WEBVTT NOTE The Political Thought of Étienne de La Boétie 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:05.120 The Political Thought of Étienne de la Boétie by Murray R. Rothbard 2 00:00:05.120 --> 00:00:12.800 Étienne de la Boétie, properly pronounced not as might be thought la Boétie, but rather la Boétie, 3 00:00:12.800 --> 00:00:19.360 with a hard T, as it was pronounced in the paragord dialect of the region in which la Boétie lived. 4 00:00:19.920 --> 00:00:26.640 Étienne de la Boétie has been best remembered as the great and close friend of the eminent essayist 5 00:00:26.640 --> 00:00:34.400 Michel de Montaigne, in one of history's most notable friendships. But he would be better remembered, 6 00:00:34.400 --> 00:00:41.040 as some historians have come to recognize, as one of the seminal political philosophers, 7 00:00:41.040 --> 00:00:47.840 not only as a founder of modern political philosophy in France, but also for the timeless 8 00:00:47.840 --> 00:00:55.120 relevance of many of his theoretical insights. Etienne de la Boite was born in Sarlat, 9 00:00:55.120 --> 00:01:02.720 in the Paragord region of southwest France in 1530 to an aristocratic family. 10 00:01:02.720 --> 00:01:07.920 His father was a royal official of the Paragord region and his mother was the sister of the 11 00:01:07.920 --> 00:01:12.640 President of the Bordeaux Parliament, Assembly of Lawyers. 12 00:01:12.640 --> 00:01:19.200 Orphaned at an early age, he was brought up by his uncle and, namesake, the curate of 13 00:01:19.200 --> 00:01:27.640 of Boubouna and received his law degree from the University of Orleans in 1553. His great 14 00:01:27.640 --> 00:01:33.080 and precocious ability earned La Boette a royal appointment to the Bordeaux Parliament 15 00:01:33.080 --> 00:01:40.200 the following year, despite his being under the minimum age. There he pursued a distinguished 16 00:01:40.200 --> 00:01:48.240 career as judge and diplomatic negotiator until his untimely death in 1563 at the age 17 00:01:48.240 --> 00:01:56.800 of 32. Labuetti was also a distinguished poet and humanist, translating Xenophon and Plutarch 18 00:01:56.800 --> 00:02:02.120 and being closely connected with the leading young pleiadate group of poets including Pierre 19 00:02:02.120 --> 00:02:09.960 Ronsard, Jean Dorat, and Jean-Antoine de Beff. Labuetti's great contribution to political 20 00:02:09.960 --> 00:02:16.000 thought was written while he was a law student at the University of Orleans, where he imbibed 21 00:02:16.000 --> 00:02:20.680 and the Spirit of Free Inquiry that prevailed there. 22 00:02:20.680 --> 00:02:26.920 In this period of questing and religious ferment, the University of Orleans was a noted center 23 00:02:26.920 --> 00:02:29.320 of free and untrammeled discussion. 24 00:02:29.320 --> 00:02:35.520 Labretti's main teacher there was the fiery Anne de Bourgh, later to become a Huguenot 25 00:02:35.520 --> 00:02:40.720 martyr and burned at the stake for heresy in 1559. 26 00:02:40.720 --> 00:02:47.520 Duborg was not yet a Protestant, but was already tending in that direction, and it was no accident 27 00:02:47.520 --> 00:02:53.200 that this university was later to become a center of Calvinism, nor that some of Lubwetti's 28 00:02:53.200 --> 00:02:56.880 fellow students were to become Huguenot leaders. 29 00:02:56.880 --> 00:03:02.480 One of these was Lubwetti's best friend at the university and Duborg's favorite student, 30 00:03:02.480 --> 00:03:04.280 Lambert Danneau. 31 00:03:04.280 --> 00:03:09.920 The study of law in those days was an exciting enterprise, a philosophical search for truth 32 00:03:09.920 --> 00:03:12.680 Truth and Fundamental Principles. 33 00:03:12.680 --> 00:03:19.120 In the 16th century, writes Paul Bonfond, the teaching of the law was a preaching rather 34 00:03:19.120 --> 00:03:25.280 than an institution, a sort of search for truth carried on by teacher and student in 35 00:03:25.280 --> 00:03:32.240 common and which they feverishly undertook together, opening up an endless field for 36 00:03:32.240 --> 00:03:34.640 philosophic speculation. 37 00:03:34.640 --> 00:03:40.640 It was this kind of atmosphere in the law schools of Orleans and other leading French universities 38 00:03:40.640 --> 00:03:47.360 in which Calvin himself, two decades earlier, had begun to develop his ideas of Protestant 39 00:03:47.360 --> 00:03:48.360 reform. 40 00:03:48.360 --> 00:03:54.640 And it was in that kind of atmosphere as well that lawyers were to form one of the most 41 00:03:54.640 --> 00:03:58.600 important centers of Calvinist strength in France. 42 00:03:58.600 --> 00:04:04.160 In the ferment of his law school days at Orleans, Etienne de la Boétie composed his brief but 43 00:04:04.160 --> 00:04:13.520 Sindelating, profound and deeply radical Discourse of Voluntary Servitude, Discours de la servitude 44 00:04:13.520 --> 00:04:15.320 volontaire. 45 00:04:15.320 --> 00:04:21.040 Having remained long in manuscript, the actual date of writing the Discourse of Voluntary 46 00:04:21.040 --> 00:04:24.520 Servitude remains a matter of dispute. 47 00:04:24.520 --> 00:04:31.040 It seems clear, however, and has been so accepted by recent authorities, that Montand's published 48 00:04:31.040 --> 00:04:39.040 story that Labuetti wrote the discourse at the age of 18 or even at 16 was incorrect. 49 00:04:39.840 --> 00:04:46.080 Montand's statement, as we shall see further below, was probably part of his later campaign to 50 00:04:46.080 --> 00:04:53.760 guard his dead friend's reputation by dissociating him from the revolutionary Huguenots who were 51 00:04:53.760 --> 00:04:59.920 claiming Labuetti's pamphlet for their own. Extreme youth tended to cast the discourse 52 00:04:59.920 --> 00:05:04.720 Discourse in the light of a work so youthful that the radical content was hardly to be 53 00:05:04.720 --> 00:05:08.760 taken seriously as the views of the author. 54 00:05:08.760 --> 00:05:15.760 Internal evidence, as well as the erudition expressed in the work, make it likely that 55 00:05:15.760 --> 00:05:25.760 the discourse was written in 1552 or 1553 at the age of 22 while La Boétie was at the 56 00:05:25.760 --> 00:05:26.760 university. 57 00:05:26.760 --> 00:05:33.320 The discourse was circulated in manuscript form and never published by Labuetti. 58 00:05:33.320 --> 00:05:38.280 One can speculate that its radical views were an important reason for the authors withholding 59 00:05:38.280 --> 00:05:40.320 it from publication. 60 00:05:40.320 --> 00:05:46.640 It achieved a considerable fame in local Perigordian intellectual circles, however. 61 00:05:46.640 --> 00:05:52.760 This can be seen by the fact that Montaigne had read the essay long before he first met 62 00:05:52.760 --> 00:05:58.980 Labuetti as a fellow member of the Bordeaux Parliament in 1559. 63 00:05:58.980 --> 00:06:03.320 The first striking thing about the discourse is the form. 64 00:06:03.320 --> 00:06:09.820 Labuetti's method was speculative, abstract, deductive. 65 00:06:09.820 --> 00:06:16.840 This contrast with the rather narrowly legal and historical argument of the Huguenot Monarch 66 00:06:16.840 --> 00:06:23.120 Monarchomoc writers, those sectarian writers who argued for the right of subjects to resist 67 00:06:23.120 --> 00:06:32.440 unjust rulers of the 1570s and 1580s, whom La Buetti resembled in his opposition to tyranny. 68 00:06:32.440 --> 00:06:41.160 While the Huguenot Monarchomocs, best exemplified by Francois Hopeman's Franco-Galilla, 1573, 69 00:06:41.160 --> 00:06:48.040 Concentrated on grounding their arguments on real or presumed historical precedents in 70 00:06:48.040 --> 00:06:56.000 French laws and institutions, La Boétie's only historical examples were numerous illustrations 71 00:06:56.000 --> 00:07:03.120 of his general principles from classical antiquity, the very remoteness of which added to the 72 00:07:03.120 --> 00:07:06.240 timeless quality of his discourse. 73 00:07:06.240 --> 00:07:12.520 The later Huguenot arguments against tyranny tended to be specific and concrete, rooted 74 00:07:12.520 --> 00:07:20.320 in actual French institutions, and therefore their conclusions and implications were limited 75 00:07:20.320 --> 00:07:26.200 to promoting the specific liberties against the state of various privileged orders in 76 00:07:26.200 --> 00:07:28.000 French society. 77 00:07:28.000 --> 00:07:35.760 In contrast, the very abstraction and universality of La Boétie's thought led inexorably to 78 00:07:35.760 --> 00:07:43.000 to radical and sweeping conclusions on the nature of tyranny, the liberty of the people, 79 00:07:43.000 --> 00:07:48.080 and what needed to be done to overthrow the former and secure the latter. 80 00:07:48.080 --> 00:07:54.680 In his abstract, universal reasoning, his development of a true political philosophy, 81 00:07:54.680 --> 00:08:00.560 and his frequent references to classical antiquity, La Boétie followed the method of Renaissance 82 00:08:00.560 --> 00:08:04.920 writers notably Niccolò Machiovelli. 83 00:08:04.920 --> 00:08:08.120 There was, however, a crucial difference. 84 00:08:08.120 --> 00:08:13.960 Whereas Machiavelli attempted to instruct the prince on ways of cementing his rule, 85 00:08:13.960 --> 00:08:20.840 Labuetti was dedicated to discussing ways to overthrow him and thus to secure the liberty 86 00:08:20.840 --> 00:08:22.840 of the individual. 87 00:08:22.840 --> 00:08:29.920 Thus Emile Brahear makes a point of contrasting the cynical realism of Machiavelli with the 88 00:08:29.920 --> 00:08:34.480 juridical idealism of Etienne de Labuetti. 89 00:08:34.480 --> 00:08:40.680 In fact, however, DiBretti's concentration on abstract reasoning and on the universal 90 00:08:40.680 --> 00:08:47.280 rights of the individual might better be characterized as foreshadowing the political thinking of 91 00:08:47.280 --> 00:08:49.480 the 18th century. 92 00:08:49.480 --> 00:08:55.620 As J.W. Allen writes, the discourse was an essay on the natural liberty, equality and 93 00:08:55.620 --> 00:08:57.960 fraternity of man. 94 00:08:57.960 --> 00:09:04.000 The essay gave a general support to the Huguenot pamphleteers by its insistence that natural 95 00:09:04.000 --> 00:09:10.280 Universal law and natural rights justified forcible resistance to tyrannous government. 96 00:09:10.280 --> 00:09:17.600 But the language of universal natural rights itself, Allen correctly adds, served no Huguenot 97 00:09:17.600 --> 00:09:19.040 purpose. 98 00:09:19.040 --> 00:09:24.160 It served, in truth, no purpose at all at the time, though one day it might come to 99 00:09:24.160 --> 00:09:25.160 do so. 100 00:09:25.160 --> 00:09:31.480 Or, as Harold Lasky trenchantly put it, a sense of popular right, such as the friend 101 00:09:31.480 --> 00:09:38.040 of Montaigne depicts is indeed as remote from the spirit of the time as the anarchy of 102 00:09:38.040 --> 00:09:43.000 Herbert Spencer in an age committed to government interference. 103 00:09:43.000 --> 00:09:49.200 The contrast between the proto-18th century speculative natural rights approach of la 104 00:09:49.200 --> 00:09:55.920 boîte and the narrowly legalistic and concrete historical emphasis of the Huguenot writers 105 00:09:55.920 --> 00:10:03.600 who reprinted and used the discourse has been stressed by W.F. Church. In contrast to the legal 106 00:10:03.600 --> 00:10:10.640 approach which dominated political thought in 16th century France, Church writes, purely speculative 107 00:10:10.640 --> 00:10:18.400 treaties so characteristic of the 18th century were all but non-existent and at their rare 108 00:10:18.400 --> 00:10:24.720 appearances seem oddly out of place. Church then mentions as an example of the latter, 109 00:10:24.720 --> 00:10:31.840 Labuetti's Discourse of Voluntary Servitude. The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude is lucidly and 110 00:10:31.840 --> 00:10:39.360 coherently structured around a single axiom, a single percipient insight into the nature 111 00:10:39.920 --> 00:10:48.480 not only of tyranny, but implicitly of the state apparatus itself. Many medieval writers had attacked 112 00:10:48.480 --> 00:10:56.320 tyranny, but La Boétie delves especially deeply into its nature and into the nature 113 00:10:56.320 --> 00:10:59.520 of state rule itself. 114 00:10:59.520 --> 00:11:08.860 This fundamental insight was that every tyranny must necessarily be grounded upon general 115 00:11:08.860 --> 00:11:11.960 popular acceptance. 116 00:11:11.960 --> 00:11:17.560 In short, the bulk of the people themselves, for whatever reason, acquiesce in their own 117 00:11:17.560 --> 00:11:19.320 objection. 118 00:11:19.320 --> 00:11:26.120 If this were not the case, no tyranny, indeed no governmental rule, could long endure. 119 00:11:26.120 --> 00:11:32.760 Hence a government does not have to be popularly elected to enjoy general public support, for 120 00:11:32.760 --> 00:11:38.440 general public support is in the very nature of all governments that endure, including 121 00:11:38.440 --> 00:11:41.320 the most oppressive of tyrannies. 122 00:11:41.320 --> 00:11:46.420 The tyrant is but one person, and could scarcely command the obedience of another person much 123 00:11:46.420 --> 00:11:52.020 Much less of an entire country if most of the subjects did not grant their obedience 124 00:11:52.020 --> 00:11:54.100 by their own consent. 125 00:11:54.100 --> 00:12:00.020 David Hume independently discovered this principle two centuries later and phrased it with his 126 00:12:00.020 --> 00:12:03.340 usual succinctness and clarity. 127 00:12:03.340 --> 00:12:08.140 Nothing appears more surprising to those who consider human affairs with a philosophical 128 00:12:08.140 --> 00:12:16.400 eye than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few and the implicit submission 129 00:12:16.400 --> 00:12:22.400 With which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. 130 00:12:22.400 --> 00:12:31.400 When we inquire by what means this wonder is affected, we shall find that as force is always on the side of the governed, 131 00:12:31.400 --> 00:12:36.400 the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. 132 00:12:36.400 --> 00:12:41.400 It is therefore on opinion only that government is founded. 133 00:12:41.400 --> 00:12:48.360 And this maxim extends to the most despotic and military governments as well as to the 134 00:12:48.360 --> 00:12:50.800 most free and most popular. 135 00:12:50.800 --> 00:12:56.640 This then becomes for La Boétie the central problem of political theory. 136 00:12:56.640 --> 00:13:01.840 Why in the world do people consent to their own enslavement? 137 00:13:01.840 --> 00:13:06.640 La Boétie cuts to the heart of what is or rather should be the central problem of political 138 00:13:06.640 --> 00:13:11.960 Civil Philosophy, The Mystery of Civil Obedience. 139 00:13:11.960 --> 00:13:19.460 Why do people, in all times and places, obey the commands of the government, which always 140 00:13:19.460 --> 00:13:23.880 constitutes a small minority of the society? 141 00:13:23.880 --> 00:13:31.880 To La Boétie, the spectacle of general consent to despotism is puzzling and appalling. 142 00:13:31.880 --> 00:13:36.600 I should like merrily to understand how it happens that so many men, so many villages, 143 00:13:36.600 --> 00:13:43.640 So many cities, so many nations, sometimes suffer under a single tyrant who has no other 144 00:13:43.640 --> 00:13:49.780 power than the power they give him, who is able to harm them only to the extent to which 145 00:13:49.780 --> 00:13:56.680 they have the willingness to bear with him, who could do them absolutely no injury unless 146 00:13:56.680 --> 00:14:01.800 they preferred to put up with him rather than contradict him. 147 00:14:01.800 --> 00:14:04.120 Surely a striking situation. 148 00:14:04.120 --> 00:14:10.000 But it is so common that one must grieve the more and wonder the less at the spectacle of 149 00:14:10.000 --> 00:14:17.240 a million men serving in wretchedness, their necks under the yoke, not constrained by a 150 00:14:17.240 --> 00:14:20.320 greater multitude than they. 151 00:14:20.320 --> 00:14:25.880 And this mass submission must be out of consent rather than simply out of fear. 152 00:14:25.880 --> 00:14:30.360 Shall we call subjection to such a leader cowardice? 153 00:14:30.360 --> 00:14:35.940 If a hundred, if a thousand endure the caprice of a single man, should we not rather say 154 00:14:35.940 --> 00:14:44.320 that they lack not the courage, but the desire to rise against him, and that such an attitude 155 00:14:44.320 --> 00:14:49.160 indicates indifference rather than cowardice? 156 00:14:49.160 --> 00:14:54.880 When not a hundred, not a thousand men, but a hundred provinces, a thousand cities, a 157 00:14:54.880 --> 00:15:10.880 When a million men refuse to assail a single man from whom the kindest treatment received is the infliction of serfdom and slavery, what shall we call that? Is it cowardice? 158 00:15:10.880 --> 00:15:26.880 When a thousand, a million men, a thousand cities fail to protect themselves against the domination of one man, this cannot be called cowardly, for cowardice does not sink to such a depth. 159 00:15:26.880 --> 00:15:38.880 What monstrous vice, then, is this which does not even deserve to be called cowardice, a vice for which no term can be found vile enough. 160 00:15:38.880 --> 00:15:39.880 enough. 161 00:15:39.880 --> 00:15:45.920 It is evident from the above passages that Labuetti is bitterly opposed to tyranny and 162 00:15:45.920 --> 00:15:50.800 to the public's consent to its own subjection. 163 00:15:50.800 --> 00:15:55.400 He makes clear also that this opposition is grounded on a theory of natural law and a 164 00:15:55.400 --> 00:15:57.960 natural right to liberty. 165 00:15:57.960 --> 00:16:04.380 In childhood, presumably because the rational faculties are not yet developed, we obey our 166 00:16:04.380 --> 00:16:05.380 parents. 167 00:16:05.380 --> 00:16:13.100 But when grown, we should follow our own reason as free individuals. 168 00:16:13.100 --> 00:16:19.340 As Liberti puts it, if we led our lives according to the ways intended by nature and the lessons 169 00:16:19.340 --> 00:16:25.220 taught by her, we should be intuitively obedient to our parents. 170 00:16:25.220 --> 00:16:32.300 Later, we should adopt reason as our guide and become slaves to nobody. 171 00:16:32.300 --> 00:16:38.500 Reason is our guide to the facts and laws of nature and to humanity's proper path, 172 00:16:38.500 --> 00:16:45.780 and each of us has in our souls some native seed of reason, which if nourished by good 173 00:16:45.780 --> 00:16:52.740 counsel and training, flowers into virtue, but which, on the other hand, if unable to 174 00:16:52.740 --> 00:16:56.580 resist the vices surrounding it, is stifled and blighted. 175 00:16:56.580 --> 00:17:04.220 And reason teaches us the justice of equal liberty for all, for reason shows us that 176 00:17:04.220 --> 00:17:11.780 nature has, among other things, granted us the common gift of voice and speech. 177 00:17:11.780 --> 00:17:17.740 Therefore there can be no further doubt that we are all naturally free, and hence it cannot 178 00:17:17.740 --> 00:17:22.780 be asserted that nature has placed some of us in slavery. 179 00:17:22.780 --> 00:17:27.460 Human animals, he points out, display a natural instinct to be free. 180 00:17:27.460 --> 00:17:33.420 But then, what in the world has so denatured man that he, the only creature really born 181 00:17:33.420 --> 00:17:40.140 to be free, lacks the memory of his original condition and the desire to return to it? 182 00:17:40.140 --> 00:17:47.140 La Boétie's celebrated and creatively original call for civil disobedience, for mass non-violent 183 00:17:47.140 --> 00:17:53.140 Resistance as a method for the overthrow of tyranny stems directly from the above two 184 00:17:53.140 --> 00:18:00.780 premises, the fact that all rule rests on the consent of the subject masses and the 185 00:18:00.780 --> 00:18:09.700 great value of natural liberty, for if tyranny really rests on mass consent, then the obvious 186 00:18:09.700 --> 00:18:16.780 means for its overthrow is simply by mass withdrawal of that consent. 187 00:18:16.780 --> 00:18:22.980 The weight of tyranny would quickly and suddenly collapse under such a non-violent revolution. 188 00:18:22.980 --> 00:18:28.940 The Tory David Hume did not, unsurprisingly, draw similar conclusions from his theory of 189 00:18:28.940 --> 00:18:33.020 mass consent as the basis of all governmental rule. 190 00:18:33.020 --> 00:18:41.020 Thus, after concluding that all tyranny rests on popular consent, Labuetti eloquently concludes 191 00:18:41.020 --> 00:18:46.740 states that, obviously, there is no need of fighting to overcome this single tyrant, for 192 00:18:46.740 --> 00:18:54.500 he is automatically defeated if the country refuses consent to its own enslavement. 193 00:18:54.500 --> 00:18:57.260 Tyrants need not be expropriated by force. 194 00:18:57.260 --> 00:19:04.900 They need only be deprived of the public's continuing supply of funds and resources. 195 00:19:04.900 --> 00:19:11.500 The more one yields to tyrants, the stronger and mightier they become. 196 00:19:11.500 --> 00:19:20.420 But if the tyrants are simply not obeyed, they become undone and as nothing. 197 00:19:20.420 --> 00:19:27.540 La Boétie then exhorts the poor wretched and stupid peoples to cast off their chains by 198 00:19:27.540 --> 00:19:34.060 refusing to supply the tyrant any further with instruments of their own oppression. 199 00:19:34.060 --> 00:19:40.700 The tyrant indeed has nothing more than the power that you confer upon him to destroy 200 00:19:41.980 --> 00:19:48.620 Where has he acquired enough eyes to spy upon you if you do not provide them yourselves? 201 00:19:48.620 --> 00:19:54.980 How can he have so many arms to beat you with if he does not borrow them from you? 202 00:19:54.980 --> 00:20:01.200 The feet that trample down your cities, where does he get them if they are not your own? 203 00:20:01.200 --> 00:20:05.900 How does he have any power over you except through you? 204 00:20:05.900 --> 00:20:10.800 How could he dare assail you if he had no cooperation from you? 205 00:20:10.800 --> 00:20:16.760 La Boete concludes his exhortation by assuring the masses that to overthrow the tyrant they 206 00:20:16.760 --> 00:20:21.120 need not act nor shed their blood. 207 00:20:21.120 --> 00:20:26.280 They can do so merely by willing to be free. 208 00:20:26.280 --> 00:20:32.200 In short, resolve to serve no more and you are at once freed. 209 00:20:32.200 --> 00:20:38.720 I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that 210 00:20:38.720 --> 00:20:42.240 you support him no longer. 211 00:20:42.240 --> 00:20:47.360 Then you will behold him like a great colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall 212 00:20:47.360 --> 00:20:51.300 of his own weight and break in pieces. 213 00:20:51.300 --> 00:20:57.940 It was a medieval tradition to justify tyrannicide of unjust rulers who break the divine law, 214 00:20:57.940 --> 00:21:06.300 but Labuetti's doctrine, though non-violent, was in the deepest sense far more radical. 215 00:21:06.300 --> 00:21:12.080 For while the assassination of a tyrant is simply an isolated individual act within an 216 00:21:12.080 --> 00:21:21.140 existing political system, mass civil disobedience, being a direct act on the part of large masses 217 00:21:21.140 --> 00:21:28.380 of People is far more revolutionary in launching a transformation of the system itself. 218 00:21:28.380 --> 00:21:34.380 It is also more elegant and profound in theoretical terms, flowing immediately as it does from 219 00:21:34.380 --> 00:21:40.060 La Boete's insight about power necessarily resting on popular consent. 220 00:21:40.060 --> 00:21:46.620 For then the remedy to power is simply to withdraw that consent. 221 00:21:46.620 --> 00:21:51.420 The call for mass civil disobedience was picked up by one of the more radical of the later 222 00:21:51.420 --> 00:21:59.300 Huguenot pamphlets, La France Turquille, 1575, which advocated an association of towns and 223 00:21:59.300 --> 00:22:05.220 provinces for the purpose of refusing to pay all taxes to the state. 224 00:22:05.220 --> 00:22:10.640 But it is not surprising that among the most enthusiastic advocates of mass civil disobedience 225 00:22:10.640 --> 00:22:18.760 have been the anarchist thinkers, who simply extend both Labuetti's analysis and his conclusion 226 00:22:18.760 --> 00:22:23.880 from tyrannical rule to all governmental rule whatsoever. 227 00:22:23.880 --> 00:22:30.360 Prominent among the anarchist advocates of nonviolent resistance have been Thoreau, Tolstoy 228 00:22:30.360 --> 00:22:38.320 and Benjamin R. Tucker, all of the 19th century, and all, unsurprisingly, associated with the 229 00:22:38.320 --> 00:22:45.400 The Nonviolent Pacifist Branch of Anarchism Tolstoy, indeed, in setting forth his doctrine 230 00:22:45.400 --> 00:22:52.360 of nonviolent anarchism, used a lengthy passage from the discourse as the focal point for 231 00:22:52.360 --> 00:22:54.560 the development of his argument. 232 00:22:54.560 --> 00:23:01.880 Thus, Tolstoy writes, The situation of the oppressed should not be compared to the constraint 233 00:23:01.880 --> 00:23:09.000 used directly by the stronger on the weaker, or by a greater number on a smaller. Here, 234 00:23:09.000 --> 00:23:16.000 indeed it is the minority who oppress the majority, thanks to a lie established ages 235 00:23:16.000 --> 00:23:23.800 ago by clever people, in virtue of which men despoil each other. Then, after a long quote 236 00:23:23.800 --> 00:23:31.260 from Labuetti, Tolstoy concludes, it would seem that the workers, not gaining any advantage 237 00:23:31.260 --> 00:23:40.740 should at last realize the lie in which they are living and free themselves in the simplest 238 00:23:40.740 --> 00:23:47.300 and easiest way, by abstaining from taking part in the violence that is only possible 239 00:23:47.300 --> 00:23:49.340 with their cooperation. 240 00:23:49.340 --> 00:23:55.780 Furthermore, Tolstoy's Letter to a Hindu, which played a central role in shaping Gandhi's 241 00:23:55.780 --> 00:24:02.700 is Thinking Toward Mass Nonviolent Action was heavily influenced by Labuetti. 242 00:24:02.700 --> 00:24:08.940 In addition, Gustav Landauer, the leading German anarchist of the early 20th century, 243 00:24:08.940 --> 00:24:16.140 after becoming converted to a pacifist approach, made a rousing summary of Labuetti's Discourse 244 00:24:16.140 --> 00:24:23.340 of Voluntary Servitude, the central core of his anarchist work, The Revolution, 1919. 245 00:24:23.340 --> 00:24:31.540 A leading Dutch pacifist anarchist of the 20th century, Bartholomew de Liet, not only 246 00:24:31.540 --> 00:24:39.940 devoted several pages of his Conquest of Violence to discussion and praise of Labuetti's discourse, 247 00:24:39.940 --> 00:24:44.660 he also translated it into Dutch in 1933. 248 00:24:44.660 --> 00:24:50.140 Several historians of anarchism have gone so far as to classify Labuetti's treatise 249 00:24:50.140 --> 00:25:18.340 The first historian of anarchism, E. V. Zenker, a non-anarchist, made the same mistake. 250 00:25:18.340 --> 00:25:24.240 As he wrote of La Boétie's discourse that it contained a glowing defense of freedom 251 00:25:24.240 --> 00:25:30.140 which goes so far that the sense of the necessity of authority disappears entirely. 252 00:25:30.140 --> 00:25:35.820 The opinion of La Boétie is that mankind does not need government. 253 00:25:35.820 --> 00:25:40.980 It is only necessary that man should really wish it and he would find himself happy and 254 00:25:40.980 --> 00:25:44.180 free again, as if by magic. 255 00:25:44.180 --> 00:25:51.420 But while La Boétie's cannot be considered an anarchist, his sweeping strictures on tyranny 256 00:25:51.420 --> 00:25:59.460 and the universality of his political philosophy lend themselves easily to such an expansion. 257 00:25:59.460 --> 00:26:05.860 All this considerably disturbed La Boétie's biographer, Paul Bonfond, who wrote of the 258 00:26:05.860 --> 00:26:13.420 discourse, after having failed to distinguish legitimate from illicit authority and having 259 00:26:13.420 --> 00:26:17.580 Imprudently attacked even the principle of authority, 260 00:26:17.580 --> 00:26:21.500 Labraty put forth a naive illusion. 261 00:26:21.500 --> 00:26:24.780 He seems to believe that man could live in a state of nature, 262 00:26:24.780 --> 00:26:28.380 without society, and without government, 263 00:26:28.380 --> 00:26:33.340 and discovered that this situation would be filled with happiness for humanity. 264 00:26:33.340 --> 00:26:35.700 This dream is puerile. 265 00:26:35.700 --> 00:26:38.740 To the acute analyst Pierre Mesnard, 266 00:26:38.740 --> 00:26:42.260 Bonfond's alarm is wide of the mark. 267 00:26:42.260 --> 00:26:50.620 Mesnard believes that La Boétie defined tyranny as simply any exercise of personal power. 268 00:26:50.620 --> 00:26:58.260 In doing so, La Boétie went beyond the traditional two-fold definition of tyranny as either usurpation 269 00:26:58.260 --> 00:27:05.100 of power or government against the laws, which were either defined as customary law, divine 270 00:27:05.100 --> 00:27:10.860 law, or the natural law for the common good of the people, whereas the traditional theory 271 00:27:10.860 --> 00:27:16.540 The Theory, thus focused only on the means of the ruler's acquiring power and the use 272 00:27:16.540 --> 00:27:24.060 made of that power, Mesnard points out that La Boétie's definition of tyranny went straight 273 00:27:24.060 --> 00:27:27.500 to the nature of power itself. 274 00:27:27.500 --> 00:27:33.180 Tyranny does not depend, as many of the older theorists had supposed, on illicit means of 275 00:27:33.180 --> 00:27:34.860 acquiring power. 276 00:27:34.860 --> 00:27:38.220 The tyrant need not be a usurper. 277 00:27:38.220 --> 00:27:44.200 As La Boétie declares, there are three kinds of tyrants. Some receive their proud position 278 00:27:44.200 --> 00:27:51.540 through elections by the people, others by force of arms, others by inheritance. Usurpers 279 00:27:51.540 --> 00:27:58.300 or conquerors always act as if they are ruling a conquered country and those born to kingship 280 00:27:58.300 --> 00:28:03.440 are scarcely any better because they are nourished on the breast of tyranny, suck in with their 281 00:28:33.440 --> 00:28:39.280 So far away from any notion of liberty that even if the memory of it is fresh, it will 282 00:28:39.280 --> 00:28:41.480 soon be eradicated. 283 00:28:41.480 --> 00:28:47.200 In some, La Boitique can find no choice between these three kinds of tyrants. 284 00:28:47.200 --> 00:28:52.280 For although the means of coming into power differ, still the method of ruling is practically 285 00:28:52.280 --> 00:28:53.620 the same. 286 00:28:53.620 --> 00:28:57.880 Those who are elected act as if they were breaking in books. 287 00:28:57.880 --> 00:29:01.700 Those who are conquerors make the people their prey. 288 00:29:01.700 --> 00:29:07.020 Those who are heirs plan to treat them as if they were their natural slaves. 289 00:29:07.020 --> 00:29:15.820 Yet, Mesnard's neat conclusion that La Boétie meant simply to indict all personal power, 290 00:29:15.820 --> 00:29:21.700 all forms of monarchy, as being tyrannical, is inadequate. 291 00:29:21.700 --> 00:29:27.660 In the first place, in the passage quoted above, La Boétie indicts elected as well 292 00:29:27.660 --> 00:29:29.420 as other rulers. 293 00:29:29.420 --> 00:29:37.140 Moreover, he states that having several masters, according to the number one has, it amounts 294 00:29:37.140 --> 00:29:39.660 to being that many times unfortunate. 295 00:29:39.660 --> 00:29:45.700 Well, these are not precisely indictments of the concept of a republic, but they leave 296 00:29:45.700 --> 00:29:52.980 the definition of tyranny in La Boete sufficiently vague so that one can easily press on the 297 00:29:52.980 --> 00:29:55.020 anarchist conclusions. 298 00:29:55.020 --> 00:29:59.700 Why do people continue to give their consent to despotism? 299 00:29:59.700 --> 00:30:03.180 Why do they permit tyranny to continue? 300 00:30:03.180 --> 00:30:10.660 This is especially puzzling if tyranny, defined at least as all personal power, must rest 301 00:30:10.660 --> 00:30:12.780 on mass consent. 302 00:30:12.780 --> 00:30:19.420 And if the way to overthrow tyranny is therefore for the people to withdraw that consent, the 303 00:30:19.420 --> 00:30:32.420 The remainder of Labuetti's treatise is devoted to this crucial problem, and his discussion here is as seminal and profound as it is in the earlier part of the work. 304 00:30:32.420 --> 00:30:46.420 The establishment of tyranny, Labuetti points out, is most difficult at the outset when it is first imposed, for generally, if given a free choice, people will vote to be free rather than to be slaves. 305 00:30:46.420 --> 00:30:52.340 There can be no doubt that they would much prefer to be guided by reason itself than 306 00:30:52.340 --> 00:30:56.020 to be ordered about by the whims of a single man. 307 00:30:56.020 --> 00:31:01.780 A possible exception was the voluntary choice by the Israelites to imitate other nations 308 00:31:01.780 --> 00:31:04.660 in choosing a king, Saul. 309 00:31:04.660 --> 00:31:11.580 Apart from that, tyranny can only be initially imposed by conquest or by deception. 310 00:31:11.580 --> 00:31:18.760 The conquest may be either by foreign armies or by an internal, fractional coup. 311 00:31:18.760 --> 00:31:25.840 The deception occurs in cases where the people, during wartime emergencies, select certain 312 00:31:25.840 --> 00:31:33.440 persons as dictators, thus providing the occasion for these individuals to fasten their power 313 00:31:33.440 --> 00:31:36.480 permanently upon the public. 314 00:31:36.480 --> 00:31:43.440 Since begun, however, the maintenance of tyranny is permitted and bolstered by the insidious 315 00:31:43.440 --> 00:31:49.560 throes of habit, which quickly accustomed the people to enslavement. 316 00:31:49.560 --> 00:31:55.440 It is true that in the beginning men submit under constraint and by force, but those who 317 00:31:55.440 --> 00:32:01.560 come after them obey without regret and perform willingly what their predecessors had done 318 00:32:01.560 --> 00:32:04.480 because they had to. 319 00:32:04.480 --> 00:32:11.920 This is why men born under the yoke and then nourished and reared in slavery are content, 320 00:32:11.920 --> 00:32:17.800 without further effort, to live in their native circumstance, unaware of any other state or 321 00:32:17.800 --> 00:32:19.200 right. 322 00:32:19.200 --> 00:32:25.000 And considering as quite natural the condition into which they are born, the powerful influence 323 00:32:25.000 --> 00:32:34.000 is in no respect more compelling than in this, namely, habituation to subjection. 324 00:32:34.000 --> 00:32:40.000 Thus, humanity's natural drive for liberty is finally overpowered by the force of custom, 325 00:32:40.000 --> 00:32:46.000 for the reason that native endowment, no matter how good, is dissipated and less encouraged, 326 00:32:46.000 --> 00:32:54.000 whereas environment always shapes us in its own way, whatever that might be, in spite of nature's gifts. 327 00:33:24.000 --> 00:33:31.140 Labuetti concludes that custom becomes the first reason for voluntary servitude. 328 00:33:31.140 --> 00:33:37.440 People will grow accustomed to the idea that they have always been in subjection, that 329 00:33:37.440 --> 00:33:40.160 their fathers lived in the same way. 330 00:33:40.160 --> 00:33:45.720 They will think they are obliged to suffer this evil and will persuade themselves by 331 00:33:45.720 --> 00:33:52.820 example an imitation of others, finally investing those who ordered them around with proprietary 332 00:33:52.820 --> 00:33:57.900 writes based on the idea that it has always been that way. 333 00:33:57.900 --> 00:34:05.460 David Hume was later to write in his essay of The Origin of Government, Habit soon consolidates 334 00:34:05.460 --> 00:34:10.540 what other principles of human nature had imperfectly founded. 335 00:34:10.540 --> 00:34:17.820 And men, once accustomed to obedience, never think of departing from that path in which 336 00:34:17.820 --> 00:34:47.820 Consent is also actively encouraged and engineered by the rulers. And this is another major reason for the persistence of civil obedience. Various devices are used by rulers to induce such consent. One method is by providing the masses with circuses, with entertaining diversions. Plays, 337 00:34:47.820 --> 00:35:17.820 and other such opiates. These were, for ancient peoples, the bait toward slavery, the price of their liberty, the instruments of tyranny. By these practices and enticements, the ancient dictators so successfully lulled their subjects under the yoke that the stupefied peoples, fascinated by the pastimes and new ideas, 338 00:35:17.820 --> 00:35:25.280 in vain pleasures flashed before their eyes, learned subservience as naively, but not so 339 00:35:25.280 --> 00:35:32.060 creditably as little children learned to read by looking at bright picture books. 340 00:35:32.060 --> 00:35:38.160 Another method of inducing consent is purely ideological, duping the masses into believing 341 00:35:38.160 --> 00:35:43.060 that the tyrannical ruler is wise, just and benevolent. 342 00:35:43.060 --> 00:35:50.180 Thus, Labuetti points out, the Roman emperors assumed the ancient title of tribune of the 343 00:35:50.180 --> 00:35:56.260 people because the concept had gained favor among the public as representing a guardian 344 00:35:56.260 --> 00:36:03.140 of their liberties, hence the assumption of despotism under the cloak of the old liberal 345 00:36:03.140 --> 00:36:04.780 form. 346 00:36:04.780 --> 00:36:12.060 In modern times, Labuetti adds, rulers present a more sophisticated version of such propaganda, 347 00:36:12.060 --> 00:36:19.140 For they never undertake an unjust policy, even one of some importance, without prefacing 348 00:36:19.140 --> 00:36:25.460 it with some pretty speech concerning public welfare and common good. 349 00:36:25.460 --> 00:36:29.820 Reinforcing ideological propaganda is deliberate mystification. 350 00:36:29.820 --> 00:36:35.780 The kings of the Assyrians and the Medes showed themselves in public as seldom as possible 351 00:36:35.780 --> 00:36:40.860 in order to set up a doubt in the minds of the rabble as to whether they were not in 352 00:36:40.860 --> 00:36:48.620 in some way more than man. Symbols of mystery and magic were woven around the crown so that, 353 00:36:48.620 --> 00:36:54.980 by doing this, they inspired their subjects with reverence and admiration. It is pitiful 354 00:36:54.980 --> 00:37:00.740 to review the list of devices that early despots used to establish their tyranny, to discover 355 00:37:00.740 --> 00:37:07.220 how many little tricks they employed, always finding the populace conveniently gullible. 356 00:37:07.220 --> 00:37:11.860 At times, tyrants have gone to the length of imputing themselves to the very status 357 00:37:11.860 --> 00:37:13.960 of divinity. 358 00:37:13.960 --> 00:37:19.520 They have insisted on using religion for their own protection and, where possible, have borrowed 359 00:37:19.520 --> 00:37:24.020 a stray bit of divinity to bolster up their evil ways. 360 00:37:24.020 --> 00:37:30.020 Thus, tyrants, in order to strengthen their power, have made every effort to train their 361 00:37:30.020 --> 00:37:38.020 At this point, Labuetti inserts his one and only reference to contemporary France. It is, on its face, extremely damaging. For he asserts that, 362 00:38:00.020 --> 00:38:29.020 He quickly adds that in this case he does not wish for my part to be incredulous, for French kings have always been so generous in times of peace and so valiant in time of war that from birth they seem not to have been created by nature like many others, but even before birth to have been designated by Almighty God for the government and preservation of this kingdom. 363 00:38:29.020 --> 00:38:56.020 In the light of the context of the work, it is impossible not to believe that the intent of this passage is satirical, and this interpretation is particularly confirmed by the passage immediately following, which asserts that even if this were not so, he would not question the truth of these French traditions, because they have provided such a fine field for the flowering of French poetry. 364 00:38:56.020 --> 00:39:03.460 Certainly I would be presumptuous, he concludes, surely ironically, if I tried to cast slurs 365 00:39:03.460 --> 00:39:08.340 on our records and thus invade the realm of our poets. 366 00:39:08.340 --> 00:39:15.260 Bonfond seizes the occasion to claim his subject as, deep down and in spite of his radical 367 00:39:15.260 --> 00:39:20.540 deviations, a good conservative Frenchman at heart. 368 00:39:20.540 --> 00:39:24.940 It was not the intention of the young man to attack the established order. 369 00:39:24.940 --> 00:39:31.820 He formally accepts the King of France from his argument and in terms which are stamped 370 00:39:31.820 --> 00:39:34.420 by deference and respect. 371 00:39:34.420 --> 00:39:42.820 Specious ideology, mystery, circuses, in addition to these purely propagandistic devices, another 372 00:39:42.820 --> 00:39:48.740 device is used by rulers to gain the consent of their subjects. 373 00:39:48.740 --> 00:39:54.000 Purchase by material benefits, bread as well as circuses. 374 00:39:54.000 --> 00:39:59.880 The distribution of this largesse to the people is also a method, and a particularly cunning 375 00:39:59.880 --> 00:40:06.160 one, of duping them into believing that they benefit from tyrannical rule. 376 00:40:06.160 --> 00:40:13.080 They do not realize that they are, in fact, only receiving a small proportion of the wealth 377 00:40:13.080 --> 00:40:17.000 already filched from them by their rulers. 378 00:40:17.000 --> 00:40:24.640 Roman tyrants provided the city wards with feast to cajole the rabble. Tyrants would 379 00:40:24.640 --> 00:40:32.060 distribute largesse, a bushel of wheat, a gallon of wine, and a sesterce. And then everybody 380 00:40:32.060 --> 00:40:38.140 would shamelessly cry, Long live the king! The fools did not realize that they were merely 381 00:40:38.140 --> 00:40:44.340 recovering a portion of their own property, and that their ruler could not have given 382 00:40:44.340 --> 00:40:46.340 The Theory of Money and Credit 383 00:41:14.340 --> 00:41:35.340 The Mob has always behaved in this way, eagerly open to bribes, and Labuetti goes on to cite the cases of the monstrous tyrannies of Nero and Julius Caesar, each of whose deaths was deeply mourned by the people because of his supposed liberality. 384 00:41:35.340 --> 00:41:41.620 Here, Labuetti proceeds to supplement this analysis of the purchase of consent by the 385 00:41:41.620 --> 00:41:48.380 public with another truly original contribution, one which Professor Lewis considers to be 386 00:41:48.380 --> 00:41:52.840 the most novel and important feature of his theory. 387 00:41:52.840 --> 00:42:00.040 This is the establishment, as it were the permanent and continuing purchase, of a hierarchy 388 00:42:00.040 --> 00:42:08.440 Theory of Subordinate Allies, a loyal band of retainers, praetorians, and bureaucrats. 389 00:42:08.440 --> 00:42:14.800 La Boétie himself considers this factor the main spring and the secret of domination, 390 00:42:14.800 --> 00:42:18.360 the support and foundation of tyranny. 391 00:42:18.360 --> 00:42:24.440 Here is a large sector of society, which is not merely duped with occasional and negligible 392 00:42:24.440 --> 00:42:26.800 handouts from the state. 393 00:42:26.800 --> 00:42:34.720 Here are individuals who make a handsome and permanent living out of the proceeds of despotism. 394 00:42:34.720 --> 00:42:41.840 Hence their stake in despotism does not depend on illusion or habit or mystery. 395 00:42:41.840 --> 00:42:45.880 Their stake is all too great and all too real. 396 00:42:45.880 --> 00:42:52.480 A hierarchy of patronage from the fruits of plunder is thus created and maintained. 397 00:42:52.480 --> 00:43:00.960 5 or 6 individuals are the chief advisors and beneficiaries of the favors of the king. 398 00:43:00.960 --> 00:43:09.480 These half-dozen, in a similar manner, maintain 600 who profit under them, and the 600 in 399 00:43:09.480 --> 00:43:17.160 their turn maintain under them 6000 whom they promote in rank, upon whom they confer the 400 00:43:17.160 --> 00:43:23.400 the government of provinces or the direction of finances in order that they may serve as 401 00:43:23.400 --> 00:43:30.460 instruments of avarice and cruelty, executing orders at the proper time and working such 402 00:43:30.460 --> 00:43:37.220 havoc all around that they could not last except under the shadow of the 600. 403 00:43:37.220 --> 00:43:44.760 In this way does the fatal hierarchy pyramid and permeate down through the ranks of society 404 00:43:44.760 --> 00:43:52.760 until a hundred thousand and even millions cling to the tyrant by this cord to which they are tied. 405 00:43:53.480 --> 00:44:00.920 In short, when the point is reached through big favors or little ones that large profits or small 406 00:44:00.920 --> 00:44:08.680 are obtained under a tyrant, there are found almost as many people to whom tyranny seems 407 00:44:08.680 --> 00:44:16.480 advantageous as those to whom liberty would seem desirable. Whenever a ruler makes himself 408 00:44:16.480 --> 00:44:23.760 a dictator, all the wicked dregs of the nation, all those who are corrupted by burning ambition 409 00:44:23.760 --> 00:44:31.160 or extraordinary avarice, these gather around him and support him in order to have a share 410 00:44:31.160 --> 00:44:38.240 in the booty and to constitute themselves petty chiefs under the big tyrant. Thus the 411 00:44:38.240 --> 00:44:44.080 The hierarchy of privilege descends from the large gainers from despotism to the middling 412 00:44:44.080 --> 00:44:49.620 and small gainers, and finally down to the mass of the people who falsely think they 413 00:44:49.620 --> 00:44:53.640 gain from the receipt of petty favors. 414 00:44:53.640 --> 00:44:59.820 In this way, the subjects are divided, and a great portion of them induced to cleave 415 00:44:59.820 --> 00:45:07.780 to the ruler, just as, in order to split wood, one has to use a wedge of the wood itself. 416 00:45:07.780 --> 00:45:13.940 Of course, the train of the tyrants, retinue, and soldiers suffer at their leaders' hands, 417 00:45:13.940 --> 00:45:19.160 but they can be led to endure evil if permitted to commit it. 418 00:45:19.160 --> 00:45:27.300 Not against him who exploits them, but against those who like themselves submit but are helpless. 419 00:45:27.300 --> 00:45:33.400 In short, in return for its own subjection, this order of subordinates is permitted to 420 00:45:33.400 --> 00:45:36.120 oppress the rest of the public. 421 00:45:36.120 --> 00:45:43.480 How is tyranny concretely to be overthrown if it is cemented upon society by habit, 422 00:45:43.480 --> 00:45:46.060 privilege and propaganda? 423 00:45:46.060 --> 00:45:52.740 How are the people to be brought to the view where they will decide to withdraw their consent? 424 00:45:52.740 --> 00:45:59.700 In the first place, affirms La Boétie, not all the people will be deluded or sunk into 425 00:45:59.700 --> 00:46:01.980 habitual submission. 426 00:46:01.980 --> 00:46:09.500 There is always a more percipient elite who will understand the reality of the situation. 427 00:46:09.500 --> 00:46:14.980 There are always a few, better endowed than others, who feel the weight of the yoke and 428 00:46:14.980 --> 00:46:19.480 cannot restrain themselves from attempting to shake it off. 429 00:46:19.480 --> 00:46:25.460 These are the people who, in contrast to the brutish mass, possess clear and far-sighted 430 00:46:25.460 --> 00:46:30.500 minds and have further trained them by study and learning. 431 00:46:30.500 --> 00:46:34.780 Such people never quite disappear from the world. 432 00:46:34.780 --> 00:46:42.540 Even if liberty had entirely perished from the earth, such men would invent it. 433 00:46:42.540 --> 00:46:47.660 Because of the danger these educated people represent, tyrants often attempt to suppress 434 00:46:47.660 --> 00:46:54.860 education in their realms, and in that way, those who have preserved their love of freedom 435 00:46:54.860 --> 00:47:00.880 still remain ineffective because, however numerous they may be, they are not known to 436 00:47:00.880 --> 00:47:02.820 one another. 437 00:47:02.820 --> 00:47:08.800 Under the tyrant they have lost freedom of action, of speech, and almost of thought. 438 00:47:08.800 --> 00:47:11.760 They are alone in their aspiration. 439 00:47:11.760 --> 00:47:19.520 Here La Boétie anticipates such modern analysts of totalitarianism as Hannah aren't. 440 00:47:19.520 --> 00:47:26.040 But there is hope, for still the elite exist, and, calling examples once again from antiquity, 441 00:47:26.040 --> 00:47:32.880 La Boétie maintains that heroic leaders can arise who will not fail to deliver their country 442 00:47:32.880 --> 00:47:38.920 from evil hands when they set about their task with a firm, wholehearted and sincere 443 00:47:38.920 --> 00:47:40.400 intention. 444 00:47:40.400 --> 00:47:48.680 The evident task, then, of this valiant, knowledgeable elite, is to form the vanguard of the revolutionary 445 00:47:48.680 --> 00:47:56.080 Resistance Movement Against the Despot. Through a process of educating the public to the truth, 446 00:47:56.080 --> 00:48:02.920 they will give back to the people knowledge of the blessings of liberty and of the myths 447 00:48:02.920 --> 00:48:10.460 and illusions fostered by the state. In addition to rousing the people to the truth, the opposition 448 00:48:10.460 --> 00:48:18.380 movement has another vital string to its bow. The unnatural lives lived by the despots and 449 00:48:18.380 --> 00:48:27.420 and their hierarchy of favorites, for their lives are miserable and fearful and not happy. 450 00:48:27.420 --> 00:48:33.140 Tyrants live in constant and perpetual fear of the well-deserved hatred they know is borne 451 00:48:33.140 --> 00:48:36.820 them by every one of their subjects. 452 00:48:36.820 --> 00:48:42.860 Courtiers and favorites live miserable, crawling, cringing lives, every moment of which is bent 453 00:48:42.860 --> 00:48:48.420 and on servilely fawning upon the ruler on whom they depend. 454 00:48:48.420 --> 00:48:53.880 Eventually, as enlightenment spreads among the public, the privileged favorites will begin 455 00:48:53.880 --> 00:49:00.100 to realize the true misery of their lot, for all their wealth can be seized from them at 456 00:49:00.100 --> 00:49:05.620 any moment should they fall out of step in the race for the favors of the king. 457 00:49:05.620 --> 00:49:12.380 When they look at themselves as they really are, they will realize clearly that the townspeople 458 00:49:12.380 --> 00:49:20.740 The peasants whom they trample underfoot and treat worse than convicts or slaves are, nevertheless, 459 00:49:20.740 --> 00:49:26.260 in comparison with themselves, better off and fairly free. 460 00:49:26.260 --> 00:49:31.420 Although he does not explicitly say so, it seems to be La Boete's contention that the 461 00:49:31.420 --> 00:49:38.300 spread of enlightenment among the public will not only generate refusal of consent among 462 00:49:38.300 --> 00:49:45.060 of the Mass, but will also aid its course immeasurably by splitting off, by driving 463 00:49:45.060 --> 00:49:50.700 a wedge inside, a portion of the disaffected privileged bureaucracy. 464 00:49:50.700 --> 00:49:55.840 There is no better way to conclude a discussion of the content of La Boétie's notable discourse 465 00:49:55.840 --> 00:50:05.420 of voluntary servitude than to note Mesnard's insight that, for La Boétie, as for Machiavelli, 466 00:50:05.420 --> 00:50:13.020 can only be grounded on acceptance by the subjects, except that the one teaches the 467 00:50:13.020 --> 00:50:19.800 prince how to compel their acquiescence while the other reveals to the people the power 468 00:50:19.800 --> 00:50:23.300 that would lie in their refusal. 469 00:50:23.300 --> 00:50:28.480 After graduating from law school, Etienne de la Poitie took up an eminent career as 470 00:50:28.480 --> 00:50:31.360 a royal official in Bordeaux. 471 00:50:31.360 --> 00:50:37.880 He never published the discourse, and as he pursued a career in faithful service of the 472 00:50:37.880 --> 00:50:44.080 monarch, never hint did he express along the lines of his earlier treatise. 473 00:50:44.080 --> 00:50:49.000 Certainly one of the reasons for Montand's stout insistence on his friend's conservatism 474 00:50:49.000 --> 00:50:56.000 and monarchal loyalty is that La Boétie had changed his political views by the time they 475 00:50:56.000 --> 00:51:05.000 They met around 1559. Indeed, in late 1662, shortly before he died, Labuetti wrote, but 476 00:51:05.000 --> 00:51:11.360 did not publish, a manuscript forgotten and lost until recent years in which he, with 477 00:51:11.360 --> 00:51:18.300 moderate conservatism, advised the state to punish Protestant leaders as rebels, to enforce 478 00:51:18.300 --> 00:51:25.800 Catholicism upon France, but also to reform the abuses of the Church moderately and respectably 479 00:51:25.800 --> 00:51:31.380 by the Agency of the King and his Parliaments. Protestants would then be forced to convert 480 00:51:31.380 --> 00:51:38.460 back to Catholicism or leave the country. Certainly it is far from unusual for a young university 481 00:51:38.460 --> 00:51:46.500 student eagerly caught up in a burst of free inquiry to be a fiery radical, only to settle 482 00:51:46.500 --> 00:51:54.000 into a comfortable and respectable conservatism, once well entrenched in a career bound to 483 00:51:54.000 --> 00:52:01.040 to the emoluments of the status quo. But there seems to be more here than that. For the very 484 00:52:01.040 --> 00:52:07.880 abstractness of Labuetti's arguments in the discourse, the very Renaissance-like remoteness 485 00:52:07.880 --> 00:52:14.580 of the discussion from the concrete problems of the France of his day, while universalizing 486 00:52:14.580 --> 00:52:23.460 and Radicalizing the Theory, also permitted La Boétie, even in his early days, to divorce 487 00:52:23.460 --> 00:52:26.020 theory from practice. 488 00:52:26.020 --> 00:52:33.380 It permitted him to be sincerely radical in the abstract while continuing to be conservative 489 00:52:33.380 --> 00:52:35.180 in the concrete. 490 00:52:35.180 --> 00:52:41.500 His almost inevitable shift of interest from the abstract to concrete problems in his busy 491 00:52:41.500 --> 00:52:48.340 Career, thereby caused his early radicalism to drop swiftly from sight, as if it had never 492 00:52:48.340 --> 00:52:49.820 existed. 493 00:52:49.820 --> 00:52:56.760 But if his abstract method permitted La Boitie to abandon his radical conclusions rapidly 494 00:52:56.760 --> 00:53:02.880 in the concrete realm, it had an opposite effect on later readers. 495 00:53:02.880 --> 00:53:11.480 Its very timelessness made the work ever available to be applied concretely in a radical manner 496 00:53:11.480 --> 00:53:18.760 Center to Later Problems in Institutions, and this was precisely the historical fate 497 00:53:18.760 --> 00:53:21.840 of La Boétie's discourse. 498 00:53:21.840 --> 00:53:27.800 It was first published, albeit anonymously and incompletely, in the radical Huguenot 499 00:53:27.800 --> 00:53:36.080 pamphlet, Révely Matin de François, 1574, probably written by Nicolas Barnode with the 500 00:53:36.080 --> 00:53:52.080 The full text with the author's name appeared for the first time two years later, in a collection of radical Huguenot essays compiled by a Calvinist minister in Geneva, Simon Goulard. 501 00:53:52.080 --> 00:54:01.080 Montand was furious at the essay's publication under revolutionary Huguenot auspices. He had intended to publish it himself. 502 00:54:01.080 --> 00:54:08.520 Now, however, not only did he refuse to do so, but he tried to refurbish Labuetti's conservative 503 00:54:08.520 --> 00:54:16.080 reputation by successively averring that his friend had been eighteen and then sixteen 504 00:54:16.080 --> 00:54:19.720 years old at the time of the essay's writing. 505 00:54:19.720 --> 00:54:25.560 For their part, however, even the Huguenots used Labuetti in gingerly fashion. 506 00:54:25.560 --> 00:54:32.880 Attractive as was the spirit of La Boétie's essay, writes Harold Lasky, avowed an academic 507 00:54:32.880 --> 00:54:38.160 republicanism was meet too strong for the digestion of the time. 508 00:54:38.160 --> 00:54:44.760 Not that La Boétie was entirely without influence, but he was used as cautiously as an Anglican 509 00:54:44.760 --> 00:54:49.760 bishop might in the sixties have an interest in Darwinism. 510 00:54:49.760 --> 00:54:54.600 Almost completely forgotten in the more peaceful days of the first half of the seventeenth 511 00:54:54.600 --> 00:55:01.040 In the 18th century in France, the discourse became widely known again during the Enlightenment 512 00:55:01.040 --> 00:55:08.060 of the 18th century, through being printed as a supplement to Montaigne's essays, but 513 00:55:08.060 --> 00:55:11.600 was not particularly influential. 514 00:55:11.600 --> 00:55:19.440 Finally and unsurprisingly, the essay found its métier in the midst of the French Revolution 515 00:55:19.440 --> 00:55:21.600 when it was twice reprinted. 516 00:55:21.600 --> 00:55:28.500 Later, the radical Abbé de Lamine reprinted the discourse with a violent preference of 517 00:55:28.500 --> 00:55:35.820 his own and the same was done by another writer in 1852 to strike back at the coup d'etat 518 00:55:35.820 --> 00:55:38.420 of Napoleon III. 519 00:55:38.420 --> 00:55:43.760 And we have seen how the discourse inspired the non-violent wing of the anarchist movement 520 00:55:43.760 --> 00:55:46.820 in the 19th and 20th centuries. 521 00:55:46.820 --> 00:55:52.580 As the centuries went on, the abstract argument of the discourse continued to exert a fascination 522 00:55:52.580 --> 00:55:55.700 for radicals and revolutionaries. 523 00:55:55.700 --> 00:56:01.940 The speculative thought of the young law student was taking posthumous revenge upon the respectable 524 00:56:01.940 --> 00:56:05.380 and eminent official of the Bordeaux Parliament. 525 00:56:05.380 --> 00:56:12.060 La Boétie's discourse has a vital importance for the modern reader, an importance that 526 00:56:12.060 --> 00:56:17.460 It goes beyond the sheer pleasure of reading a great and seminal work on political philosophy 527 00:56:17.460 --> 00:56:24.500 or, for the libertarian, of reading the first libertarian political philosopher in the Western 528 00:56:24.500 --> 00:56:25.500 world. 529 00:56:25.500 --> 00:56:32.940 For La Boétie speaks most sharply to the problem which all libertarians, indeed all 530 00:56:32.940 --> 00:56:38.220 opponents of despotism, find particularly difficult. 531 00:56:38.220 --> 00:56:44.300 The Problem of Strategy Facing the devastating and seemingly overwhelming 532 00:56:44.300 --> 00:56:51.500 power of the modern state, how can a free and very different world be brought about? 533 00:56:51.500 --> 00:56:59.780 How in the world can we get from here to there, from a world of tyranny to a world of freedom? 534 00:56:59.780 --> 00:57:06.700 Precisely because of his abstract and timeless methodology, La Boitie offers vital insights 535 00:57:06.700 --> 00:57:09.140 into this eternal problem. 536 00:57:09.140 --> 00:57:16.740 In the first place, La Boétie's insight that any state, no matter how ruthless and despotic, 537 00:57:16.740 --> 00:57:23.940 rests in the long run on the consent of the majority of the public, has not yet been absorbed 538 00:57:23.940 --> 00:57:28.780 into the consciousness of intellectuals opposed to state despotism. 539 00:57:28.780 --> 00:57:36.620 Notice, for example, how many anti-communists write about communist rule as if it were so 540 00:57:36.620 --> 00:57:43.420 are solely terror imposed from above on the angry and discontented masses. 541 00:57:43.420 --> 00:57:49.420 Many of the errors of American foreign policy have stemmed from the idea that the majority 542 00:57:49.420 --> 00:57:56.220 of the population of a country can never accept and believe in communist ideas, which must 543 00:57:56.220 --> 00:58:03.380 therefore be imposed by either a small clique or by outside agents from existing communist 544 00:58:03.380 --> 00:58:04.860 countries. 545 00:58:04.860 --> 00:58:11.020 In modern political thought, only the free market economist Ludwig von Mises has sufficiently 546 00:58:11.020 --> 00:58:17.380 stressed the fact that all governments must rest on majority consent. 547 00:58:17.380 --> 00:58:22.940 Since despotic rule is against the interest of the bulk of the population, how then does 548 00:58:22.940 --> 00:58:25.820 this consent come about? 549 00:58:25.820 --> 00:58:32.940 Again La Boite highlights the point that this consent is engineered largely by propaganda 550 00:58:32.940 --> 00:58:37.780 beamed at the populace by the rulers and their intellectual apologist. 551 00:58:37.780 --> 00:58:45.100 The devices of bread and circuses, of ideological mystification that rulers today use to gull 552 00:58:45.100 --> 00:58:52.360 the masses and gain the consent, remain the same as in Laporte's days. 553 00:58:52.360 --> 00:58:58.340 The only difference is the enormous increase in the use of specialized intellectuals in 554 00:58:58.340 --> 00:59:00.340 the service of the rulers. 555 00:59:00.340 --> 00:59:06.700 But in this case, the primary task of opponents of modern tyranny is an educational one, to 556 00:59:06.700 --> 00:59:15.260 awaken the public to this process, to demystify and desanctify the state apparatus. 557 00:59:15.260 --> 00:59:21.820 Furthermore, La Boite's analysis, both of the engineering of consent and of the role 558 00:59:21.820 --> 00:59:28.760 played by bureaucrats and other economic interests that benefit from the state, highlights another 559 00:59:28.760 --> 00:59:43.760 is another critical problem which many modern opponents of statism have failed to recognize that the problem of strategy is not simply one of educating the public about the errors committed by the government. 560 00:59:43.760 --> 00:59:55.760 For much of what the state does is not an error at all from its own point of view, but a means of maximizing its power, influence and income. 561 00:59:55.760 --> 01:00:20.760 We have to realize that we are facing a mighty engine of power and economic exploitation and therefore that, at the very least, libertarian education of the public must include an expose of this exploitation and of the economic interest and intellectual apologist who benefit from state rule. 562 01:00:20.760 --> 01:00:28.640 By confining themselves to analysis of alleged intellectual errors, opponents of government 563 01:00:28.640 --> 01:00:31.760 intervention have rendered themselves ineffective. 564 01:00:31.760 --> 01:00:37.680 For one thing, they have been beaming their counter-propaganda at a public which does 565 01:00:37.680 --> 01:00:44.640 not have the equipment or the interest to follow the complex analyses of error, and which 566 01:00:44.640 --> 01:00:51.320 which can therefore easily be re-bamboozled by the experts in the employ of the state. 567 01:00:51.320 --> 01:00:55.840 Those experts, too, must be de-sanctified. 568 01:00:55.840 --> 01:01:02.520 And again, La Boétie strengthens us in the necessity of such de-sanctification. 569 01:01:02.520 --> 01:01:10.520 The libertarian theorist Lysander Spooner, writing over 400 years after La Boétie, propounded 570 01:01:10.520 --> 01:01:17.720 The similar view that the supporters of government consisted largely of dupes and naves. 571 01:01:17.720 --> 01:01:23.440 The ostensible supporters of the Constitution, like the ostensible supporters of most other 572 01:01:23.440 --> 01:01:28.720 governments, are made up of three classes as follows. 573 01:01:28.720 --> 01:01:35.500 One, naves, a numerous and active class who see in the government an instrument which 574 01:01:35.500 --> 01:01:39.720 they can use for their own aggrandizement or wealth. 575 01:01:39.720 --> 01:01:46.280 Two dupes, a large class no doubt, each of whom, because he's allowed one voice out 576 01:01:46.280 --> 01:01:51.960 of millions in deciding what he may do with his own person and his own property, and because 577 01:01:51.960 --> 01:01:58.960 he is permitted to have the same voice in robbing, enslaving and murdering others, that 578 01:01:58.960 --> 01:02:04.660 others have in robbing, enslaving and murdering himself, is stupid enough to imagine that 579 01:02:04.660 --> 01:02:23.100 3. A class who have some appreciation of the evils of government, but either do not see 580 01:02:23.100 --> 01:02:29.580 how to get rid of them, or do not choose to so far sacrifice their private interest as 581 01:02:29.580 --> 01:02:35.900 as to give themselves seriously and earnestly to the work of making a change. 582 01:02:35.900 --> 01:02:43.460 The prime task of education then is not simply abstract insight into governmental errors in 583 01:02:43.460 --> 01:02:52.500 advancing the general welfare, but de-bamboozling the public on the entire nature and procedures 584 01:02:52.500 --> 01:02:55.140 of the despotic state. 585 01:02:55.140 --> 01:03:02.620 In that task, La Boétie also speaks to us in his stress on the importance of a perceptive 586 01:03:02.620 --> 01:03:10.180 vanguard elite of libertarian and anti-statist intellectuals. 587 01:03:10.180 --> 01:03:16.900 The role of this cadre to grasp the essence of statism and to de-sanctify the state in 588 01:03:16.900 --> 01:03:24.860 the eyes and minds of the rest of the population is crucial to the potential success of any 589 01:03:24.860 --> 01:03:54.860 It becomes, therefore, a prime libertarian task to discover, coalesce, nurture, and advance its cadre, a task of which all too many libertarians remain completely ignorant, for no amount of oppression or misery will lead to a successful movement for freedom unless such a cadre exists and is able to bring about a free society. 590 01:03:54.860 --> 01:04:00.220 to educate and rally the intellectuals and the general public. 591 01:04:00.220 --> 01:04:06.620 There is also the hint in La Boétie of the importance of finding and encouraging disaffected 592 01:04:06.620 --> 01:04:13.820 portions of the ruling apparatus and of stimulating them to break away and support the opposition 593 01:04:13.820 --> 01:04:15.700 to despotism. 594 01:04:15.700 --> 01:04:20.620 While this can hardly play a central role in a libertarian movement, all successful 595 01:04:20.620 --> 01:04:25.020 The first theoretical movements against state tyranny in the past have made use of such 596 01:04:25.020 --> 01:04:31.060 disaffection and inner conflicts, especially in their later stages of development. 597 01:04:31.060 --> 01:04:37.420 La Boitie was also the first theorist to move from the emphasis on the importance of consent 598 01:04:37.420 --> 01:04:45.020 to the strategic importance of toppling tyranny by leading the public to withdraw that consent. 599 01:04:45.020 --> 01:04:52.140 Hence, Laborty was the first theorist of the strategy of mass, non-violent, civil disobedience 600 01:04:52.140 --> 01:04:56.120 of state edicts and exactions. 601 01:04:56.120 --> 01:05:02.300 How practical such a tactic might be is difficult to say, especially since it has rarely been 602 01:05:02.300 --> 01:05:09.160 used, but the tactic of mass refusal to pay taxes, for example, is increasingly being 603 01:05:09.160 --> 01:05:14.300 employed in the United States today, albeit in a sporadic form. 604 01:05:14.300 --> 01:05:20.480 In December 1974, the residents of the city of Willimantic, Connecticut, assembled in 605 01:05:20.480 --> 01:05:27.400 a town meeting and rejected the entire city budget three times, finally forcing a tax 606 01:05:27.400 --> 01:05:29.520 cut of 9%. 607 01:05:29.520 --> 01:05:34.760 This is but one example of growing public revulsion against crippling taxation throughout 608 01:05:34.760 --> 01:05:36.320 the country. 609 01:05:36.320 --> 01:05:41.600 On a different theme, Labretti provides us with a hopeful note on the future of a free 610 01:05:41.600 --> 01:05:42.880 society. 611 01:05:42.880 --> 01:05:49.440 He points out that once the public experiences tyranny for a long time, it becomes inert 612 01:05:49.440 --> 01:05:54.240 and heedless of the possibility of an alternative society. 613 01:05:54.240 --> 01:06:01.480 But this means that should state despotism ever be removed, it would be extremely difficult 614 01:06:01.480 --> 01:06:03.860 to reimpose statism. 615 01:06:03.860 --> 01:06:09.640 The bulwark of habit would be gone, and statism would be seen by all for the tyranny that 616 01:06:09.640 --> 01:06:11.460 it is. 617 01:06:11.460 --> 01:06:18.060 If a free society were ever to be established then, the chances for its maintaining itself 618 01:06:18.060 --> 01:06:20.800 would be excellent. 619 01:06:20.800 --> 01:06:26.340 More and more, if inarticulately, the public is rebelling. 620 01:06:26.340 --> 01:06:33.540 Not only against onerous taxation, but, in the age of Watergate, against the whole carefully 621 01:06:33.540 --> 01:06:37.260 nurtured mystique of government. 622 01:06:37.260 --> 01:06:43.900 Many years ago, the historian Cecilia Kenyon, writing of the anti-Federalist opponents of 623 01:06:43.900 --> 01:06:50.480 the adoption of the U.S. Constitution, chided them for being men of little faith. Little 624 01:06:50.480 --> 01:06:57.020 faith, that is, in a strong central government. It is hard to think of anyone having such 625 01:06:57.020 --> 01:07:04.240 unexamined faith in government today. In such an age as ours, thinkers like Etienne de 626 01:07:04.240 --> 01:07:14.240 have become far more relevant, far more genuinely modern than they have ever been for over a century.