Financial History Issue 116 (Winter 2016) | Page 12
EDUCATORS’ PERSPECTIVE
Montaigne’s Essay On Coaches:
Old World Greed in the New World
“Personal Finance: Philosophy and
Practice” is a unique course offered at
Eastern Washington University. Unlike
other personal finance courses, this course
requires students to read excerpts from
the works of philosophers on topics such
as wealth, greed, self-interest and other
finance-related topics. One of my [Brian’s] favorite readings in this course is
the essay On Coaches by Michel de Montaigne. Students, however, struggle with
the essay because of its structure, which
María Garcés has described as a disconcerting, rambling, inextricable chaos. In
spite of its structure, reading On Coaches
is well worth the effort because it focuses
the reader’s attention on a number of
issues that are still relevant today without
resorting to the religious justifications for
expansion and conquest that prevailed in
Montaigne’s day and age.
Sarah Bakewell describes Montaigne
as “a nobleman, government official and
winegrower who lived in the Périgord area
of southwestern France from 1533 to 1592.”
She goes on to note that a destructive religious civil war cast a shadow over Montaigne while he was writing his famous
Essays. Those essays, according to Montaigne chronicler Saul Frampton, rank
alongside Shakespeare’s plays and Cervantes’s Don Quixiote as “the most important literary works of the Renaissance.”
In his introductory note to On Coaches,
translator M.A. Screech provides an important insight into the essay: “Coaches…were
the symbols of luxury. They are contrasted
with the simplicity of those American
Indian cultures which had never invented
the wheel, had no horses and used gold for
its beauty alone. Their simplicity emphasized the horrors of the Spanish conquest
of Peru, with its naked cruelty and avarice.”
Garcés sees coaches as representing “the
devastating intrusion of the Old World into
the New World. The war chariots of Europe
launching their attack upon the peoples of
America and their civilizations, which did
not know the wheel.”
Frampton takes the metaphor further
arguing that coaches “…represent a separation from others, economically and
10 FINANCIAL HISTORY | Winter 2016 | www.MoAF.org
proxemically, and hence epitomize the
individualistic, acquisitive estrangement
of [Montaigne’s] age.” The Spanish conquest of Latin America was all about personal aggrandizement.
As summer approached in 1532, Atahualpa was heading south to the city of
© Stefano Bianchetti/Corbis
By Brian Grinder and Dan Cooper
Portrait of Michel de Montaigne, author of On Coaches.