Disguised Vices

The range of enquiry is extensive, tracing the origins of early modern scepticism back to the ancients ... The author demonstrates an impressive range and depth of scholarship in his engagement with both primary sources and critical predecessors, in a style which is consistently lucid, readable, reflexive and thought-provoking. He shows how early modern debates on virtue, however remote in time, have a bearing on modern thought in their challenge to self-delusion and their affirmation of self-awareness and recognition. The impact of this illuminating book extends beyond its immediate audience in early modern scholarship, providing valuable critical insight into subsequent developments in the history of ideas in France and Europe * Comments from Prize Jury, R. H. Gapper Book Prize 2012 on the winning book *
the third part of Michael Moriarty's ambitiously and impressively conceived project on early modern thought in France ... Together, they constitute probably the most important single body of work on French seventeenth-century thought for at least a generation ... Unquestionably, Moriarty's work stands as a valuable and magisterial analysis in itself of virtue authentic or otherwise. But it also constitutes a crucial component in the wider historical and intellectual context * Henry Philips, The Seventeenth Century *
La Rochefoucauld's nuanced and complex account of human behaviour is renewed by Moriarty's exposition of the transcendant values that it both assimilates and throws into question, as the reader confronts this wilfully and artfully provocative text in which, somme toute, 'moral agency is largely an illusion'. * Richard Parish, French Studies *