In this article, you’re going to find out why a single slim book managed to have an enormous positive influence on our time, inspiring thousands of intellectuals and humanist activists all over the world.

When people talk about anarchist thinkers, they tend to jump straight to relatively recent figures like Bakunin or Kropotkin. But for all their talent, that’s a pretty convenient way to forget that anarchist philosophy was born long before either of them. So to fill that glaring gap, today we’re going to talk about Étienne de La Boétie. A kid of 18 who had already figured out everything there was to figure out about the perversity of power. His one and only work, Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, hasn’t aged a single day since 1549. He’s an author you absolutely need to discover, or rediscover, right now.

Étienne de La Boétie: A kid from southwest France who shook the world

We’re in the 1540s, smack in the middle of the Renaissance. Europe is going through an unprecedented intellectual revolution. The printing press is spreading ideas at a speed the world has never seen, humanists are rediscovering Greek and Roman texts. And just about everywhere, people are beginning to question established authorities. Whether it’s the Church, the kings, or other dogmas.

It’s in this context that Étienne de La Boétie was born in 1530 in Sarlat, in southwest France, into a family of educated magistrates. His father died when he was young, and it was his uncle who took charge of his education. An uncle who was open to the new ideas of the Renaissance, which is far from a minor detail.

Young Étienne was a prodigy. From a very early age he learned Latin and Greek to devour the texts of antiquity. He then went off to study law at the University of Orléans, a genuine hotbed of humanism where the teaching had absolutely nothing to do with the old medieval scholasticism. Among his professors was Anne du Bourg, a Protestant who would end up hanged in 1559 for daring to defy the king. The atmosphere, as you can imagine, was not exactly that of a quiet college campus.

It was in this intellectual ferment, around 1548-1549, that La Boétie wrote his famous Discourse on Voluntary Servitude. He was only between 16 and 18 years old! Nobody knows exactly. And what probably pulled the trigger was the popular uprising against an unjust tax in southwest France in 1548. In response, the royal power crushed the revolt in blood. Safe to say that young La Boétie was deeply marked by that violence.

He later joined the Bordeaux Parliament as a counselor at just 23 years old. It was also during this period that he crossed paths with a certain Michel de Montaigne. But that’s another story we’ll get to further on. Sadly, he died in 1563, at just 32. Probably of dysentery, and having never published his explosive text himself.

The Discourse on Voluntary Servitude is a powerful weapon against tyranny

The title of the book sums up its entire power all by itself. Voluntary servitude. Two words that have no business being together, and yet they describe a reality that nobody before La Boétie had dared to state so clearly.

His starting premise is disarmingly simple: How is it that millions of people agree to submit to a single man? And yet the tyrant has only two eyes, two hands, and one body. He has nothing more than the lowliest inhabitant of the smallest town in the kingdom. So where does his power come from?

La Boétie’s answer lands like a slap in the face. The tyrant’s power doesn’t come from his own strength. It comes solely from us. From our consent. From our obedience. It’s our eyes that spy for him, our hands that feed him, our arms that defend him. Without our active participation, the most terrible dictator is nothing more than a man alone and naked.

And that’s where La Boétie drives the point home with relentless logic. It’s not even about revolting, taking up arms, or overthrowing anything. All you need to do is stop consenting. Stop feeding the beast. Withdraw your support. That’s it. Because the day a people collectively decides to stop obeying, the tyrant’s power collapses like a house of cards. Which amounts to saying that this power was never built on anything other than the submission of those it claimed to dominate.

Just think about how revolutionary this idea was for the time. Because in the 16th century, the power of kings was considered sacred, supposedly willed by God. As a result, virtually nobody allowed themselves to question the very principle of authority. And then an 18-year-old student shows up and says, in essence: The problem isn’t the tyrant, the problem is you. You, who are the architects of your own prison.

The 5 mechanisms of voluntary servitude according to La Boétie

For that era, making the diagnosis was already huge. But La Boétie doesn’t stop there! He dismantles the gears of the submission machine one by one. And that’s precisely what makes his text still so terrifyingly lucid five centuries later.

Habit. This is the first and most formidable of the mechanisms. Those who are born under tyranny know nothing else. They serve without regret and voluntarily do what their fathers would have done only under compulsion. La Boétie sums it up with a crystal-clear formula: You never miss what you’ve never had. The man who has never tasted freedom doesn’t even know what he’s lacking. He takes the state of servitude as his natural state. Exactly like a horse broken in from birth that eventually presents itself under the harness on its own.

Entertainment. The tyrant doesn’t settle for ruling by force alone. He puts the people to sleep with pleasures. La Boétie talks about “narcotics“: theaters, games, farces, spectacles, festivals… In short, all the distractions that keep the mind busy and divert attention away from what actually matters. The Romans had already figured this out with bread and circuses. The principle hasn’t changed since then, only the delivery mechanisms have evolved. These days, the circus is running 24/7 on every screen we own.

Superstition and the staging of power. Egyptian pharaohs never showed themselves without wearing mysterious symbols on their heads. King Pyrrhus let people believe his thumb had miraculous powers, and the people themselves invented new superpowers for him. Through his research, La Boétie had perfectly understood that power rests on a permanent performance. The tyrant surrounds himself with the sacred, with mystery, with rituals… And the people end up believing that whoever dominates them is of a superior nature to their own.

The pyramidal chain of accomplices. This is the most brilliant analysis in the Discourse. The tyrant never rules alone. He surrounds himself with five or six close allies who keep five or six hundred people under their thumb, who in turn control five or six thousand. And so on… Every link in the chain draws a small advantage from its position. Which is enough to guarantee its loyalty. This is how the system feeds itself, because everyone gets something out of it, from the minister down to the lowliest civil servant. And in the end, everyone finds themselves both accomplice and victim at the same time.

The Malencontre. This is the most mysterious and deepest concept in the text. La Boétie argues that servitude has not always existed. That there was a moment in history, a tragic accident, an original stroke of misfortune he calls the Malencontre. A moment when humanity fell from freedom into servitude. And from that tipping point, the memory of freedom gradually faded to the point where even the desire to be free eventually disappeared. The effects of this accident would only keep amplifying from generation to generation, until nobody remembered that another world was possible. How can you interpret this concept as anything other than the expression of an anarchist utopia? Sure, you might find this point of view somewhat anachronistic. But the question deserves to be asked, because it opens the door to some genuinely constructive debate.

Why do we consider Étienne de La Boétie an anarchist ahead of his time?

Let’s be clear right off the bat. La Boétie never identified as an anarchist. He never campaigned in any political movement, and he spent his short life holding the very official position of counselor to the Bordeaux Parliament. On paper, there was nothing remotely revolutionary about him.

But that’s precisely what makes his text even more radical. Because La Boétie doesn’t target a particular tyrant, or even a specific political regime. He targets the very principle of one person’s power over another. He is therefore probably the first thinker in history to spell out, in so many words, that social relations must in no way interfere with the independence of individuals. And that, right there, is the very heart of anarchist thought.

What sets him apart from every political thinker who came before him is that he proposes no replacement system. He doesn’t say “let’s replace the bad king with a good king.” He doesn’t say “democracy is better than monarchy.” Long before Louise Michel, he says something far more fundamental: all power is toxic by nature, because it rests on the dispossession of individual freedom. The solution therefore doesn’t lie in a change of regime, but in a change of consciousness. The day individuals finally understand that they themselves are the source of the power being exercised over them, domination will collapse on its own.

This is the exact foundation of what some anarchists would later call nonviolent civil disobedience. No taking up arms, no coup, no civil war. Just the withdrawal of consent. It’s almost naively simple. And yet it’s the most powerful weapon ever theorized against oppression.

Two centuries after La Boétie, Jean-Jacques Rousseau would write his famous line: “man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” But La Boétie actually goes much further than Rousseau. Where the Enlightenment philosopher merely observes the contradiction, the kid from southwest France identifies its root causes and proposes a way out. It’s no coincidence that historians of political thought now consider him the father of nonviolent disobedience, well before Thoreau, well before Tolstoy, and well before Gandhi.

From La Boétie to Gandhi: The chain of transmission of civil disobedience

The Discourse on Voluntary Servitude had a completely wild fate. A text written by a teenager in the 1540s, never published in his lifetime, that would travel across five centuries and influence the greatest liberation movements in history. Here’s a look back at one hell of a journey:

It all starts after La Boétie’s death in 1563. His best friend, Michel de Montaigne, inherits the manuscript and plans to place it at the heart of his own Essays as a centerpiece. But times change. In 1572, the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre plunges France into horror, and the Protestants seize the text to justify armed resistance against the king. They rename it the Contr’un and publish it anonymously in 1574 in a collective pamphlet. Montaigne gets scared. He pulls the Discourse from his Essays to avoid being associated with the Calvinists, replacing the text with sonnets by his friend. In 1579, the Bordeaux Parliament condemns the work to be burned in public. La Boétie has been dead for sixteen years, but his little book is already making power tremble.

The text then travels through the centuries underground, resurfacing at every period of struggle against oppression. During the French Revolution, Marat draws heavily on it for his Chains of Slavery, going as far as plagiarizing entire passages without ever crediting La Boétie. In 1835, it’s the former priest turned socialist deputy Lamennais who puts the work back into circulation. From that point on, the Discourse never leaves the shelves of resistance fighters.

But it’s in the 19th century that the chain of transmission takes on a global dimension. In 1849, the American Henry David Thoreau publishes Civil Disobedience after spending a night in jail for refusing to pay a tax that funded slavery and the war against Mexico. His thinking flows directly from La Boétie: The citizen has a duty to withdraw consent when the State institutionalizes injustice. Unfortunately, Thoreau’s text goes completely unnoticed on release. It would take several decades for it to surface from obscurity, thanks to a certain Leo Tolstoy, the towering Russian writer who was also a radical pacifist. And it was Tolstoy himself who translated the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude into Russian.

It was then through Thoreau and Tolstoy that these ideas reached Gandhi. In 1906, while imprisoned in South Africa, the young Indian lawyer discovered Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience and Tolstoy’s pacifist writings. These readings left a profound mark on him, and from them he developed his concept of Satyagraha, meaning resistance through nonviolence. Over the decades that followed, Gandhi led the struggle for Indian independence with the mass withdrawal of popular consent as his only weapon. Exactly what La Boétie had theorized four centuries earlier. In the 1950s and 1960s, Martin Luther King picked up the torch in the United States, drawing explicitly on Gandhi’s legacy to lead the civil rights movement.

La Boétie, Thoreau, Tolstoy, Gandhi, Martin Luther King. Five names, five centuries, and a single thread: Power only holds through the consent of those it dominates, and nonviolent disobedience is the most powerful weapon to bring it down. The kid from southwest France obviously couldn’t have imagined that his little student essay would one day help free India from British colonialism and bring down the shameful racial segregation in America.

Voluntary servitude in the 21st century: Why La Boétie is more relevant than ever

Five centuries separate us from the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, and yet you only need to look around to see that La Boétie could have written it yesterday morning. Because the mechanisms he described haven’t just survived, they’ve been perfected to a degree he probably never would have dared to imagine.

Take his famous “narcotics,” those distractions the tyrant offered the people to put them to sleep. The theaters and Roman circus games look pretty tame compared to what we have today. The infinite scroll of social media, binge-watching on streaming platforms, constant notifications on our smartphones, video games engineered to generate addiction… All of this has been thought through, designed, and optimized by armies of engineers whose sole objective is to capture our attention for as long as possible. La Boétie called them narcotics. The word has never been so literally accurate. Digital dopamine is the most massively distributed drug in the history of humanity, and we keep asking for more.

Habit, that first pillar of servitude La Boétie had identified, works in exactly the same way today. You never miss what you’ve never had. Entire generations are growing up in a world where permanent digital surveillance is the norm, where handing over your entire private life to a handful of California multinationals seems as natural as breathing. Those who have never known a world without ad tracking, without facial recognition, without constant geolocation feel no sense of loss. They take for their natural state what is in reality a state of servitude.

The pyramid of accomplices described by La Boétie has also found its modern equivalent. Big Tech doesn’t rule alone. It relies on millions of developers, content creators, influencers, advertisers, startups, and tech journalists who all draw an advantage from their position in the ecosystem. Every link in the chain has a stake in keeping the system going. The small Instagram influencer monetizing their audience is the perfect contemporary equivalent of the minor civil servant in service to the tyrant, who looked the other way at his abuses in exchange for a few privileges.

And what about the staging of power that La Boétie had spotted in the pharaohs and kings? It hasn’t disappeared, it’s just changed its costume. Apple keynotes, TED talks, the messianic cult of the visionary CEO figure, the mythology of the California garage where tech empires are born. All of this serves exactly the same function as King Pyrrhus’s miraculous thumb. Surrounding power with a quasi-mystical aura so that nobody thinks to question it.

But the most chilling part is still the Malencontre. That collective loss of memory La Boétie described five centuries ago is amplifying right before our eyes. Who still remembers that the Internet was designed as a free, decentralized space? Who still remembers that you could live, work, communicate, and stay informed without depending on a private platform? That memory fades a little more every year, and with it disappears the very desire for another possible world. Exactly the process La Boétie had described: The effects of the Malencontre amplify from generation to generation until nobody remembers that we were once free.

The democratic illusion and the power of billionaires: La Boétie had it all figured out!

There’s one aspect of voluntary servitude that La Boétie didn’t have time to see unfold, but that his analysis allows us to understand with surgical precision. It’s the democratic illusion.

The principle is devastatingly effective. Give the people the right to vote once every four or five years and make them believe that this gesture is enough to make them masters of their own destiny. In reality, what the citizen does in the voting booth is exactly what La Boétie described five centuries ago: They voluntarily delegate their power to someone else. They consent to their own dispossession and are even proud of it, because they’ve been conditioned to believe that this is what real freedom looks like. La Boétie had identified this mechanism with terrifying clarity, noting that the people end up confusing the act of submission with an act of sovereignty. And if on top of all that you throw in George Orwell’s 1984… Welcome to our sorry era!

But the real power isn’t even political anymore. Because behind the democratic facade, it’s economic forces that are genuinely holding the reins. When it comes down to it, the billionaires of tech, finance, agribusiness, and fossil fuels exert an infinitely greater influence over our lives than any elected official. And you don’t need to be a great analyst to notice who’s really deciding what we eat, what we watch, how we communicate, which information reaches us and which stays in the shadows. Everything is designed to shape our desires, our habits, and our ways of thinking. All of this, without any of these malevolent entities ever having been elected by anyone.

And yet these people are billionaires only because we made them billionaires. Every purchase on Amazon, every hour spent on Instagram, every streaming subscription, every tank of gas from an oil company, every meal at McDonald’s is an act of consent. We are voluntarily feeding the machine that dominates us. La Boétie nailed it with a formula of devastating simplicity: The tyrant only has the power we give him. So let’s just stop giving him credit, and almost immediately he becomes nothing. Just an ordinary human being among human beings.

This is where La Boétie’s thinking connects directly to the power of the boycott. If the modern tyrant’s power rests on our consumption, then refusing to consume is the exact equivalent of the withdrawal of consent that La Boétie was calling for. Gandhi understood this perfectly when he launched the boycott of British goods in India. Martin Luther King understood it when he organized the Montgomery Bus Boycott. In both cases, it was the economic withdrawal of consent that made power bend.

Today that weapon is in our hands and it’s more powerful than ever. Refusing to buy the products of a multinational that destroys the environment, leaving a social network that monetizes your personal data, choosing free software over proprietary software, prioritizing local supply chains over big distribution platforms: Each of these actions is an act of disobedience in the sense that La Boétie intended. Not a spectacular revolt, not an armed revolution, but a quiet and methodical withdrawal of consent that, if it becomes collective, can bring down the most powerful empires.

But despite the proven and formidable effectiveness of this method, La Boétie had also identified why it almost never works. The main reason is that the pyramid of accomplices means everyone draws a small advantage from the system, and the majority of citizens are afraid of losing the illusion of their little comfort. For example, the Amazon warehouse worker knows perfectly well that the whole operation runs on inhumane terms, but they absolutely need that meager paycheck. The influencer knows perfectly well they’re feeding a toxic system, but they make a living from it and get a very fleeting taste of fame out of it. The consumer knows perfectly well that their smartphone was manufactured under unacceptable conditions, but they’re not prepared to pay the real cost of eliminating the ecological and social damage. And in the end, everyone finds themselves both victim and accomplice at the same time, exactly like the subjects of the tyrant La Boétie described five centuries ago. Doesn’t it hit differently when you actually truly let that sink in?

Bonus: Montaigne and La Boétie, the most celebrated friendship in French literature

As I hinted at the start of this article, you can’t talk about La Boétie without talking about Montaigne. Because their relationship has become, over the centuries, the absolute archetype of friendship, to the point of sometimes overshadowing the work itself.

It all started with a book. In the 1550s, Michel de Montaigne was a young magistrate at the Bordeaux Parliament when the manuscript of the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude fell into his hands. The text wasn’t even published yet, it was just circulating on the quiet. But Montaigne was so shaken by what he read that he did everything he could to meet the author. And when the two men finally crossed paths by chance in 1558 at a gathering in Bordeaux, it was a kind of intellectual thunderbolt. An immediate mutual recognition between two brilliant minds who had been looking for each other without knowing it.

Their friendship lasted six years. Six short years before death came and shattered everything. In 1563, La Boétie fell gravely ill during a trip through southwest France. Montaigne rushed to his bedside, disregarding the risk of contagion, and never left him during his three days of agony. On his deathbed, La Boétie bequeathed him his entire library and all his manuscripts. He was only 32 years old.

That loss transformed Montaigne. Before La Boétie’s death, he had never written a word. It was the disappearance of his friend that pushed him to take up his pen. The Essays, that monumental work which revolutionized world literature, was born directly out of Montaigne’s grief. In short, one of the great unavoidable landmarks of world literature was built to fill the absence of a lost friend. In the chapter On Friendship, Montaigne tried to explain what bound them together with a line that has since become immortal: “If someone presses me to say why I loved him, I feel it can only be expressed by answering: because it was him, because it was me.”

What’s fascinating in this story is the role Montaigne played in the destiny of the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude. Without him, the text would probably have disappeared. It was Montaigne who preserved the manuscript, who talked about it, and who kept alive the memory of his friend and his work. But it was also Montaigne who blocked its distribution by pulling it from his Essays when the Protestants hijacked the text for political purposes. Protector and censor at once, driven by both friendship and caution. A contradiction plenty of people know well. Isn’t it said that we all have our contradictions? Especially since we live in an era that constantly forces us to choose between what is morally acceptable and what is not. To the point where we often end up losing our footing entirely.

In the end, there’s something deeply coherent between this great friendship and La Boétie’s thinking. Because The Discourse on Voluntary Servitude is at its core a text about the bonds between human beings. About what unites them freely and about what chains them. La Boétie described servitude as a perverted relationship between people. And with Montaigne, he lived its exact opposite. A bond based on a relationship between equals, grounded in mutual respect and reciprocal freedom. Which gives us living proof that authentic human relationships are possible outside of any logic of domination.

Conclusion: The power of writing in the face of the subculture steamroller

I became a writer very young because I understood early on the power of writing by reading great authors. Not necessarily great by their reputation, but great by their ideas. People like La Boétie himself, capable of shaking the world with a few dozen pages.

Unfortunately for me, we’re living through a pretty bleak era. Because these days, nobody censors books anymore. They don’t burn them either. It’s far more Machiavellian than that: The market economy is slowly killing literature by squeezing out small independent publishers and driving small bookshops to the wall. On top of that, the shelves are flooded with absolute garbage that barely deserves to be called books. Not to mention Amazon and its mountain of filth called ebooks, more and more of which are now written entirely by AI.

So I’m not going to beat around the bush: Literature is dying! It’s almost completely suffocated by Big Tech and other entities that find culture deeply threatening. And as a result, readers are becoming fewer and fewer. The brain of homo modernus is being slowly conditioned to no longer tolerate anything beyond short-form content. Things like video stories or microblogging posts. And alongside that, everything that demands even a small effort of concentration is increasingly being summarized by AI. Which obviously strips it of all its soul.

Under these conditions, after all these years during which I genuinely took immense pleasure in writing books and meeting my readers, why would I spend time writing something that will have no real way to reach people? It pained me to admit it, but my life as a writer now belongs to another era. All that’s left for me is NovaFuture and its NovaMag as a platform for my freedom of expression.

And even there, I can see it’s getting more and more complicated. Simply because it’s no longer just books that are dying, it’s the written format in general.

So what do you do to recapture attention? To keep existing in the face of the subculture steamroller? Honestly, today I don’t have the answer yet. All I know is that I have no intention of letting myself be erased by the dark forces of tech. Finding a new medium for expression was already a first response. As for the rest, meaning being able to weigh in on public debate again, it seems obvious to me that only our readers can help us build an audience large enough to turn the tide. And that starts right now. With you 🙂

So if you enjoyed this content and found it useful, please share it as widely as possible. It’ll also help keep the work of Étienne de La Boétie alive. And we’re making it easy for you, because this content is published under copyleft. You can republish it on the web and even print it for distribution if you want. The only thing that matters is that it circulates. Even underground, that’s awesome too.

And finally, if you’re feeling generous, thanks for taking a few seconds to buy us a coffee, because that’s what keeps the site going. See you very soon for more adventures. Stay tuned to NovaFuture, because we’re far from done dropping heavy content.