Available in English for the first time, Imperfect Garden is both an approachable intellectual history and a bracing treatise on how we should understand and experience our lives. In it, one of France's most prominent intellectuals explores the foundations, limits, and possibilities of humanist thinking. Through his critical but sympathetic excavat "Tzvetan Todorov's book on the humanist legacy is written very much in the spirit of Montaigne. . . . It offers a wide-ranging meditation on the open-endedness of human life, on the freedom and the sociability that are its only givens, and on the minimal ethic of autonomy and responsibility to others that they ought to inspire. Yet the book is by no means a hymn to man. Todorov harbors no illusions about the mix of good and bad that enters into the fabric of all that is human. . . . [He] . . . speaks throughout in his own voice, with rare breadth of sympathy and with a fine eye for the complexities of human experience."---Charles Larmore, The New Republic