The Political Thought of Étienne de la Boétie
The Political Thought of Étienne de la Boétie
By Murray N. Rothbard
[Introduction to The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude by Étienne de la Boétie, written 1552-53. Translated by Harry Kurz for the edition that carried Rothbard’s introduction, New York:
Free Life Editions, 1975. The pagination in the footnotes refers to
this 1975 edition. This online edition of Rothbard introduction 2002
© The Mises Institute, reprinted with the permission of the
Rothbard Estate]
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 Perigord region of southwest France, in 1530, to an
aristocratic family. His father was a royal official of the Perigord
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 Orleans, where he imbibed the spirit of free inquiry that
prevailed there. In this period of questing and religious ferment, the
University of Orleans 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 Orleans 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 Orleans,
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 with holding it from publication. It achieved a
considerable fame in local Perigordian 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 Francois 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 Niccolo 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, Apurely 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 naive 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 naively,
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 Francois(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'etat of Napoleon III. And we have seen how the Discourseinspired
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 Boeties’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 there- fore that,
at the very least, libertarian education of the public must include an
expos6 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
Boéte 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 populationB 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.
Murray N. Rothbard
[1]
Properly pronounced not, as might be thought, La Bo-ay- see, but rather
La Bwettie (with the hardt) as it was pronounced in the perigord
dialect of the region in which La Boetie lived. The definitive
discussion of the proper pronunciation may be found in Paul Bonnefon, Oeuvres Completes d'Estienne de La Boetie (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 Boetie
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 .:ampalgn to guard his dead
friend's reputation by dissociating him from the revolutionary
Huguenots who were claiming La Boetie'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 Boetie 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 Boetie. Closest to it is Bonnefon's "Introduction" to his Oeuvres Completes, op. cit., pp. xi-Ixxxv, 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 Boetie 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.
[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 Boetie, 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 Boetie. See Bartelemy
de Ligt, The Conquest of Violence (New York, E.P. Dutton & Co., 1938), pp. 105-6.
[20] Etienne de La Boetie, 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 Boetie'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 Boetie 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 Boetie'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.
[27]
Mesnard writes: "If La Boetie 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
Boetie 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.
[33]
David Hume was later to write in his essay “Of the Origin of
Government”: “Habit soon consolidates what other principles
of human I 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....
[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.
[43] Lewis, op. cit. pp. 56-57.
[46]
pp. 78-79. John Lewis declares that "La Boetie here put his finger on
one important element of tyranny which earlier writers had neglected
and which contemporary writers sometimes ne- glect." Lewis, op. cit., p. 56.
[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 Boetie'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. 3-46.