Essay
Discourse on Voluntary Servitude
Discours de la servitude volontaire
Étienne de La Boétie · 1576
Synopsis
How can so many men, towns and nations endure a single tyrant, who has no power but what they give him? La Boétie answers that servitude is consented to. Liberty is natural, but habit, upbringing, entertainments, superstition and the lure of favours make people accept the yoke, and around the tyrant a chain of accomplices who profit from power keeps him in place. To be free there is no need to fight: it is enough to stop serving.
Context
Montaigne reports that his friend wrote it at sixteen or eighteen; recent studies place it rather around 1552 or 1553. Left in manuscript, the text, also known as the Contr'un, passed to Montaigne, who gave up placing it in his Essays; it appeared only posthumously, in 1576 and 1577, among exiled Protestants. Forgotten for two centuries, it was republished during the Revolution, then in 1835 with a preface by Lamennais. Tolstoy translated it into Russian, and thinkers of civil disobedience see it as a forerunner.
Who it is for
For a brief and lively text that raises, in the time of the Wars of Religion, the question of obedience to power.
Prizes and reception
Burned by order of the parlement of Bordeaux, it has been read from Rousseau to the anarchists and translated into English in 1975.