Book Review
Discourse on Voluntary Servitude
By Étienne de La Boétie (pronounced La Bwaytee)
Published posthumously 1577
Download from Online Library of Liberty
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About the Author
Étienne de La Boétie (1530 - 1563) received a law degree from the University of Orléans in 1553. His great contribution to political thought was written while he was a student. The manuscript of his Discourse was widely circulated in intellectual circles but never published by him. His teacher there was Anne du Bourg who was burned at the stake in 1559 for heresy, a Huguenot martyr. He was appointed to the Bordeaux Parlement in 1554. There, he was a colleague and friend of Michel de Montaigne, the famed essayist, when Montaigne became a member of the Parlement in 1559.
About the Book
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. For La Boétie the central problem of political theory is: why in the world do people consent to their own enslavement? He 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.
His celebrated and creatively original call for civil disobedience, for mass non-violent resistance as a method for the overthrow of tyranny, stems directly from ... two premises: the fact that all rule rests on the consent of the subject masses, and the great value of natural liberty.
He stated, "Resolve to serve no more," he says, "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."
Endorsements
"Leo 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 Leo Tolstoy, The Law of Love and the Law of Violence (New York: Rudolph Field, 1948), pp. 42-45.
This book's popularity is demonstrated in the fact that its Amazon rank is #64 in the category "Political Freedom." Customer Reviews rate it 4.7 out of 5 stars.
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