FeaturesSeptember 2012 Are you in? On Obama as Weber's charismatic leader, and the decline in constitutional governance. Of Étienne de La Boétie we remember, at most, two things. First, he was the friend of Michel de la Montaigne. When La Boétie died, Montaigne wrote “if you ask me why I loved him, all I can say is, because it was him, because it was I.” La Boétie is less well known for his principal work, a rambling essay on political allegiance entitled Discours de la servitude volontaire, ou le Contr’un: the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, or the Anti-One. The “One” was the King, tyrant or dictator who ruled the many, and why the many permitted that to happen was the puzzle La Boétie set out to answer, in a foundational if neglected work of political theory What La Boétie wanted to know was why people agree to be oppressed by their rulers. “I should like merely to understand,” he wrote:
This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 31 September 2012, on page 13 Copyright © 2013 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Are-you-in--7422
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A review of The Thurber Letters: The Wit, Wisdom, and Surprising Life of James Thurber, Harrison Kinney, editor & Thurber Country: A Collection of Pieces About Males and Females, Mainly of Our Own Species,by James Thurber. The great famine before China's Cultural Revolution killed millions. Yang Jisheng took it upon himself to make sure the world knew about it. by Charles Hill He was an eighteenth-century Irish statesman, but Edmund Burke still has plenty to say today. Reinhold Niebuhr was a public intellectual and a theologian who still has a deep influence on both the right and the left.
Webcasts
Poet George Green reads from his award-winning Lord Byron's Foot
Celebration of the Life of Robert H. Bork, 1927–2012
James Panero on price gouging at the Met, with Fred Dicker Weblog 
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