Abstract: We will investigate the role reason plays in the appreciation of the savage other in Montaigne’s Americanist essays. We will thus enter the discussion on the meanings of an imaginary conquest of the Amerindians by Greco-Roman Antiquity (III, 6). We shall see to what extent the indirect answer given in these essays to the laboétien problem of voluntary servitude may or may not give another direction to questions surrounding reason, and savage majority.
