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Cycles

Difference and Alterity in La Boétie, Montaigne, Spinoza and Mendelssohn

By Willi Goetschel

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£24.99

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Published 31 December 2026

About this book

Traces a shared critical agenda highlighting the emancipatory force of difference and otherness

  • Offers a new way to look at the critical role of difference and alterity in modern philosophy
  • Examines the emergence of the project of rethinking difference and alterity from the 16th to the 18th century
  • Explores the thought of La Boétie, Montaigne, Spinoza, and Mendelssohn
  • Produces a new view on the emergence of critical thought from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment and its relevance today
  • Offers new readings of La Boétie, Montaigne, Spinoza, and Mendelssohn that shows how their trajectories form a constellation critical to the understanding modern philosophy

This book redirects our attention to a group of thinkers whose project of rethinking difference and alterity assumes new critical significance at the current juncture. Reaching from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, the interventions of La Boétie, Montaigne, Spinoza and Mendelssohn are not just history (albeit one problematically assimilated to canonical views), but offer new resources for moving past the politics of tolerance, charity, and recognition.

These thinkers argue for an understanding of otherness that renegotiates the terms of difference and alterity more radically as the conditions of our own existence. From La Boétie’s exposure of ‘voluntary servitude’ as the mechanism behind the tyranny of despotic authority, to the ideas of Montaigne, Spinoza and Mendelssohn, these thinkers argue for the critical importance of the deep constitutive nexus between self and other: identity, difference and otherness.

Reviews

In this engagingly written and deeply erudite study, Goetschel stages a compelling conversation between Boétie, Montaigne, Spinoza, and Mendelssohn on difference and alterity. Through his impressively skilful tracking of the movement of the liberatory and constructive potentialities of alterity and difference in their writings, Goetschel reveals the power of this constellation of thinkers to profoundly reframe contemporary thought.
This book is a humane, erudite, and philosophically sophisticated attempt to bring back to life a strand of early modern intellectual history, starting with La Boëtie and extending to Moses Mendelssohn, which construed freedom as based on an acceptance of alterity. The contemporary relevance of this project is obvious.
Willi Goetschel’s central claim, that familiar texts can be reconsidered and less familiar texts can be seen in a new constellation, leads to a compelling case for seeing human difference and alterity as central issues in a period marked by colonial projects, religious conflicts, and complex cultural exchanges. Goetschel examines a history of resistant texts that deserve renewed scrutiny.
Table of contents

Acknowledgments
Abbreviations

Difference and Alterity: An Introduction

1. La Boétie’s Discourse on Voluntary Servitude

2. Montaigne’s Project

3. Difference and Alterity in Spinoza

4. Spinoza’s Dream

5. Diversity and Pluralism: Mendelssohn’s Difference

6. Meaning and Translation: Mendelssohn’s ‘Living Script’


Bibliography
Index

About the author

Willi Goetschel

Willi Goetschel is Professor of German and Philosophy at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Heine and Critical Theory (Bloomsbury, 2019), The Discipline of Philosophy and the Invention of Modern Jewish Thought (Fordham, 2013), Spinoza’s Modernity: Mendelssohn, Lessing, and Heine (Wisconsin, 2004) and Constituting Critique: Kant’s Writing as Critical Praxis (Duke, 1994).

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