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A Redisocvery of Étienne de La
Boétie's notable
Étienne de La Boétie[1] has been
best remembered as the great and close friend of the eminent
essayist Michel de Montaigne, in one of history's most
notable friendships. But he would be better remembered, as
some historians have come to recognize, as one of the
seminal political philosophers, not only as a founder of
modern political philosophy in France but also for the
timeless relevance of many of his theoretical insights.
Étienne de la Boétie was born in Sarlat, in
the Périgord region of southwest France, in 1530, to
an aristocratic family. His father was a royal official of
the Périgord region and his mother was the sister of
the president of the Bordeaux Parlement (assembly of
lawyers). Orphaned at an early age, he was brought up by his
uncle and namesake, the curate of Bouilbonnas, and received
his law degree from the University of Orléans in
1553. His great and precocious ability earned La
Boétie a royal appointment to the Bordeaux Parlement
the following year, despite his being under the minimum age.
There he pursued a distinguished career as judge and
diplomatic negotiator until his untimely death in 1563, at
the age of thirty-two. La Boétie was also a
distinguished poet and humanist, translating Xenophon and
Plutarch, and being closely connected with the leading young
Pleiade group of poets, including Pierre Ronsard, Jean
Dorat, and Jean-
Antoine de Baif.
La Boétie's great contribution to political
thought was written while he was a law student at the
University of Orléans, where he imbibed the spirit of
free inquiry that prevailed there. In this period of
questing and religious ferment, the University of
Orléans was a noted center of free and untrammeled
discussion. La Boétie's main teacher there was the
fiery Anne du Bourg, later to become a Huguenot martyr, and
burned at the stake for heresy in 1559. Du Bourg was not yet
a Protestant, but was already tending in that direction, and
it was no accident that this University was later to become
a center of Calvinism, nor that some of La Boétie's
fellow students were to become Huguenot leaders. One of
these was La Boétie's best friend at the University,
and Du Bourg's favorite student, Lambert Daneau. The study
of law in those days was an exciting enterprise, a
philosophical search for truth and fundamental principles.
In the sixteenth century, writes Paul Bonnefon, "The
teaching of the law was a preaching rather than an
institution, a sort of search for truth, carried on by
teacher and student in common, and which they feverishly
undertook together, opening up an endless field for
philosophic speculation."[2] It was this kind of
atmosphere in the law schools of Orléans and other
leading French universities in which Calvin himself, two
decades earlier, had begun to develop his ideas of
Protestant Reform.[3] And it was in that kind of
atmosphere, as well, that lawyers were to form one of the
most important centers of Calvinist strength in France.
In the ferment of his law school days at Orléans,
Étienne de La Boétie composed his brief but
scintillating, profound and deeply radical Discourse of
Voluntary Servitude (Discours de la Servitude
Volontaire).[4] The Discourse was circulated in
manuscript form and never published by La Boétie. One
can speculate that its radical views were an important
reason for the author's withholding it from publication. It
achieved a considerable fame in local Périgordian
intellectual circles, however. This can be seen by the fact
that Montaigne had read the essay long before he first met
La Boétie as a fellow member of the Bordeaux
Parlement in 1559.
The first striking thing about the Discourse is the form:
La Boétie's method was speculative, abstract,
deductive. This contrasts with the rather narrowly legal and
historical argument of the Huguenot monarchomach writers
(those sectarian writers who argued for the right of
subjects to resist unjust rulers) of the 1570's and 1580's,
whom La Boétie resembled in his opposition to
tyranny. While the Huguenot monarchomachs, best exemplified
by François Hotman's Franco-Gallia (1573),
concentrated on grounding their arguments on real or
presumed historical precedents in French laws and
institutions, La Boétie's only historical examples
were numerous illustrations of his general principles from
classical antiquity, the very remoteness of which added to
the timeless quality of his discourse. The later Huguenot
arguments against tyranny tended to be specific and
concrete, rooted in actual French institutions, and
therefore their conclusions and implications were limited to
promoting the specific liberties against the State of
various privileged orders in French society. In contrast,
the very abstraction and universality of La Boétie's
thought led inexorably to radical and sweeping conclusions
on the nature of tyranny, the liberty of the people, and
what needed to be done to overthrow the former and secure
the latter.
In his abstract, universal reasoning, his development of
a true political philosophy, and his frequent references to
classical antiquity, La Boétie followed the method of
Renaissance writers, notably Niccolò Machiavelli.
There was, however, a crucial difference: whereas
Machiavelli attempted to instruct the Prince on ways of
cementing his rule, La Boétie was dedicated to
discussing ways to overthrow him and thus to secure the
liberty of the individual. Thus, Emile Brehier makes a point
of contrasting the cynical realism of Machiavelli with the
"juridical idealism" of Étienne de La
Boétie.[5] In fact, however, La
Boétie's concentration on abstract reasoning and on
the universal rights of the individual might better be
characterized as foreshadowing the political thinking of the
eighteenth century. As J. W. Allen writes, the Discourse was
an "essay on the natural liberty, equality and fraternity of
man." The essay "gave a general support to the Huguenot
pamphleteers by its insistence that natural law and natural
rights justified forcible resistance to tyrannous
government." But the language of universal natural rights
itself, Allen correctly adds, "served no Huguenot purpose.
It served, in truth, no purpose at all at the time, though,
one day, it might come to do so."[6] Or, as Harold
Laski trenchantly put it: "A sense of popular right such as
the friend of Montaigne depicts is, indeed, as remote from
the spirit of the time as the anarchy of Herbert Spencer in
an age committed to government interference."[7]
The contrast between the proto-eighteenth-century
speculative natural rights approach of La Boétie, and
the narrowly legalistic and concrete-historical emphasis of
the Huguenot writers who reprinted and used the Discourse,
has been stressed by W. F. Church. In contrast to the "legal
approach" which dominated political thought in
sixteenth-century France, Church writes, purely speculative
treatises, so characteristic of the eighteenth century, were
all but non-existent and at their rare appearances seem
oddly out of place. Church then mentions as an example of
the latter La Boétie's Discourse of Voluntary
Servitude.[8]
The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude is lucidly and
coherently structured around a single axiom, a single
percipient insight into the nature not only of tyranny, but
implicitly of the State apparatus itself. Many medieval
writers had attacked tyranny, but La Boétie delves
especially deeply into its nature, and into the nature of
State rule itself. This fundamental insight was that every
tyranny must necessarily be grounded upon general popular
acceptance. In short, the bulk of the people themselves, for
whatever reason, acquiesce in their own subjection. If this
were not the case, no tyranny, indeed no governmental rule,
could long endure. Hence, a government does not have to be
popularly elected to enjoy general public support; for
general public support is in the very nature of all
governments that endure, including the most oppressive of
tyrannies. The tyrant is but one person, and could scarcely
command the obedience of another person, much less of an
entire country, if most of the subjects did not grant their
obedience by their own consent.[9]
This, then, becomes for La Boétie the central
problem of political theory: why in the world do people
consent to their own enslavement? La Boétie cuts to
the heart of what is, or rather should be, the central
problem of political philosophy: the mystery of civil
obedience. Why do people, in all times and places, obey the
commands of the government, which always constitutes a small
minority of the society? To La Boétie the spectacle
of general consent to despotism is puzzling and
appalling:
I should like merely to understand how it happens that so
many men, so many villages, so many cities, so many nations,
sometimes suffer under a single tyrant who has no other
power than the power they give him; who is able to harm them
only to the extent to which they have the willingness to
bear with him; who could do them absolutely no injury unless
they preferred to put up with him rather than contradict
him. Surely a striking situation! Yet it is so common that
one must grieve the more and wonder the less at the
spectacle of a million men serving in wretchedness, their
necks under the yoke, not constrained by a greater multitude
than they... [10]
And this mass submission must be out of consent rather
than simply out of fear:
Shall we call subjection to such a leader cowardice? ...
If a hundred, if a thousand endure the caprice of a single
man, should we not rather say that they lack not the courage
but the desire to rise against him, and that such an
attitude indicates indifference rather than cowardice? When
not a hundred, not a thousand men, but a hundred provinces,
a thousand cities, a million men, refuse to assail a single
man from whom the kindest treatment received is the
infliction of serfdom and slavery, what shall we call that?
Is it cowardice? ... When a thousand, a million men, a
thousand cities, fail to protect themselves against the
domination of one man, this cannot be called cowardly, for
cowardice does not sink to such a depth... What monstrous
vice, then, is this which does not even deserve to be called
cowardice, a vice for which no term can be found vile enough
... ? [11]
It is evident from the above passages that La
Boétie is bitterly opposed to tyranny and to the
public's consent to its own subjection. He makes clear also
that this opposition is grounded on a theory of natural law
and a natural right to liberty. In childhood, presumably
because the rational faculties are not yet developed, we
obey our parents; but when grown, we should follow our own
reason, as free individuals. As La Boétie puts it:
"If we led our lives according to the ways intended by
nature and the lessons taught by her, we should be
intuitively obedient to our parents; later we should adopt
reason as our guide and become slaves to nobody."
[12] Reason is our guide to the facts and laws of
nature and to humanity's proper path, and each of us has "in
our souls some native seed of reason, which, if nourished by
good counsel and training, flowers into virtue, but which,
on the other hand, if unable to resist the vices surrounding
it, is stifled and blighted."[13] And reason, La
Boétie adds, teaches us the justice of equal liberty
for all. For reason shows us that nature has, among other
things, granted us the common gift of voice and speech.
Therefore, "there can be no further doubt that we are all
naturally free," and hence it cannot be asserted that
"nature has placed some of us in slavery."[14] Even
animals, he points out, display a natural instinct to be
free. But then, what in the world "has so, denatured man
that he, the only creature really born to be free, lacks the
memory of his original condition and the desire to return to
it?"[15]
La Boétie's celebrated and creatively original
call for civil disobedience, for mass non-violent resistance
as a method for the overthrow of tyranny, stems directly
from the above two premises: the fact that all rule rests on
the consent of the subject masses, and the great value of
natural liberty. For if tyranny really rests on mass
consent, then the obvious means for its overthrow is simply
by mass withdrawal of that consent. The weight of tyranny
would quickly and suddenly collapse under such a non-violent
revolution. (The Tory David Hume did not, unsurprisingly,
draw similar conclusions from his theory of mass consent as
the basis of all governmental rule.)
Thus, after concluding that all tyranny rests on popular
consent, La Boétie eloquently concludes that
"obviously there is no need of fighting to overcome this
single tyrant, for he is automatically defeated if the
country refuses consent to its own enslavement." Tyrants
need not be expropriated by force; they need only be
deprived of the public's continuing supply of funds and
resources. The more one yields to tyrants, La Boétie
points out, the stronger and mightier they become. But if
the tyrants "are simply not obeyed," they become "undone and
as nothing." La Boétie then exhorts the "poor,
wretched, and stupid peoples" to cast off their chains by
refusing to supply the tyrant any further with the
instruments of their own oppression. The tyrant, indeed, has
nothing more than the power that you confer upon him to
destroy you. Where has he acquired enough eyes to spy upon
you, if you do not provide them yourselves? How can he have
so many arms to beat you with, if he does not borrow them
from you? The feet that trample down your cities, where does
he get them if they are not your own? How does he have any
power over you except through you? How would he dare assail
you if he had not cooperation from you?
La Boétie concludes his exhortation by assuring
the masses that to overthrow the tyrant they need not act,
nor shed their blood. They can do so "merely by willing to
be free." In short,
Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do
not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him
over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you
will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has
been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break in
pieces.[16]
It was a medieval tradition to justify tyrannicide of
unjust rulers who break the divine law, but La
Boétie's doctrine, though non-violent, was in the
deepest sense far more radical. For while the assassination
of a tyrant is simply an isolated individual act within an
existing political system, mass civil disobedience, being a
direct act on the part of large masses of people, is far
more revolutionary in launching a transformation of the
system itself. It is also more elegant and profound in
theoretical terms, flowing immediately as it does from La
Boétie's insight about power necessarily resting on
popular consent; for then the remedy to power is simply to
withdraw that consent.[17]
The call for mass civil disobedience was picked up by one
of the more radical of the later Huguenot pamphlets, La
France Turquie (1575), which advocated an association of
towns and provinces for the purpose of refusing to pay all
taxes to the State.[18] But it is not surprising
that among the most enthusiastic advocates of mass civil
disobedience have been the anarchist thinkers, who simply
extend both La Boétie's analysis and his conclusion
from tyrannical rule to all governmental rule whatsoever.
Prominent among the anarchist advocates of non-violent
resistance have been Thoreau, Tolstoy, and Benjamin R.
Tucker, all of the nineteenth century, and all,
unsurprisingly, associated with the non-violent, pacifist
branch of anarchism. Tolstoy, indeed, in setting forth his
doctrine of non-violent anarchism, used a lengthy passage
from the Discourse as the focal point for the development of
his argument.[19] In addition, Gustav Landauer, the
leading German anarchist of the early twentieth century,
after becoming converted to a pacifist approach, made a
rousing summary of La Boétie's Discourse of Voluntary
Servitude the central core of his anarchist work, Die
Revolution (1919). A leading Dutch pacifist-anarchist of the
twentieth century, Barthelemy de Ligt, not only devoted
several pages of his Conquest of Violence to discussion and
praise of La Boétie's Discourse; he also translated
it into Dutch in 1933.[20]
Several historians of anarchism have gone so far as to
classify La Boétie's treatise itself as anarchist,
which is incorrect since La Boétie never extended his
analysis from tyrannical government to government per
se.[21] But while La Boétie cannot be
considered an anarchist, his sweeping strictures on tyranny
and the universality of his political philosophy lend
themselves easily to such an expansion. All this
considerably disturbed La Boétie's biographer, Paul
Bonnefon, who wrote of the Discourse:
After having failed to distinguish legitimate from
illicit authority, and having imprudently attacked even the
principle of authority, La Boétie put forth a
naïve illusion. He seems to believe that man could live
in a state of nature, without society and without
government, and discovered that this situation would be
filled with happiness for humanity. This dream is
puerile...[22]
To the acute analyst Pierre Mesnard, Bonnefon's alarm is
wide of the mark; Mesnard believes that La Boétie
defined tyranny as simply any exercise of personal
power.[23] In doing so, La Boétie went beyond
the traditional twofold definition of tyranny as either
usurpation of power, or government against the "laws" (which
were either defined as customary law, divine law, or the
natural law for the "common good" of the
people).[24] Whereas the traditional theory thus
focused only on the means of the ruler's acquiring power;
and the use made of that power, Mesnard points out that La
Boétie's definition of tyranny went straight to the
nature of power itself. Tyranny does not depend, as many of
the older theorists had supposed, on illicit means of
acquiring power, the tyrant need not be a usurper. As La
Boétie declares, "There are three kinds of tyrants:
some receive their proud position through elections by the
people, others by force of arms, others by
inheritance."[25] Usurpers or conquerors always act
as if they are ruling a conquered country and those born to
kingship "are scarcely any better, because they are
nourished on the breast of tyranny, suck in with their milk
the instincts of the tyrant, and consider the people under
them as their inherited serfs. As for elected they would
seem to be "more bearable," but they are always intriguing
to convert the election into a hereditary despotism, and
hence "surpass other tyrants ... in cruelty, because they
find no other means to impose this new tyranny than by
tightening control and removing their subjects so far from
any notion of liberty that even if the memory of it is fresh
it will soon be eradicated." In sum, La Boétie can
find no choice between these three kinds of tyrants:
For although the means of coming into power differ, still
the method of ruling is practically the same; those who are
elected act as if they were breaking in bullocks; those who
are conquerors make the people their prey; those who are
heirs plan to treat them as if they were their natural
slaves.[26]
Yet Mesnard's neat conclusion - that La Boétie
meant simply to indict all personal power, all forms of
monarchy, as being tyrannical - is inadequate.[27]
In the first place, in the passage quoted above La
Boétie indicts elected as well as other rulers.
Moreover, he states that, "having several masters, according
to the number one has, it amounts to being that many times
unfortunate."[28] These are not precisely
indictments of the concept of a republic, but they leave the
definition of tyranny in La Boétie sufficiently vague
so that one can easily press on the anarchist
conclusions.
Why do people continue to give their consent to
despotism? Why do they permit tyranny to continue? This is
especially puzzling if tyranny (defined at least as all
personal power) must rest on mass consent, and if the way to
overthrow tyranny is therefore for the people to withdraw
that consent. The remainder of La Boétie's treatise
is devoted to this crucial problem, and his discussion here
is as seminal and profound as it is in the earlier part of
the work.
The establishment of tyranny, La Boétie points
out, is most difficult at the outset, when it is first
imposed. For generally, if given a free choice, people will
vote to be free rather than to be slaves: "There can be no
doubt that they would much prefer to be guided by reason
itself than to be ordered about by the whims of a single
man."[29] A possible exception was the voluntary
choice by the Israelites to imitate other nations in
choosing a king (Saul). Apart from that, tyranny can only be
initially imposed by conquest or by deception. The conquest
may be either by foreign armies or by an internal factional
coup. The deception occurs in cases where the people, during
wartime emergencies, select certain persons as dictators,
thus providing the occasion for these individuals to fasten
their power permanently upon the public. Once begun,
however, the maintenance of tyranny is permitted and
bolstered by the insidious throes of habit, which quickly
accustom the people to enslavement.
It is true that in the beginning men submit under
constraint and by force; but those who come after them obey
without regret and perform willingly what their predecessors
had done because they had to. This is why men born under the
yoke and then nourished and reared in slavery are content,
without further effort, to live in their native
circumstance, unaware of any other state or right, and
considering as quite natural the condition into which they
are born ... the powerful influence of custom is in no
respect more compelling than in this, namely, habituation to
subjection.[30]
Thus, humanity's natural drive for liberty is finally
overpowered by the force of custom, for the reason that
native endowment, no matter how good, is dissipated unless
encouraged, whereas environment always shapes us in its own
way, whatever that might be in spite of nature's
gifts.[31] Therefore, those who are born enslaved
should be pitied and forgiven, "since they have not seen
even the shadow of liberty, and being quite unaware of it,
cannot perceive the evil endured through their own
slavery...." While, in short, "it is truly the nature of man
to be free and to wish to be so," yet a person's character
"instinctively follows the tendencies that his training
gives him..." La Boétie concludes that "custom
becomes the first reason for voluntary servitude." People
will grow accustomed to the idea that they have always been
in subjection, that their fathers lived in the same way;
they will think they are obliged to suffer this evil, and
will persuade themselves by example and imitation of others,
finally investing those who order them around with
proprietary rights, based on the idea that it has always
been that way.[32] [33]
Consent is also actively encouraged and engineered by the
rulers; and this is another major reason for the persistence
of civil obedience. Various devices are used by rulers to
induce such consent. One method is by providing the masses
with circuses, with entertaining diversions:
Plays, farces, spectacles, gladiators, strange beasts,
medals, pictures, and other such opiates, these were for
ancient peoples the bait toward slavery, the price of their
liberty, the instruments of tyranny. By these practices and
enticements the ancient dictators so successfully lulled
their subjects under the yoke, that the stupefied peoples,
fascinated by the pastimes and vain pleasures flashed before
their eyes, learned subservience as naïvely, but not so
creditably, as little children learn to read by looking at
bright picture books.[34]
Another method of inducing consent is purely ideological:
duping the masses into believing that the tyrannical ruler
is wise, just, and benevolent. Thus, La Boétie points
out, the Roman emperors assumed the ancient title of Tribune
of the People, because the concept had gained favor among
the public as representing a guardian of their liberties.
Hence the assumption of despotism under the cloak of the old
liberal form. In modern times, La Boétie adds, rulers
present a more sophisticated version of such propaganda, for
"they never undertake an unjust policy, even one of some
importance, without prefacing it with some pretty speech
concerning public welfare and common good."[35]
Reinforcing ideological propaganda is deliberate
mystification: "The kings of the Assyrians and ... the Medes
showed themselves in public as seldom as possible in order
to set up a doubt in the minds of the rabble as to whether
they were not in some way more than man..." Symbols of
mystery and magic were woven around the Crown, so that "by
doing this they inspired their subjects with reverence and
admiration.... It is pitiful to review the list of devices
that early despots used to establish their tyranny; to
discover how many little tricks they employed, always
finding the populace conveniently gullible.... [36]
At times, tyrants have gone to the length of imputing
themselves to the very status of divinity: "they have
insisted on using religion for their own protection and,
where possible, have borrowed a stray bit of divinity to
bolster up their evil ways."[37] Thus, "tyrants, in
order to strengthen their power, have made every effort to
train their people not only in obedience and servility
toward themselves, but also in adoration." [38]
At this point, La Boétie inserts his one and only
reference to contemporary France. It is on its face
extremely damaging, for he asserts that "our own leaders
have employed in France certain similar
[quasidivine] devices, such as toads, fleurs-de-lys,
sacred vessels, and standards with flames of gold
[oriflammes]."[39] He quickly adds that in
this case he does not "wish, for my part, to be
incredulous," for French kings "have always been so generous
in times of peace and so valiant in time of war, that from
birth they seem not to have been created by nature like many
others, but even before birth to have been designated by
Almighty God for the government and preservation of this
kingdom." [40] In the light of the context of the
work, it is impossible not to believe that the intent of
this passage is satirical, and this interpretation is
particularly confirmed by the passage immediately following,
which asserts that "even if this were not so," he would not
question the truth of these French traditions, because they
have provided such a fine field for the flowering of French
poetry. "Certainly I should be presumptuous," he concludes,
surely ironically, "if I tried to cast slurs on our records
and thus invade the realm of our poets."[41]
Specious ideology, mystery, circuses; in addition to
these purely propagandistic devices, another device is used
by rulers to gain the consent of their subjects: purchase by
material benefits, bread as well as circuses. The
distribution of this largesse to the people is also a
method, and a particularly cunning one, of duping them into
believing that they benefit from tyrannical rule. They do
not realize that they are in fact only receiving a small
proportion of the wealth already filched from them by their
rulers. Thus:
Roman tyrants ... provided the city wards with feasts to
cajole the rabble.... Tyrants would distribute largesse, a
bushel of wheat, a gallon of wine, and a sesterce: and then
everybody would shamelessly cry, "Long live the King!" The
fools did not realize that they were merely recovering a
portion of their own property, and that their ruler could
not have given them what they were receiving without having
first taken it from them. A man might one day be presented
with a sesterce and gorge himself at the public feast,
lauding Tiberius and Nero for handsome liberality, who on
the morrow, would be forced to abandon his property to their
avarice, his children to their lust, his very blood to the
cruelty of these magnificent emperors, without offering any
more resistance than a stone or a tree stump. The mob has
always behaved in this way - eagerly open to bribes...
[42]
And La Boétie goes on to cite the cases of the
monstrous tyrannies of Nero and Julius Caesar, each of whose
deaths was deeply mourned by the people because of his
supposed liberality.
Here La Boétie proceeds to supplement this
analysis of the purchase of consent by the public with
another truly original contribution, one which Professor
Lewis considers to be the most novel and important feature
of his theory.[43] This is the establishment, as it
were the permanent and continuing purchase, of a hierarchy
of subordinate allies, a loyal band of retainers,
praetorians and bureaucrats. La Boétie himself
considers this factor "the mainspring and the secret of
domination, the support and foundation of
tyranny."[44] Here is a large sector of society
which is not merely duped with occasional and negligible
handouts from the State; here are individuals who make a
handsome and permanent living out of the proceeds of
despotism. Hence, their stake in despotism does not depend
on illusion or habit or mystery; their stake is all too
great and all too real. A hierarchy of patronage from the
fruits of plunder is thus created and maintained: five or
six individuals are the chief advisors and beneficiaries of
the favors of the king. These half-dozen in a similar manner
maintain six hundred "who profit under them," and the six
hundred in their turn "maintain under them six thousand,
whom they promote in rank, upon whom they confer the
government of provinces or the direction of finances, in
order that they may serve as instruments of avarice and
cruelty, executing orders at the proper time and working
such havoc all around that they could not last except under
the shadow of the six hundred..." [45]
In this way does the fatal hierarchy pyramid and permeate
down through the ranks of society, until "a hundred
thousand, and even millions, cling to the tyrant by this
cord to which they are tied." In short, when the point is
reached, through big favors or little ones, that large
profits or small are obtained under a tyrant, there are
found almost as many people to whom tyranny seems
advantageous as those to whom liberty would seem
desirable... Whenever a ruler makes himself a dictator, all
the wicked dregs of the nation ... all those who are
corrupted by burning ambition or extraordinary avarice,
these gather around him and support him in order to have a
share in the booty and to constitute themselves petty chiefs
under the big tyrant.[46]
Thus, the hierarchy of privilege descends from the large
gainers from despotism, to the middling and small gainers,
and finally down to the mass of the people who falsely think
they gain from the receipt of petty favors. In this way the
subjects are divided, and a great portion of them induced to
cleave to the ruler, "just as, in order to split wood, one
has to use a wedge of the wood itself." Of course, the train
of the tyrant's retinue and soldiers suffer at their
leader's hands, but they "can be led to endure evil if
permitted to commit it, not against him who exploits them,
but against those who like themselves submit, but are
helpless." In short, in return for its own subjection, this
order of subordinates is permitted to oppress the rest of
the public.[47]
How is tyranny concretely to be overthrown, if it is
cemented upon society by habit, privilege and propaganda?
How are the people to be brought to the point where they
will decide to withdraw their consent? In the first place,
affirms La Boétie, not all the people will be deluded
or sunk into habitual submission. There is always a more
percipient elite who will understand the reality of the
situation; "there are always a few, better endowed than
others, who feel the weight of the yoke and cannot restrain
themselves from attempting to shake it off." These are the
people who, in contrast to "the brutish mass," possess clear
and far-sighted minds, and "have further trained them by
study and learning." Such people never quite disappear from
the world: "Even if liberty had entirely perished from the
earth, such men would invent it."[48]
Because of the danger these educated people represent,
tyrants often attempt to suppress education in their realms,
and in that way those who "have preserved their love of
freedom, still remain ineffective because, however numerous
they may be, they are not known to one another; under the
tyrant they have lost freedom of action, of speech, and
almost of thought; they are alone in their
aspiration."[49] Here La Boétie anticipates
such modern analysts of totalitarianism as Hannah Arendt.
But there is hope; for still the elite exists, and, culling
examples once again from antiquity, La Boétie
maintains that heroic leaders can arise who will not fail
"to deliver their country from evil hands when they set
about their task with a firm, whole-hearted and sincere
intention."[50] The evident task, then, of this
valiant and knowledgeable elite is to form the vanguard of
the revolutionary resistance movement against the despot.
Through a process of educating the public to the truth, they
will give back to the people knowledge of the blessings of
liberty and of the myths and illusions fostered by the
State.
In addition to rousing the people to the truth, the
opposition movement has another vital string to its bow: the
unnatural lives lived by the despots and their hierarchy of
favorites. For their lives are miserable and fearful and not
happy. Tyrants live in constant and perpetual fear of the
well-deserved hatred they know is borne them by every one of
their subjects. [51] Courtiers and favorites live
miserable, crawling, cringing lives every moment of which is
bent on servilely fawning upon the ruler on whom they
depend. Eventually, as enlightenment spreads among the
public, the privileged favorites will begin to realize the
true misery of their lot, for all their wealth can be seized
from them at any moment should they fall out of step in the
race for the favors of the king. When they "look at
themselves as they really are ... they will realize clearly
that the townspeople, the peasants whom they trample under
foot and treat worse than convicts or slaves ... are
nevertheless, in comparison with themselves, better off and
fairly free."[52]
Although he does not explicitly say so, it seems to be La
Boétie's contention that the spread of enlightenment
among the public will not only generate refusal of consent
among the mass, but will also aid its course immeasurably by
splitting off, by driving a wedge inside, a portion of the
disaffected privileged bureaucracy.[53]
There is no better way to conclude a discussion of the
content of La Boétie's notable Discourse of Voluntary
Servitude than to note Mesnard's insight that "for La
Boétie as for Machiavelli, authority can only be
grounded on acceptance by the subjects: except that the one
teaches the prince how to compel their acquiescence, while
the other reveals to the people the power that would lie in
their refusal."[54]
After graduating from law school, Étienne de La
Boétie took up an eminent career as a royal official
in Bordeaux. He never published the Discourse, and as he
pursued a career in faithful service of the monarch, never a
hint did he express along the lines of his earlier treatise.
Certainly one of the reasons for Montaigne's stout
insistence on his friend's conservatism and monarchical
loyalty is that La Boétie had changed his political
views by the time they met around 1559. Indeed, in late
1562, shortly before he died, La Boétie wrote but did
not publish a manuscript forgotten and lost until recent
years, in which he, with moderate conservatism, advised the
State to punish Protestant leaders as rebels, to enforce
Catholicism upon France, but also to reform the abuses of
the Church moderately and respectably by the agency of the
king and his Parlements. Protestants would then be forced to
convert back to Catholicism or leave the
country.[55]
Certainly it is far from unusual for a young university
student, eagerly caught up in a burst of free inquiry, to be
a fiery radical, only to settle into a comfortable and
respectable conservatism once well entrenched in a career
bound to the emoluments of the status quo. But there seems
to be more here than that. For the very abstractness of La
Boétie's argument in the Discourse, the very
Renaissance-like remoteness of the discussion from the
concrete problems of the France of his day, while
universalizing and radicalizing the theory, also permitted
La Boétie, even in his early days, to divorce theory
from practice. It permitted him to be sincerely radical in
the abstract while continuing to be conservative in the
concrete. His almost inevitable shift of interest from the
abstract to concrete problems in his busy career thereby
caused his early radicalism to drop swiftly from sight as if
it had never existed.[56]
But if his abstract method permitted La Boétie to
abandon his radical conclusions rapidly in the concrete
realm, it had an opposite effect on later readers. Its very
timelessness made the work ever available to be applied
concretely in a radical manner to later problems and
institutions. And this was precisely the historical fate of
La Boétie's Discourse. It was first published, albeit
anonymously and incompletely, in the radical Huguenot
pamphlet, Reveille-Matin des François (1574),
probably written by Nicholas Barnaud with the collaboration
of Theodore Beza.[57] The full text with the
author's name appeared for the first time two years later,
in a collection of radical Huguenot essays compiled by a
Calvinist minister at Geneva, Simon Goulard. [58]
Montaigne was furious at the essay's publication under
revolutionary Huguenot auspices. He had intended to publish
it himself. Now, however, not only did he refuse to do so,
but he tried to refurbish La Boétie's conservative
reputation by successively averring that his friend had been
eighteen, and then sixteen, years old at the time of the
essay's writing. For their part, however, even the Huguenots
used La Boétie in gingerly fashion. "Attractive as
was the spirit of La Boétie's essay," writes Harold
Laski, "avowed and academic republicanism was meat too
strong for the digestion of the time. Not that La
Boétie was entirely without influence; but he was
used as cautiously as an Anglican bishop might, in the
sixties, have an interest in Darwinism."[59]
Almost completely forgotten in the more peaceful days of
the first half of the seventeenth century in France, the
Discourse became widely known again during the Enlightenment
of the eighteenth century, through being printed as a
supplement to Montaigne's essays, but was not particularly
influential. Finally, and unsurprisingly, the essay found
its metier in the midst of the French Revolution, when it
was twice reprinted. Later the radical Abbe de Lammenais
reprinted the Discourse with a "violent" preface of his own,
and the same was done by another writer in 1852 to strike
back at the coup d'état of Napoleon III. And we have
seen how the Discourse inspired the non-violent wing of the
anarchist movement in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. As the centuries went on, the abstract argument
of the Discourse continued to exert a fascination for
radicals and revolutionaries. The speculative thought of the
young law student was taking posthumous revenge upon the
respectable and eminent official of the Bordeaux
Parlement.
La Boétie's Discourse has a vital importance for
the modern reader - an importance that goes beyond the sheer
pleasure of reading a great and seminal work on political
philosophy, or, for the libertarian, of reading the first
libertarian political philosopher in the Western world. For
La Boétie speaks most sharply to the problem which
all libertarians - indeed, all opponents of despotism - find
particularly difficult: the problem of strategy. Facing the
devastating and seemingly overwhelming power of the modem
State, how can a free and very different world be brought
about? How in the world can we get from here to there, from
a world of tyranny to a world of freedom? Precisely because
of his abstract and timeless methodology, La Boétie
offers vital insights into this eternal problem.
In the first place, La Boétie's insight that any
State, no matter how ruthless and despotic, rests in the
long run on the consent of the majority of the public, has
not yet been absorbed into the consciousness of
intellectuals opposed to State despotism. Notice, for
example, how many anti-Communists write about Communist rule
as if it were solely terror imposed from above on the angry
and discontented masses. Many of the errors of American
foreign policy have stemmed from the idea that the majority
of the population of a country can never accept and believe
in Communist ideas, which must therefore be imposed by
either a small clique or by outside agents from existing
Communist countries. In modern political thought, only the
free-market economist Ludwig von Mises has sufficiently
stressed the fact that all governments must rest on majority
consent.
Since despotic rule is against the interests of the bulk
of the population, how then does this consent come about?
Again, La Boétie highlights the point that this
consent is engineered, largely by propaganda beamed at the
populace by the rulers and their intellectual apologists.
The devices - of bread and circuses, of ideological
mystification - that rulers today use to gull the masses and
gain their consent, remain the same as in La Boétie's
days. The only difference is the enormous increase in the
use of specialized intellectuals in the service of the
rulers. But in this case, the primary task of opponents of
modem tyranny is an educational one: to awaken the public to
this process, to demystify and desanctify the State
apparatus. Furthermore, La Boétie's analysis both of
the engineering of consent and of the role played by
bureaucrats and other economic interests that benefit from
the State, highlights another critical problem which many
modem opponents of statism have failed to recognize: that
the problem of strategy is not simply one of educating the
public about the "errors" committed by the government. For
much of what the State does is not an error at all from its
own point of view, but a means of maximizing its power,
influence, and income. We have to realize that we are facing
a mighty engine of power and economic exploitation, and
therefore that, at the very least, libertarian education of
the public must include an exposé of this
exploitation, and of the economic interests and intellectual
apologists who benefit from State rule. By confining
themselves to analysis of alleged intellectual "errors,"
opponents of government intervention have rendered
themselves ineffective. For one thing, they have been
beaming their counter-propaganda at a public which does not
have the equipment or the interest to follow the complex
analyses of error, and which can therefore easily be
rebamboozled by the experts in the employ of the State.
Those experts, too, must be desanctified, and again La
Boétie strengthens us in the necessity of such
desanctification.
The libertarian theorist Lysander Spooner, writing over
four hundred years after La Boétie, propounded the
similar view that the supporters of government consisted
largely of "dupes" and "knaves":
The ostensible supporters of the Constitution, like the
ostensible supporters of most other governments, are made up
of three classes, viz.: 1. Knaves, a numerous and active
class, who see in the government an instrument which they
can use for their own aggrandizement or wealth. 2. Dupes - a
large class, no doubt - each of whom, because he is allowed
one voice out of millions in deciding what he may do with
his own person and his own property, and because he is
permitted to have the same voice in robbing, enslaving, and
murdering others, that others have in robbing, enslaving,
and murdering himself, is stupid enough to imagine that he
is a "free man," a "sovereign"; that this is a "free
government"; "a government of equal rights," "the best
government on earth," and such like absurdities. 3. A class
who have some appreciation of the evils of government, but
either do not see how to get rid of them, or do not choose
to so far sacrifice their private interests as to give
themselves seriously and earnestly to the work of making a
change.[60]
The prime task of education, then, is not simply abstract
insight into governmental "errors" in advancing the general
welfare, but debamboozling the public on the entire nature
and procedures of the despotic State. In that task, La
Boétie also speaks to us in his stress on the
importance of a perceptive, vanguard elite of libertarian
and anti-statist intellectuals. The role of this "cadre" -
to grasp the essence of statism and to desanctify the State
in the eyes and minds of the rest of the population - is
crucial to the potential success of any movement to bring
about a free society. It becomes, therefore, a prime
libertarian task to discover, coalesce, nurture, and advance
its cadre - a task of which all too many libertarians remain
completely ignorant. For no amount of oppression or misery
will lead to a successful movement for freedom unless such a
cadre exists and is able to educate and rally the
intellectuals and the general public.
There is also the hint in La Boétie of the
importance of finding and encouraging disaffected portions
of the ruling apparatus, and of stimulating them to break
away and support the opposition to despotism. While this can
hardly play a central role in a libertarian movement, all
successful movements against State tyranny in the past have
made use of such disaffection and inner conflicts,
especially in their later stages of development.
La Boétie was also the first theorist to move from
the emphasis on the importance of consent, to the strategic
importance of toppling tyranny by leading the public to
withdraw that consent. Hence, La Boétie was the first
theorist of the strategy of mass, non-violent civil
disobedience of State edicts and exactions. How practical
such a tactic might be is difficult to say, especially since
it has rarely been used. But the tactic of mass refusal to
pay taxes, for example, is increasingly being employed in
the United States today, albeit in a sporadic form. In
December 1974 the residents of the city of Willimantic,
Connecticut, assembled in a town meeting and rejected the
entire city budget three times, finally forcing a tax cut of
9 percent. This is but one example of growing public
revulsion against crippling taxation throughout the
country.
On a different theme, La Boétie provides us with a
hopeful note on the future of a free society. He points out
that once the public experiences tyranny for a long time, it
becomes inured, and heedless of the possibility of an
alternative society. But this means that should State
despotism ever be removed, it would be extremely difficult
to reimpose statism. The bulwark of habit would be gone, and
statism would be seen by all for the tyranny that it is. If
a free society were ever to be established, then, the
chances for its maintaining itself would be excellent.
More and more, if inarticulately, the public is
rebelling, not only against onerous taxation but - in the
age of Watergate - against the whole, carefully nurtured
mystique of government. Twenty years ago, the historian,
Cecilia Kenyon, writing of the Anti-Federalist opponents of
the adoption of the U.S. Constitution, chided them for being
"men of little faith" - little faith, that is, in a strong
central government.[61] It is hard to think of
anyone having such unexamined faith in government today. In
such an age as ours, thinkers like Étienne de La
Boétie have become far more relevant, far more
genuinely modern, than they have been for over a
century.
Notes
[1] Properly pronounced not, as might be thought,
La Bo-ay-see, but rather La Bwettie (with the hard t) as it
was pronounced in the Périgord dialect of the region
in which La Boétie lived. The definitive discussion
of the proper pronunciation may be found in Paul Bonnefon,
Oeuvres Completes d'Estienne de La Boétie (Bordeaux:
C. Gounouilhou, and Paris: J. Rouam et Cie., 1892), pp.
385-6.
[2] Bonnefon, op. cit., p. xlvi.
[3] Pierre Mesnard, L 'Essor de la Philosophie
Politique Au XVle Siecle (Paris: Boivin et Cie., 1936), p.
391.
[4] Having remained long in manuscript, the
actual date of writing the Discourse of Voluntary Servitude
remains a matter of dispute. It seems clear, however, and
has been so accepted by recent authorities, that Montaigne's
published story that La Boétie wrote the Discourse at
the age of eighteen or even of sixteen was incorrect.
Montaigne's statement, as we shall see further below, was
probably part of his later campaign to guard his dead
friend's reputation by dissociating him from the
revolutionary Huguenots who were claiming La Boétie's
pamphlet for their own. Extreme youth tended to cast the
Discourse in the light of a work so youthful that the
radical content was hardly to be taken seriously as the
views of the author. Internal evidence as well as the
erudition expressed in the work make it likely that the
Discourse was written in 1552 or 1553, at the age of
twenty-two, while La Boétie was at the University.
See Bonnefon, op. cit., pp. xxxvi-xxxvii; Mesnard, op. cit.,
pp. 390-1; and Donald Frame, Montaigne: A Biography (New
York: Harcourt Brace, & World, 1965), p. 71. There is no
biography of La Boétie. Closest to it is Bonnefon's
"Introduction" to his Oeuvres Completes, op. cit., pp.
xi-lxxxv, later reprinted as part of Paul Bonnefon,
Montaigne et ses Amis (Paris: Armand Colin et Cie., 1898),
I, pp. 103-224.
[5] Emile Brehier, Histoire de la Philosophie,
Vol. I: Moyen Age et Renaissance, cited in Mesnard, op.
cit., p. 404n. Also see Joseph Banere, Estienne de La
Boétie contre Nicholas Machiavel (Bordeaux, 1908),
cited in ibid.
[6] J. W. Allen, A History of Political Thought
in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1960),
p. 314.
[7] Harold J. Laski, "Introduction," A Defence of
Liberty Against Tyrants (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith,
1963), p. 11.
[8] William Fan Church, Constitutional Thought in
Sixteenth-Century France (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1941), p. 13 and 13n.
[9] David Hume independently discovered this
principle two centuries later, and phrased it with his usual
succinctness and clarity:
Nothing appears more surprising to those who consider
human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the easiness
with which the many are governed by the few; and the
implicit submission, with which men resign their own
sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. When we
enquire by what means this wonder is effected, we shall
find, that, as Force is always on the side of the governed,
the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It
is therefore, on opinion only that government is founded;
and this maxim extends to the most despotic and military
governments, as well as to the most free and most
popular.
David Hume, "Of the First Principles of Government," in
Essays, Literary, Moral and Political.
[10] See p. 46 below.
[11] p. 48.
[12] p. 55.
[13] pp. 55-56.
[14] p. 56.
[15] p. 58.
[16] pp. 50-53.
[17] The historian Mesnard writes that this
theory is "rigorous and profound," that the critics have
never fully grasped its point, and that "it is the humanist
solution to the problem of authority." Mesnard, op. cit., p.
400.
[18] See Laski, op. cit., p. 29; Allen, op. cit.,
p. 308.
[19] Thus, Tolstoy writes:
The situation of the oppressed should not be compared to
the constraint used directly by the stronger on the weaker,
or by a greater number on a smaller. Here, indeed it is the
minority who oppress the majority, thanks to a lie
established ages ago by clever people, in virtue of which
men despoil each other....
Then, after a long quote from La Boétie, Tolstoy
concludes,
It would seem that the workers, not gaining any advantage
from the restraint that is exercised on them, should at last
realize the lie in which they are living and free themselves
in the simplest and easiest way: by abstaining from taking
part in the violence that is only possible with their
co-operation.
Leo Tolstoy, The Law of Love and the Law of Violence (New
York: Rudolph Field, 1948), pp. 42-45.
Furthermore, Tolstoy's Letter to a Hindu, which played a
central role in shaping Ghandi's thinking toward mass
non-violent action, was heavily influenced by La
Boétie. See Bartelemy de Ligt, The Conquest of
Violence (New York, E.P. Dutton & Co., 1938), pp.
105-6.
[20] Etienne de La Boétie, Vrijwillige
Slavernij (The Hague, 1933, edited by Bart. de Ligt). Cited
in Bart. de Ligt, op. cit., p. 289. Also see ibid., pp.
104-6. On Landauer, see ibid., p. 106, and George Woodcock,
Anarchism (Cleveland, Ohio: World Pub. Co., 1962), p.
432.
[21] Among those making this error was Max
Nettlau, the outstanding historian of anarchism and himself
an anarchist. Max Nettlau, Der Vorfruhling der Anarchie;
Ihre Historische Entwicklung den Anfangen bis zum Jahre 1864
(Berlin, 1925). On this see Bert F. Hoselitz, "Publisher's
Preface," in G.P. Maximoff, ed., The Political Philosophy of
Bakunin (Glencoe, Dl.: The Free Press, 1953), pp. 9-10.
The first historian of anarchism, E. V. Zenker, a
non-anarchist, made the same mistake. Thus, he wrote of La
Boétie's Discourse, that it contained: "A glowing
defence of Freedom, which goes so far that the sense of the
necessity of authority disappears entirely. The opinion of
La Boétie is that mankind does not need government;
it is only necessary that man should really wish it, and he
would find himself happy and free again, as if by
magic."
E. V. Zenker, Anarchism (London: Methuen & Co.,
1898), pp. 15-16.
[22] Bonnefon, op. cit., "Introduction," p.
xliii. In short, even Bonnefon, reacting gingerly to the
radical nature and implications of La Boétie's work,
classified it as anarchist.
[23] Mesnard, op. cit., p. 395-6.
[24] On the classical and medieval concepts of
tyranny, see John D. Lewis, "The Development of the Theory
of Tyrannicide to 1660" in Oscar Jaszi and John D. Lewis,
Against the Tyrant: The Tradition and Theory of Tyrannicide
(Glencoe, Dl.: The Free Press, 1957), pp. 3-96, esp. pp.
3ff., 20ff.
[25] p. 58.
[26] pp. 58-59.
[27] Mesnard writes: "If La Boétie does
not distinguish between monarchy and tyranny (as he was
charged by Bonnefon), it is precisely because the two are
equally illegitimate in his eyes, the first being only a
special case of the second." Mesnard, op. cit., pp. 395-6.
La Boétie also levels a general attack on monarchy
when he questions whether monarchy has any place among true
commonwealths, "since it is hard to believe that there is
anything of common wealth in a country where everything
belongs to one master." p. 46.
[28] p. 46.
[29] p. 59.
[30] p. 60.
[31] p. 61.
[32] pp. 64-65.
[33] David Hume was later to write in his essay
"Of the Origin of Government": "Habit soon consolidates what
other principles of human nature had imperfectly founded;
and men, once accustomed to obedience, never think of
departing from that path, in which they and their ancestors
have constantly trod. . . ."
[34] pp. 69-70
[35] p. 71.
[36] p. 72.
[37] p. 73.
[38] p. 75.
[39] p. 74.
[40] Ibid.
[41] pp. 74-75. Bonnefon seizes the occasion to
claim his subject as, deep down and in spite of his radical
deviations, a good conservative Frenchman at heart: "It was
not the intention of the young man to attack the established
order. He formally excepts the king of France from his
argument, and in terms which are stamped by deference and
respect." Bonnefon, op. cit., p. xli. See also the critique
of Bonnefon's misinterpretation by Mesnard, op. cit., p.
398.
[42] p. 70.
[43] Lewis, op. cit. pp. 56-57.
[44] p. 77.
[45] p. 78.
[46] pp. 78-79. John Lewis declares that "La
Boétie here put his finger on one important element
of tyranny which earlier writers had neglected and which
contemporary writers sometimes neglect." Lewis, op. cit., p.
56.
[47] pp. 79-80.
[48] p. 65.
[49] p. 66.
[50] Ibid.
[51] pp. 67-68.
[52] pp. 79-80. Also, pp. 79-86
[53] See the thoughtful conclusion in Mesnard,
op. cit., p. 404. Also see Oscar Jaszi, "The Use and Abuse
of Tyrannicide," in Jaszi and Lewis, op. cit., pp.
254-5.
[54] Mesnard, op. cit., p. 400.
[55] This was La Boétie's Memoir
Concerning the Edict of January, 1562. See Frame, op. cit.,
pp. 72-3, 345.
[56] Mesnard, op. cit., pp. 405-6.
[57] See J.H.M. Salmon, The French Religious Wars
in English Political Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1959), p. 19n.
[58] The third volume of the Memoires de L 'estat
de France (1576). See Bonnefon, "Introduction," op. cit.,
pp. xlix-l.
[59] Laski, op. cit., p. 24.
[60] Lysander Spooner, No Treason: The
Constitution of No Authority (Colorado Springs, Co.: Ralph
Myles Pub., 1973), p. 18.
[61] Cecilia Kenyon, "Men of Little Faith: the
Anti-Federalists on the Nature of Representative
Government," William and Mary Quarterly (1955), pp.
3&endash;46.
The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary
Servitude by Étienne de la Boétie, written
1552-53, is translated by Harry Kurz for the edition that
carried Rothbard's introduction, "The Political Thought of
Étienne de la Boétie," New York: Free Life
Editions, 1975. The pagination in the footnotes refers to
this edition.
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Ending Tyranny Without Violence