[SNIP] Born in 1533, Montaigne lived through the massacres and mayhem of France’s Wars of Religion. The child of a wealthy Catholic father (his grandfather made a fortune in the herring trade) and a wealthy Jewish mother, he grew up as a skeptical Catholic with Protestants as companions and associates. Surveying the barbaric excesses of his time, he came to believe that the state was mostly an institution in which pride and ambition contested for power – yet, nevertheless, enforced an elemental discipline. It was this discipline alone that separated mankind from savage butchery. [SNIP] When evil and barbaric acts...