Montaigne

The philosopher Georg W.F. Hegel proposed that history moves in pendulum swings, as thesis is met by antithesis. Over the next decades, these dark chapters of the presecution of minorities at home and slaughters abroad can be seen as engendering such a reaction. After reading critics of the Spanish empire the Frenchman Michael de Montaigne, in a famed essay on cannibals
web2.qatar.cmu.edu/~breilly2/odyssey/Montaigne.pdf summoned Saint Paul and wrote, “each man calls barbarians whatever is not his own practice.” Beyond such sheer relativism, a politics and ethics was needed that did not descend so easily into rank prejudice. In search of that framework, early modern thinkers turned to two related principles: radical egalitarianism and toleration. ` Page 32