Tuesday, March 23, 2021

#023: Mystery of Civil Obedience

“This, then, becomes for La Boétie the central problem of political theory: why in the world do people consent to their own enslavement? La Boétie cuts to the heart of what is, or rather should be, the central problem of political philosophy: the mystery of civil obedience. Why do people, in all times and places, obey the commands of the government, which always constitutes a small minority of the society? To La Boétie the spectacle of general consent to despotism is puzzling and appalling:
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...
And this mass submission must be out of consent rather than simply out of fear[.]”*

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*La Boétie, Étienne de. The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude (LvMI) (pp. 12-13). Ludwig von Mises Institute. Kindle Edition. (Bold emphasis added.)

Murray Newton Rothbard (... March 2, 1926 – January 7, 1995) was an American heterodox economist of the Austrian School, ... economic historian ... and political theorist. Rothbard was the founder and leading theoretician of anarcho-capitalism, a staunch advocate of historical revisionism and a central figure in the 20th-century American libertarian movement. He wrote over twenty books on political theory, revisionist history, economics, and other subjects. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Rothbard

Étienne or Estienne de La Boétie (French: ... 1 November 1530 – 18 August 1563) was a French judge, writer and "a founder of modern political philosophy in France". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89tienne_de_La_Bo%C3%A9tie