond to reform the mores of his culture is perhaps the first act of self-conscious civility. After tracing Montaigne’s thought, Hartle returns to our modern society and argues that this framing of civility is a human, philosophical invention and that civility fails precisely because it is a human, philosophical invention. She concludes with a defense of the central importance of sacred tradition for civility and the need to protect and maintain that social bond by supporting nonpoliticized, nonideological, free institutions, including and especially universities and churches.

What Happened to Civility is written for readers concerned about the deterioration of civility in our public life and the defense of freedom of religion. The book will also interest philosophers who seek a deeper understanding of modernity and its meaning, political scientists interested in the meaning of liberalism and the causes of its failure, and scholars working on Montaigne’s Essays.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: If I ever needed an inoculation against conservatism, this under-200pp book was the full and complete spectrum version of it.

In looking for reviews of the book to see if I was crazy, reading it wrong, or simply bilious when I was reading it, I found my proof I was not here: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/review-of-politics/article/abs/ann-hartle-what-happened-to-civility-the-promise-and-failure-of-montaignes-modern-project-notre-dame-in-university-of-notre-dame-press-2022-pp-ix-178/CE68BDF228EB95F3533F945414C7E785 The Review of Politics is paywalled, as one expects from conservative-leaning publications, but an excerpt is available at the link. It contains the words that "civility is inadequate to replace traditional moral virtues" and "{c}ivility is not self-sustaining: as a merely human invention, it lacks the kind of transcendent support possessed by the traditional moral virtues, which found their grounding and stability in their orientation towards the divine."

Of course the reviewer says a lot more about the book, but for my purposes (trying to see what it is I found appalling about the read) this was a showstopper. The divine is a human invention. My bedrock reality will not accommodate the assertion that y'all's god is real; one of us is wrong, and I'm quite sure it's you.

We're so far apart, Author Hartle, that all I can say is your writing on a sentence level is clear and your arguments to my non-expert mind is completely self-consistent.

And you're wrong.