DISCOURSE ON VOLUNTARY SERVITUDE

Author: Étienne de la Boétie
Year: 2017 (1577)
Publisher: Ersatz
Language: Swedish (translator Ervin Rosenberg)

We have all heard of Niccolo Machiavelli and “The Prince”. We know it as the monolith in philosophical literature in which the Florentine diplomat delves into the murky depths of power; how to obtain it and how to maintain it. Less famous, and as history has shown, infinitely less influential, is the French lawyer and poet Étienne de la Boétie. De la Boétie was also interested in power but approached the topic from the opposite direction. In his essay “Avhandling om frivillig underkastelse” (”Discourse on Voluntary Servitude”) he attempts to bring clarity to why a community, a city, or indeed an entire nation not only allows a single person to dominate and even enslave them, but moreover, encourage him or her to do so.

“For the present 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”*

For it is most certainly true, that human history is but a series of temporally interconnected states of affairs where the few subjugate the many. Historical events taught in schools are nothing but episodes where a small élite either seize or abuse the power over one or another population. Monuments are raised, poems are written, and myths are retold by the oppressed in celebration of their oppressors. How is this possible?

Unquestionably, there seem to be certain processes within a community that shrewd pretenders to power can exploit in order to propel themselves to the top of the hierarchy or, indeed, thrust a new order onto said community. Machiavelli’s book deals with these processes and the manipulative techniques a ruler might want to employ to manage them to his or her advantage. De la Boétie in no way questions the existence of such processes or denies the efficiency of various power techniques, but moreover challenges the mere necessity of these processes. His remedy is as simple as it is provocative.

“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: 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.”*

Perhaps this is a mirror of Marcus Tullius Cicero’s famous statement “Nulla enim minantis auctoritas apud liberos est.” To a free man, threats are impotent.

De la Boétie argues that humans are naturally predisposed to obeying their parents as children but equally prone to rebelling against them in adolescence. In the same way, a refusal to submit to all other authorities is just as natural to him, and yet all of us who rebelled against our guardians as teenagers remain servile to the government throughout our adult lives. We are so preoccupied with the illusion of owning whatever measly earthly possessions we convince ourselves that we have amassed, that we fail to see that we do not even own ourselves in the first place.

Étienne de la Boétie is one of a great many philosophers, some of whom have achieved far greater fame than he, who have wrestled with the concept of freedom and slavery. Thomas Hobbes polemised that autocracy was inevitable, as the only alternative would be chaos. One can either be free in a chaotic and hostile world, or subjugated in an organised and safe one. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was decidedly more optimistic. Although he recognised that humans are systemically enslaved (“L'homme est né libre, et partout il est dans les fers”) he made great intellectual efforts to unify order and liberty by means of a so called “social contract” through which society as a whole would guarantee the citizen collective safety and individual freedom at the same time. John Stuart Mill, in his “On Liberty” (reviewed on this blog in December 2019) argues that the role of the government can only be legitimate in so far as it protects the liberties of society. Additionally, he argued, that the greatest threat to individual freedom was not the government or state, but the self-controlling structures of society itself.

Still, I would venture to argue that Jean-Paul Sartre came the closest to answering de la Boétie’s principle question. While de la Boétie argues that all you have to do to stop being oppressed is to stop obeying, Sartre claims that all you need to do is to stop thinking that you are not free. The illusion of slavery, “mauvais fois” in Sartre’s terminology, is a self-fulfilling prophecy which serves only to shackle us with invisible chains. He even argues that humans are “condemned to freedom” and that this is something we generally detest. By being completely free, we are also made directly responsible for our actions. No one to blame. No fingers to point. It is thus easy to imagine mankind, horrified by the crushing responsibility of freedom, rush into the shade of a tyrant who mercifully lifts freedom, and consequently responsibility, from its grateful shoulders.

400 years before Sartre, de la Boétie already promoted a form of anarchy. Essentially, “Discourse on Voluntary Servitude” is a call to civil disobedience. He is adamant about revolutions being unnecessary where simple passivity suffices. At the core of the argument is anarchism.

De la Boétie lists three types of ruler.
1. The ruler by election
2. The ruler by force
3. The ruler by inheritance
Of these three, he suggests that the former is the most tolerable, but at the same time he postulates that even that type of ruler will do whatever they need to make themselves absolute and that will in the end make them even more ruthless than any of the other two.

Put in a modern perspective, this leads us to a couple of interesting observations. There is certainly no shortage of anarchists in modern day Europe. They often argue that all governments of all kinds need to be abolished. We can find them to the far left where the state is perceived as nothing but a watchdog for the capital and elite, and to the right where the war-cry “Taxation is theft” is nothing but a catchphrase for anarchy.

This is where I propose that a modern reader needs to tread carefully. De la Boétie lived in an era where the government looked upon the people as their subjects. In a modern democracy, the government’s mandate is from the electorate. This is a fundamental difference which people have fought and died for ever since the rise of liberalism and it must not be neglected or diminished. An orphan growing up in a working-class foster family in a small village far away from the capital becoming the prime minister and leader of the country would be a fairy-tale in de la Boétie’s times but is democracy in ours. It is thus folly to advocate nihilism and anarchy based on writings from the 16^th century.

I do not know if Sartre read “Discourse on Voluntary Servitude”. Nor do I know if de la Boétie read “The Prince”. Yet these behemoths in the history of thought are closely interlinked through the study of domination and submission, and they all help us understand ourselves and the choices available to us.

*The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude, trans. Harry Kurz (Indianapolis: 1942).