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:
how it happens that so many men, so many villages, so many cities, so many nations, sometimes suffer under a single tyrant who has no other power than the power they give him; who is able to harm them only to the extent to which they have the willingness to bear with him; who could do them absolutely no injury unless they preferred to put up with him rather than contradict him.
How is it, he wondered, that people will stand up to an invading barbarian army but cower before a “single little man,” often the “most cowardly and effeminate in the
