This Day in History: French judge, and writer Étienne de La Boétie was born on this day in 1530. In his very short life La Boétie has given the world one of the earliest critiques of governmental power: Discourse of Voluntary Servitude (Discours de la Servitude Volontaire).
In this writing he wonders, "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!"
200 years later David Hume wondered the same: "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."
James Mackinnon wrote about Étienne de La Boétie in A History of Modern Liberty, Volume 2 (1906) where he summarized Étienne de La Boétie's thoughts.
"How a million of men can submit to the absolute régime of a king, especially a bad king, is what La Boëtie, like most reasonable beings, cannot understand. That men out of gratitude for some benefit should place one of themselves in a position in which he might do them untold harm, shows a lamentable want of foresight. To remain in subjection and suffer every species of wrong is worse than cowardice. If a man were to announce this voluntary servitude as hearsay, and not as a fact patent to all, nobody would believe him. The people is the author of its own slavery, for to recover its liberty it has merely to will its freedom. Liberty, it would seem, is not a blessing desired by man, for, though he has but to desire in order to attain it, he prefers to remain in an effeminate slavery. Be resolute to serve no longer, and you will be free. If this seems paradoxical, it is because, cries La Boëtie, the love of liberty, the most natural of sentiments, has been so long stifled by bondage that it has ceased to seem natural. Nevertheless, man is born in subjection only to his parents and to reason. Nature has given the same form to all, in order that all may realise their brotherhood. If there is any advantage in individual ability, it ought only the more to foster fraternal affection between man and man by enabling the strong to minister to the necessities of the weak. Nature has ordained society, companionship, for man, not the oppression of the weak by the strong. Liberty is therefore natural. Long live liberty! The kingship in any form—whether obtained by election, succession, or conquest-appears to La Boëtie, who has in his view the absolute sway of a Henry II., equally hostile to liberty. The king who has been elected strives to affirm his power at the expense of liberty; the king by succession regards the people as his natural slaves; the conqueror as his prey.
A man born unaccustomed to modern subjection would certainly instinctively prefer to obey his reason rather than any other man. Men become slaves only by constraint and deception, never by natural impulse. At first they usually deceive themselves in this matter, to discover speedily that they have been and are being duped. So apt are they to mistake for nature what they owe only to their birth, to mistake custom, which teaches servitude, for nature, which teaches freedom. Nature, unfortunately, loses her power the less she is cultivated. As a plant may be transformed by engrafting some foreign twig on its stem, so human nature may be entirely distorted by custom. Custom, then, is the first cause of this voluntary servitude, in which men seem to live so naturally. Happily, there are exceptions even to the power of custom.
Such exceptions are the men 'who, possessed of strong intelligence and insight, are not content, like the great mass, to regard what is before their eyes, but look beyond and behind them, studying the past in order to measure the present and gauge the future.' To such, slavery is not natural and its taste never sweet, however artfully it may be gilded. Education and freedom of thought are the enemies of tyrants. It is the interest of the tyrant to enervate the people rather than enlighten them, and it is the tendency of the subjects of a tyrant to lose all the masculine virtues of natural freedom. Long live the king, cry the people, in return for the spectacles, free dinners, and largesses of the tyrant. They bless Tiberius and Nero for their liberality, and forget that they are being bribed with their own substance, and will be called on to-morrow to surrender their property in order to satisfy the avarice, their children to gratify the passions, of these magnanimous emperors. Credulity grows with effeminacy, and the tyranny of kings is invested with the miraculous by the ignorance of the mass. The people themselves help to give currency to the lies they believe, for the profit of the monarch. Moreover, the tyrant finds ready adjuncts in the passions, the avarice, the egotism of many of his subjects, who find their advantage in his service and their own slavery."
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