Discourse On Voluntary Servitude
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The Politics of Obedience
This classic work of the sixteenth century political philosopher, in reply to Machiavelli's The Prince, seeks to answer the question of why people submit to the tyranny of government, and as such, has exerted an important influence on the traditions of dissidence from Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, to Tolstoy, to Gandhi.
Discourse on Voluntary Servitude
Discourse on Voluntary ServitudeDiscours sur la servitude volontaire�tienne de La Bo�tieLa Bo�tie's essay against dictators makes stirring reading. A clear analysis of how tyrants get power and maintain it, its simple assumption is that real power always lies in the hands of the people and that they can free themselves from a despot by an act of will unaccompanied by any gesture of violence. The astounding fact about this tract is that in 1948 it was four hundred years old. One would seek hard to find any writing of current times that strips the sham from dictators more vigorously. Better than many modern political thinkers, its author not only reveals the contemptible nature of dictatorships, but he goes on to show, as is aptly stated by the exiled Borgese, "that all servitude is voluntary and the slave is more despicable than the tyrant is hateful." No outraged cry from the past or present points the moral more clearly that Rome was worthy of her Nero, and by inference, Europe of her present little strutters and the agony in which they have engulfed their world. So appropriate to our day is this courageous essay that one's amazement is aroused by the fact that a youth of eighteen really wrote it four centuries ago, with such far-sighted wisdom that his words can resound today as an ever-echoing demand for what is still dearest to mankind.
Discourse on Voluntary Servitude
Author: Etienne de La Boetie
language: en
Publisher: Hackett Publishing
Release Date: 2012-09-15
An elegant English version of La Boetie's Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, which is both a key to understanding much of Montaigne and a major piece of early modern political thought. --Timothy Hampton, Professor of French and Comparative Literature, University of California, Berkeley