Five-minute digest
Discourse on Voluntary Servitude
Summary
The Discourse on Voluntary Servitude is a short essay asking one question with unusual persistence: how can so many men, cities and nations put up with a single tyrant, who has no power except what they give him? La Boétie, writing as a young law student around 1548 (some scholars date it to about 1552-53), addresses the question to a friend named Longa and answers it in stages. He begins with Ulysses' praise of one-man rule in Homer and sets it aside, then expresses astonishment that whole peoples not only obey but serve, sacrificing goods, children and lives to one man who is often the weakest and least worthy among them. His remedy is strikingly simple: a tyrant need not be overthrown by force; if the people merely stop supporting him, he falls like a colossus whose base has been removed. The essay then asks why people do not take this step. Liberty is natural, La Boétie argues, as even animals show by resisting the cage, yet custom is stronger than nature, and those born under the yoke come to treat servitude as normal, like horses that first bite the bit and later play with it. He contrasts Venice and the Spartans Sperthies and Bulis, who told the Persian Hydarnes that he had never tasted liberty, with peoples softened by habit. Tyrants add other means: games, theatres, feasts and gifts as baits; titles and religious ceremony, illustrated by the healing toe of Pyrrhus and the miracles credited to Vespasian; and, most important, a chain of interest in which five or six favourites hold six hundred, who hold six thousand, until a great part of the country profits from the tyranny. The closing pages turn to these favourites, who are never safe, since a tyrant can neither love nor be loved; friendship, La Boétie says, exists only between good men. He ends by commending tyrants and their accomplices to the judgment of God. The essay circulated in manuscript, was printed in part in 1574 and in full in 1576 by Huguenot writers after the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre, and is known chiefly through Montaigne's tribute in his essay Of Friendship. The library text is the anonymous English translation printed for T. Smith in London in 1735, with the translator's preface.
Top Lessons
Power rests on cooperation
La Boétie's central claim is that a ruler's strength is borrowed from those who obey. The guards, the tax collectors and the informers are all subjects, so the people's own hands do the work of their servitude. The argument relocates the problem of tyranny from the palace to the habits of ordinary people.
Custom as second nature
La Boétie grants that liberty is natural but argues that custom is stronger, so that people born under the yoke stop feeling its weight. He pities rather than blames such people, and points to education and the memory of freedom as the counterweight. The essay is as much about formation as about politics.
The economy of favour
The most original section traces tyranny's support through a pyramid of beneficiaries: six, six hundred, six thousand. Those who gain from a regime defend it, even when they also live in fear of it. La Boétie presents interest, not force, as the ruler's firmest prop.
No friendship with a tyrant
La Boétie defines friendship as a sacred bond that exists only between good men and grows from mutual esteem. A tyrant, placed above everyone and trusting no one, cannot have friends, and his favourites cannot trust him. The theme links the essay to the famous friendship Montaigne later described.
Verified Quotes
“Resolve not to obey, and you are free.”
“I do not advise you to shake or overturn him, forbear only to support him, and you will see him, like a great Colossus from which the Base is taken away, fall with his own Weight, and be broken in pieces.”
“From whence has he so many Eyes to watch you, if you do not give them?”
“So the first Reason of this voluntary Servitude is Custom, like the generous Steeds who at first bite the Bitt, but afterwards play with it”
“Publick Theatres, Plays, Farces, Shews, Gladiators, Foreign Wild Beasts, Medals, Pictures, and suck like Amusements, were to the Ancients the Decoys of Servitude, the Price of their Liberty, and the Instruments of Tyranny.”
“as we say, to cleave Wood, Wedges are made of the Wood itself”
“Friendship is a sacred Word, a holy Thing; it never subsists but between good Men, nor commences but by mutual Esteem”
Medical Lens
The essay is political, but it reasons repeatedly by medical analogy, as Renaissance humanists often did. La Boétie compares advising an enslaved people to a physician tampering with incurable wounds, likens the habituation to servitude to Mithridates' famed tolerance of poison, and compares the gathering of the ambitious around a tyrant to humours flowing toward a gangrenous part. He also praises Hippocrates for refusing the Persian king's rewards, an anecdote drawn from the pseudo-Hippocratic letters printed with the Hippocratic works, which the 1735 translator glosses in a note. These passages show the period's view of the physician as a moral exemplar and of the body politic as liable to disease.
- Of Voluntary Servitude, the address to the peoples (end)
La Boétie says physicians wisely leave incurable wounds alone and compares his own advice to a people long used to servitude.
- Of Voluntary Servitude, on custom
Custom teaches people to swallow servitude unawares, as Mithridates accustomed himself to poison.
- Of Voluntary Servitude, on cowardice; translator's endnotes 5 and 7
Hippocrates is cited on the cowardice of peoples under despots and praised for refusing to treat the army of Artaxerxes.
- Of Voluntary Servitude, the chain of dependents
The ambitious flock to a new tyrant as, physicians say, matter flows toward a gangrenous part of the body.