The purpose of our research is to highlight the relationship, hidden by the specialisation of historical disciplines, between the
the constraints imposed on thought by modern skepticism and the restrictions on civil behaviour at the dawn of modernity. This
duality between intellectual discipline and affective formation opens up the the space for a prehistory of the critique of the faculty of judgment. We focus on practical texts, containing rules of self-awareness and self-consciousness and community duties, without excluding speculative meditation on the place of the individual in society. Thus, we will be able to account for the ongoing exchange between the justifying logos and teaching praxis. The new social and affective relationships and affective relationships of a civility, which will impose in the centuries to come the criteria of judgement of action and thought, are expressed in philosophical and pedagogical texts. Philosophy reflects these changes by meditating on the role of the prince and the duties of the great, while pedagogy sketches the classical portraits of the courtier. A point of encounter between the two directions of analysis is the civic skepticism to be found in the digressions of Montaigne’s Essays (1588) by Montaigne (1533-1592) or in the scholastic organisation of Wisdom (1604) by Pierre Charron (1541-1603)