Umanesimo, scetticismo, società borghese: Horkheimer lettore di Montaigne

In some of his works, Horkheimer investigates the connections between modern philosophy and the historical development of bourgeois society, exposing the contradictions that smoulder at the heart of the bourgeois order. One of the most interesting of these texts is the 1938 essay on Montaigne. This article explores Horkheimer‟s interpretation of Montaigne and of scepticism of the modern age, throwing light upon its precision and fecundity within the sphere of Montaignian studies and underlining, in particular, the convergences and divergences between various ideas of Montaigne and the Protestant reform, points of contact between scepticism and humanism, and the fundamental Horkheimerian distinction between the scepticism of the 16th century and that of his contemporaries.