Why We Are Restless surveys the lives and ideas of four French philosophers—Montaigne, Pascal, Rousseau, and Tocqueville—to find the starting point of our peculiarly American pursuit of happiness. While the 1500s may seem a strange place to begin such a search, husband and wife co-writers Benjamin and Jenna Silber Storey make a powerful case that the invention of “immanent contentment” in early modern France has everything to do with the infinite restlessness of the postmodern United States.  

Immanent contentment is the idea that “life simply—not the philosophic life or the holy life or the heroic life, but simply life—can be enough to satisfy the longings of the human heart.” And the way to achieve this satisfaction is a mode of living characterized by “moderation through variation: an arrangement of our dispositions, our pursuits, and our pleasures that is calculated to keep us interested, ‘at home,’ and present in the moment, but also dispassionate, at ease, and in balance.”

According to the Storeys, Montaigne was the original proponent of immanent contentment. He rejected a life of politics and power and was ambivalent to religion. Instead, he retreated to the pastimes and hobbies of his country home and sought to cultivate a life of pleasures and comforts, alongside the delights of socializing with like-minded peers. His modern invention was the idea that society can exist apart from the “traditional forms of human association: city and kingdom, family and church.” Accordingly, he developed a new ideal for friendship as a relationship of intimacy and full acceptance, like you might hope to find with God, but without judgement or the need for forgiveness.  These new values shaped bourgeois culture. Such a pursuit of immanent contentment can take place only under conditions of material prosperity and only for persons without much responsibility as caregivers, citizens, or believers.

Pascal challenged Montaigne, arguing that immanent contentment is impossible because the “basic choice for modern man is between sadness papered over with diversion, and the anguished but clear-eyed search for God.” Pascal observed the attempts of people to live according to Montaigne’s ideas, and he noticed deep longing and dissatisfaction in the hearts of people whose lives were outwardly very pleasurable and comfortable. He thus concluded that the only option for true happiness is to give oneself over wholeheartedly to the pursuit of transcendence. For Pascal, human lives ought not to be a ramble through pleasures and distractions, but be like “comets,” burning brightly unto eternity, “beginning in anguish and culminating in joy.”

Rousseau takes up Pascal’s idea that life should be lived in full-on devotion to something greater than the self, but he rejects the claim that transcendence is the thing to seek. Rather, he advocates searching for the “sentiment of existence,” found in living life to the fullest. He looks for fulfillment not in Montaigne’s simple and social life, nor in Pascal’s yearning for God and the world to come, but in radical and bohemian experiments in living, designed to solve the problem of bourgeois sadness and restlessness. He looks for contentment in politics and power, in women and love, and in philosophy and solitude, though he fails to be satisfied with each in turn.

Tocqueville chronicles how the search for immanent contentment ceases to be merely a private project, but “an all-pervasive social and political phenomenon” in America. The Storeys argue that immanent contentment “often stands as a shared anthropological assumption” which is found across all of our political divisions, “orienting the arguments of both the right and the left.” On their view, “many of the debates of modern politics can be understood as arguments about the political vision that best serves the individual pursuit of immanent contentment.”