Graham R (Ed.) - Anarchism - A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas Volume One - From Anarchy to Anarchism (300 CE to 1939)

4/ ANARCHISM
tween lord and subject is established, hearts become daily more filled with evil designs,
until the manacled criminals sUllenly doing forced labour in the mud and the
dust are full of mutinous thoughts, the Sovereign trembles with anxious fear in his
ancestral temple, and the people simmer with revolt in the midst of their poverty and
distress; and to try to stop them revolting by means of rules and regulations, or control
them by means of penalties and punishments, is like trying to dam a river in full
flood with a handful of earth, or keeping the torrents of water back with one finger.
2. Etienne de la Boetie: On Voluntary Servitude (1552)
Etienne de la Boetie (1530-1563), the friend of the famous essayist, Michel de Montaigne,
wrote his Discourse on Voluntary Servitude around the age of22, when a law student at
the University of Orleans in France. The essay remained unpublished until after his death, by
which time he had established himself as a royal official with much more conservative views,
advocating the suppression of Protestantism, by fo rceful conversion or exile, in fa vour of the
Catholic Church. Ironically, his essay was first published as part of a radical Huguenot pampl1let
in 1574 . Since then it has resurfa ced at various times of intellectual and political ferment,
during the En lightenment, the French Revolution and in the aftermath of the failed
1848 Revolution in France, after Napoleon Ill's coup d'etat, only to be rediscovered by the
19th Century anarchist and pacifist movements, influencing a variety of writers, including
Gustav Landauer and Leo. To.lsto.y. These excerpts are taken fro.m the Rlack Rose Ro.o.k.s edition,
using the 194 2 translation by Harry Kurz.
I SHOULD LIKE MERELY TO understand how it happens that so many men, so many
viIIages, 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. Surely a striking situation! Yet it is so common that one must grieve the more
and wonder the less at the spectacle of a million men serving in wretchedness, their
necks under the yoke, not constrained by a greater multitude than they, but simply,
it would seem, delighted and charmed by the name of one man alone whose power
they need not fear, for he is evidently the one person whose qualities they cannot admire
because of his inhumanity and brutality toward them.
A weakness characteristic of human kind is that we often have to obey force; we
have to make concessions; we ourselves cannot always be the stronger. Therefore,
when a nation is constrained by the fortune of war to serve a single clique ... one
should not be amazed that the nation obeys, but simply be grieved by the situation;