2. Étienne de la Boétie: A Discourse on ‘A Discourse on Voluntary Servitude’
It seems apt to begin my series on the history of radical French political philosophy with one of the most obscure and explicitly radical of the pre-Lumières authors. Étienne de la Boétie (1530–1563), now known primarily through his friendship with Michel de Montaigne (to be covered tomorrow), could be considered the grandfather of Anarchism, due in no small part to the composition of his Discourse on Voluntary Servitude. He wrote the essay at some point between the ages of 16 and 23, and it circulated privately in radical Huguenot (French Protestant) spheres until its eventual posthumous publication in 1576. The conflicting accounts of when A Discourse on Voluntary Servitude was written are primarily due to Montaigne arguing that the essay was juvenilia written by a young, immature la Boétie, probably in order to protect his friend’s reputation. Regardless, it is a stunning work without even considering that it was written by someone approximately my age nearly 500 years ago.
The main argument of A Discourse on Voluntary Servitude is that all monarchical power is derived from the subjects themselves, and that they only need to stop serving the tyrant in order to return to their natural state of freedom. La Boétie holds that even the most powerful general is but a single person, and they uphold their power through general public consent, obedience, and subservience. He writes:
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, but simply, it would seem, delighted and charmed by the name of one man alone whose power they need not fear, for he is evidently the one person whose qualities they cannot admire because of his inhumanity and brutality toward them. (la Boétie, 42)
The application of the essay to social situations other than those involving a single despotic king or queen has been a subject of contention, with many denying the essays contemporary relevance. However, it is worth noting that La Boétie believes that “there are three kinds of tyrants; some receive their proud position through elections by the people, others by force of arms, others by inheritance.” (la Boétie, 53) This implies that even those who are elected can be tyrants, and he adds “as for having several masters, according to the number one has, it amounts to being that many times unfortunate.” (la Boétie, 41–2) This may influence the way we apply la Boétie’s analysis to our contemporary situations with regards to representative democracy.
La Boétie acknowledges that the serfs around him “suffer plundering, wantonness, cruelty, not from an army, not from a barbarian horde, on account of whom they must shed their blood and sacrifice their lives, but from a single man.” (la Boétie, 43–4) While he considers the notion that these people may be cowardly in their complacency, he argues that it is something much worse than mere cowardice that compels people to spend their lives in servitude, for “cowardice does not sink to such a depth.” (la Boétie, 44) Instead, people actually desire and consent to their own subjection.
The question arises — why do people willingly allow themselves to be exploited? La Boétie offers two answers, one ideological and the other a matter of pure force. Firstly, people do not rise up against their oppressors because they are provided with the proverbial ‘bread and circuses’. He writes:
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. […] Tyrants would distribute largess, 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.(la Boétie, 65)
Rulers, whether they are Lords, the Church, or the State, occasionally provide entertainment and goods to their servants in order to keep them satiated, without the people realizing that these feasts and spectacles provided by rulers are a mere fraction of what was taken from them in the forms of surplus value from labour, tithes, and taxes. This social system is presented as ‘the way it must be’, and any provisions afforded to working people are considered gifts from a benevolent leader.
The internalization of the master’s ideology is further strengthened by the forces of custom, given that people who are born into certain conditions are led to believe that ‘it has always been this way’. He writes:
Men 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. (la Boétie, 60)
As a result, “one should pity those who, at birth, arrive with the yoke upon their necks. We should exonerate and forgive them, 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.” (la Boétie, 59) Historical amnesia is deliberately weaponized by the state in the form of propaganda, and serves to reproduce exploitative relations.
However, la Boétie recognizes that there are, and will always be, a vanguard of people who recognize these unjust social structures, and who will refuse to be pacified by the fraction of the products of their labour given back to them by their masters. In a particularly beautiful and inspiring passage, he writes:
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 men who never become tamed under subjection and who always […] cannot prevent themselves from peering about for their natural privileges and from remembering their ancestors and their former ways. These are in fact the men who, possessed of clear minds and far-sighted spirit, are not satisfied, like the brutish mass, to see only what is at their feet, but rather look about them, behind and before, and even recall the things of the past in order to judge those of the future, and compare both with their present condition. These are the ones who, having good minds of their own, have further trained them by study and learning. Even if liberty had entirely perished from the earth, such men would invent it. For them slavery has no satisfactions, no matter how well disguised. (la Boétie, 60–1)
The first step toward freedom is thus the development of consciousness of your exploitation and the degree to which you are arbitrarily serving your master.
Unfortunately, there is a very real barrier presented to those who combat the ideological supports for unjust systems. Because one person could never maintain an entire exploitative regime by themselves, they construct a hierarchical and bureaucratic system of supporters who reproduce and profit off of mass exploitation. These are to be understood as the tyrants’ main associates, the people they reign over, and the people they administer in turn. La Boétie notes that there “are found almost as many people to whom tyranny seems advantageous as those to whom liberty would seem desirable.” (la Boétie, 72) The apparatus is therefore upheld by people who profit off the exploitative relationship, with civil servants and the military alike upholding the interests of the tyrant over those of their fellow workers. [As a side note, it would be interesting to perform a comparative analysis of Max Weber and la Boétie’s conceptions of bureaucracy and structural stability.]
Many tyrants operate mysteriously, opting to appear in public as little as possible to preserve their god-like mystique. La Boétie notes that ancient rulers:
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, and thereby to encourage people to use their imagination for those things which they cannot judge by sight. Thus a great many nations who for a long time dwelt under the control of the Assyrians became accustomed, with all this mystery, to their own subjection, and submitted the more readily for not knowing what sort of master they had, or scarcely even if they had one, all of them fearing by report someone they had never seen. (la Boétie, 66)
As a solution, la Boétie suggests that since power is only derived from the consent of subjects, one only needs to deny voluntary assent to the tyrant in order to regain their natural freedom. He writes:
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: it is not necessary to deprive him of anything, but simply to give him nothing; there is no need that the country make an effort to do anything for itself provided it does nothing against itself. It is therefore the inhabitants themselves who permit, or, rather, bring about, their own subjection, since by ceasing to submit they would put an end to their servitude. (la Boétie, 46)
One does not need to fight — just refuse to work for Lords, refuse to pay taxes to the tyrant who does not have public interest in mind, deny the legitimacy of rulers through conscientious objection.
While this pacifism may seem counter-revolutionary at a cursory glance, it is actually a notable break with the medieval tradition of tyrannicide, which, although radical, merely served to kill individuals rather than undermine the ideological foundations of the system. Mass civil disobedience, then, was a more progressive concept than the age-old violent refusal to the ‘divine right of kings’. Although la Boétie may thus be able to respond to accusations of benign pacifism, he fails to provide a concrete schema of how to convince those who actually profit off the system of exploitation (civil servants, the military, the police, etc.) to withhold their consent to the tyrant and stop defending the system that upholds their own power. This limitation, however, could be recognized as a problem that is still yet to be adequately addressed by contemporary Leftists, and as such we can excuse old la Boétie!
A Discourse on Voluntary Servitude can be seen as a Machiavellian diatribe directed not at a ‘Prince’, but at the masses in order to overthrow the malevolent despot that unjustly reigns over them. It predates virtually all of what is considered ‘modern political thought’ and sketches the foundations to everything from contemporary Anarchism, Communism, and Liberalism. It is worth noting how la Boétie appeals to the idea of ‘universal natural rights’ in his chapter descriptions, writing “liberty is the natural condition of the people.” (la Boétie, 5) This idea is normally associated with the much later (and more reactionary) Liberalism(s) of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who are normally treated as the progenitors of the notion of natural rights so revered today. Although la Boétie would be an accessible and enlightening read for students of political theory, it is no surprise that, due to the radical nature of his politics, his name was not mentioned even once in class throughout my time as a student in Political Science and Philosophy.