The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with
Jeff Rigenbach.
It was about 1550, according to the standard accounts, about 35 years after the death of
Shakespeare, about 80 years before the birth of John Locke, about 135 years before the
and the Birth of Bach, that a young Frenchman named Etienne de la Boitie, a young man of
what we today would call college age, about 20 years old, posed what Murray Rothbard would
later describe as 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
This constitutes a small minority of the society.
La Boitie saw, Rothbard wrote, 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.
If this were not the case, no tyranny, indeed no governmental rule, could long endure.
Hence a government does not have to be popularly elected to enjoy general public support, for
general public support is in the very nature of all governments that endure, including
the most oppressive of tyrannies.
The tyrant is but one person, and could scarcely command the obedience of another person, much
less of an entire country, if most of the subjects did not grant their obedience by
their own consent.
This then becomes for La Boitie the central problem of political theory.
Why in the world do people consent to their own enslavement?
Rothbard wrote this passage as part of a lengthy and extremely interesting introduction to
a then new edition of Etienne de La Boitie's youthful essay on political philosophy.
This new edition, which presented a modern American translation originally brought out
in the 1940s was published in 1975 under the title The Politics of Obedience, The Discourse
of Voluntary Servitude.
That very same year, 1975, a rival edition of La Boitie's little book was issued by
another small scholarly publisher, this one presenting an 18th century British translation
with the 16th century French text on facing pages.
This rival edition was published under the title The Will to Bondage and featured a not
so lengthy but extremely interesting preface by the libertarian historian and editor James
J. Martin.
Martin thought he knew the answer to the question that had so perplexed La Boite and now perplexed
Rothbard.
Why do people, in all times and places, obey the commands of the government, acquiesce
Yes in their own subjection, consent to their own enslavement.
Martin's answer was that they're born that way.
We should ask ourselves, he wrote, whether at bottom all political, ethical and philosophic
convictions might not be due to personal temperament and incapable of being accounted for by reason.
This hypothesis, he maintained, is of critical importance to a detached view of this business
The Theory of Money and Credit
and the Arts of Persuasion.
At the time he wrote this, Martin had spent more than 20 years teaching at the high school
and college levels, and his considered opinion was that schools, in particular, persuaded
nobody of anything.
They largely succeed, he wrote, in entrenching sentiments already there in the people they
process, though they may develop adversaries by awakening contradictory reactions among
This is why, Martin wrote, the members of libertarian persuasions remain at just about the same levels year after year relative to the total community, despite the most wondrous attempts via literature, communication and action to swell them.
Plain fact is, Martin insisted, that those who crave the comforts and security of subordination
outnumber the free souls, and there is no credible evidence that this relationship is
likely to change in any appreciable degree, now or at any calculable time in the future.
That was James J. Martin's take on the origins of the politics of obedience, the will to
bondage, the will to voluntary servitude.
There were other takes, however. As the simultaneous appearance in 1975 of competing translations
of Etienne de la Boitie's Essay and Political Philosophy suggests, the 70s was a time when
such ideas were in the air, a time when many people were drawn to consider and discuss
such ideas.
Consider the case of Stanley Milgram, the social psychologist at the City University
of New York, whose book Obedience to Authority was published in 1974.
The book was Milgram's summary of and reflections upon a series of experiments he had begun
conducting back in 1961, when he was a newly-minted Harvard PhD in the second year of his first
teaching assignment as an assistant professor of psychology at Yale.
Milgram advertised for volunteers who would be willing to participate in a psychological
experiment in return for a small payment, four dollars for one hour of your time, according
to the ad reproduced in Milgram's 1974 book.
When the volunteers reached Milgram's laboratory, they were told they would be participating
in a study of how memory and learning were affected by punishment.
They were told that in the experiment, each of them would play the part of a teacher.
Each of them was then paired with another volunteer who was playing the part of a learner.
The rules were simple.
The learner was strapped into a chair by a white-coated experimenter and connected to
electrodes.
In an adjoining room with a window through which the teacher and the experimenter could
see and make eye contact with the learner, the teacher read a list of words arranged
in pairs aloud into a microphone.
The teacher's voice was audible to the learner through speakers on the walls of the adjoining
room. In similar fashion, the learner's voice was audible to the teacher and the experimenter
through speakers mounted on the walls on their side of the glass. If the learner repeated
the word pairs in correct sequence, the experiment would go on. If the learner made an error,
the teacher would administer an electric shock to the learner by remote control, pressing
and to escape from the chairs into which they had been strapped by the experimenter.
It wasn't long before the learners began pleading with the teachers to help them get themselves
free.
And as the severity of the shocks the experimenters ordered the teachers to administer grew greater
and greater, the console from which the teachers administered these shocks began to display
warnings that the selected voltages were dangerously high.
Still, any teachers who protested to the experimenters, or even raised questions about whether the experiment should proceed, were sternly ordered by the experimenters to continue.
They were told by the experimenters that everything was all right.
And, in fact, everything was all right.
The learners were not really volunteers, but actors. They were not really receiving any shocks at all.
But the teachers did not know this.
They believed themselves to be inflicting excruciating and possibly life-threatening pain on the learners, and most of them went right on doing so despite the struggles and protests of their victims.
Only one of Milgram's first 40 volunteers refused to inflict any more shocks beyond what his consul told him was 300 volts.
So by that time the learners were totally unresponsive and apparently either unconscious or dead.
Milgram's experiment really had nothing to do with memory, learning, and punishment,
of course.
It was rather, as he described it in 1974, a simple experiment to test how much pain
an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by
by an Experimental Scientist
Stark authority was pitted against the subject's strongest moral imperatives against hurting
others, and, with the subject's ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority
won more often than not.
Yet at any point in the proceedings, all any of the teachers had to do was refuse to continue.
All any of them had to do was stand up and walk out of the laboratory.
It is rather like the situation Etienne de la Boitie describes in his essay on the politics
of obedience.
Because the ruled always outnumber the ruler, la Boitie wrote, the ruled can free themselves
at any time merely by willing to be free.
It was really that simple, la Boitie wrote.
In his words, Resolve to serve no more, 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.
Would the experimenter in Stanley Milgram's lab have fallen of his own weight and broken
in pieces if the teachers had walked out on him?
As Milgram himself put it, a reader's initial reaction to the experiment may be to wonder
why anyone in his right mind would not simply refuse and walk out of the laboratory.
But the fact is that no one ever does.
Since the subject has come to the laboratory to aid the experimenter, he is quite willing
to start off with the procedure.
There is nothing very extraordinary in this, particularly since the person who is to
To receive the shocks seems initially cooperative if somewhat apprehensive.
What is surprising is how far ordinary individuals will go in complying with the experimenter's
instructions.
Indeed, the results of the experiment are both surprising and dismaying.
Many subjects, Milgram wrote, will obey the experimenter no matter how vehement the pleading
of the person being shocked.
No matter how painful the shocks seem to be, and no matter how much the victim pleads to
be let out, this was seen time and again in our studies and has been observed in several
universities where the experiment was repeated.
It is the extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of
an authority that constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding
explanation.
Milgram believed there were two explanations for his results.
I call them the psychological explanation and the sociological explanation.
The psychological explanation was that under certain circumstances the ordinary individual
is both able and willing to, as Milgram put it, view himself as the instrument for carrying
out another person's wishes, so that he therefore no longer considers himself responsible for
The sociological explanation was that under certain circumstances, most individuals abandon any attempt at independent thinking and simply conform to what they feel is expected of them, what they have absorbed, mostly unthinkingly, from the culture in which they have grown up and now live.
So what was the solution to this problem of authority, as one might call it?
To his credit, Milgram considered libertarianism as a possibility, but he rejected it.
It would seem, he wrote, that the anarchist argument for universal dismantling of political
institutions is a powerful solution to the problem of authority.
But the problems of anarchism are equally insoluble.
For while the existence of authority sometimes leads to the commission of ruthless and immoral
and Financial Acts.
The absence of authority renders one a victim to such acts on the part of others who are
better organized.
Were the United States to abandon all forms of political authority, the outcome would
be entirely clear.
We would soon become the victims of our own disorganization, because better organized
societies would immediately perceive and act on the opportunities that weakness creates.
Section two, Milgram argued, it would be an oversimplification to present the picture
of the noble individual in a continuous struggle against malevolent authority.
The obvious truth is that for every individual who carries out harsh action because of authority,
there is another individual who is restrained from doing so.
The libertarian social psychologist Sharon Presley studied for her Ph.D. under Milgram
at the City University of New York in the 70s.
She says, politically, Milgram was not a libertarian, but a liberal democrat who was in favor of
civil liberties.
Nonetheless, by reflecting further on Etienne de la Boitie's key insight about the politics
of authority, the will to bondage, and the eager embrace of voluntary servitude, and by
devising an ingenious test for their influence on the ordinary individual, Stanley Milgram
made an important contribution to the libertarian tradition.
This is Jeff Rigenbach.