Étienne de La Boétie, "Father of Civil Disobedience," died on this day in 1563.
Étienne de La Boétie died on this day in 1563. He was a political philosopher who wrote his greatest work, “Discourse on Voluntary Servitude,” when he was either 18 or 20 years old. The discourse attacks tyranny, positing that leaders have power simply because the people give it to them. He was perhaps the earliest European advocate of civil disobedience, suggesting in the discourse that people should refuse to support tyrants and expose their ultimate weakness. La Boétie is widely credited as being one of the pillars that support the later writings of Tolstoy and Thoreau. He has been called “The Father of Civil Disobedience.”
“I should like merely to understand 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. 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.”
Read the entire Discourse on Voluntary Servitude here:
http://tmh.floonet.net/articles/laboetie.html
