Discourse on Voluntary Servitude

The Discourse on Voluntary Servitude is a short essay by Étienne de La Boétie, written in his youth, probably around 1548 or in the early 1550s, when the author was a law student in his early twenties. Some accounts, following the testimony of his friend Michel de Montaigne, place it even earlier, when he was sixteen to eighteen. The work was prompted by the brutal suppression of an anti-tax revolt in Guyenne in 1548, and it expresses the bewilderment of a young humanist before the growing power of absolute monarchy in France.

Its publication was late and uneven. After La Boétie's death in 1563, fragments appeared in Latin in 1574, and the full French text was printed in 1576, largely through Huguenot circles, who issued it with significant alterations. The original manuscript was lost, though Montaigne kept copies. He greatly admired his friend but feared that the text could be used for partisan purposes, and he chose not to include it in his Essays. The work then fell into relative obscurity, kept alive mainly by collectors and readers with specific interests, until Pierre Coste included it in an edition of the Essays in 1724.

Its central thesis is simple and unsettling: servitude is not imposed by force but sustained by the consent of those who endure it. For La Boétie, a tyrant holds only the power his subjects grant him, and if they stop obeying, his dominion collapses. He asks how it is possible that many men tolerate a single ruler, and answers that custom, upbringing, self-interest and the pursuit of favours keep the bond of submission in place. Against this, he proposes disobedience as the path to liberation, and holds that the desire for freedom is natural to human beings, even if it has been dulled.

The essay has had a considerable afterlife. Though little read for centuries, it gained wider recognition from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries onward, when it came to be regarded as a major work of political thought. Thinkers such as Rousseau, Lamennais, Stirner, Bergson, Simone Weil and, later, Deleuze and Guattari engaged with the question it raises: why do people accept domination? Its early anticipation of ideas about popular sovereignty and civil disobedience has made it a point of reference for traditions as different as anarchism and pacifism.