500 Years Ago, Étienne de La Boétie Laid the Foundations of Anarchism, and It’s Never Been More Relevant
In this article, you’ll find out why one small book has had such a huge positive influence on our era, inspiring thousands of intellectuals and humanist activists all over the world.
Talk about anarchist thinkers and people jump straight to names close to us, like Bakunin or Kropotkin. Talented as they were, that’s forgetting anarchist philosophy was born long before them. So today we’re filling that gap and talking about Étienne de La Boétie. An 18-year-old kid who had already figured out just how twisted power is. His only book, Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, hasn’t aged a day since 1549. He’s an author you 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, deep in the Renaissance. Europe is going through an intellectual revolution like nothing before it. The printing press spreads ideas at a speed nobody has ever seen, and humanists are rediscovering Greek and Roman texts. Everywhere, people are starting to question established authority. The Church, kings, whatever dogma you like.
That’s the world Étienne de La Boétie is born into, in 1530, in Sarlat in southwest France, to a cultured family of magistrates. His father dies when he’s little and his uncle takes over his education. An uncle open to the new Renaissance ideas, which is no small detail.
Young Étienne is a prodigy. He picks up Latin and Greek early so he can devour the ancient texts. Then he goes off to study law at the University of Orléans, a hotbed of humanism where the teaching has nothing left in common with old medieval scholasticism. One of his professors is Anne du Bourg, a Protestant who’ll end up hanged in 1559 for daring to defy the king. So you can imagine, not exactly a quiet campus.
In the middle of all that ferment, around 1548-1549, La Boétie wrote his famous Discourse on Voluntary Servitude. He was somewhere between 16 and 18 years old! Nobody knows exactly. The trigger was probably the 1548 uprising against an unfair tax in southwest France. The crown answered by drowning the revolt in blood. It’s fair to assume that violence left a mark on the young La Boétie.
He joined the Parlement de Bordeaux, the region’s high court, as a councilor at just 23. That’s where he ran into a certain Michel de Montaigne. That’s another story, and we’ll get to it later. He died in 1563, at only 32. Dysentery, probably, and he never published his explosive text himself.
The Discourse on Voluntary Servitude is a powerful weapon against tyranny
The title alone carries the whole force of the book. Voluntary servitude. Two words that have no business sitting next to each other, and yet they describe something nobody before La Boétie had dared to put that plainly.
His starting point is disarmingly simple: how come millions of people agree to submit to one man? And yet the tyrant has just two eyes, two hands and one body. Nothing more than the humblest resident of the smallest town in the kingdom. So where does his power come from?
La Boétie’s answer lands like a slap. The tyrant doesn’t get his power from his own strength. He gets it from us. From our consent. From our obedience. Our eyes spy for him, our hands feed him, our arms defend him. Without our active participation, the most terrifying dictator is nothing but a man, alone and naked.
Then he drives the nail in with unstoppable logic. You don’t even have to revolt, take up arms or overthrow anything. You just stop consenting. Stop feeding the beast. Pull your support. That’s it. The day a people collectively decides to stop obeying, the tyrant’s power collapses like a house of cards. Which means that power never rested on anything but the submission of the people it claimed to rule.
You can measure how revolutionary that idea was at the time. In the 16th century, the power of kings was considered sacred, supposedly willed by God. Almost nobody dared question the principle of authority itself. And then an 18-year-old student shows up and says, in substance: the problem isn’t the tyrant, the problem is you. You people, the architects of your own prison.
The 5 mechanisms of voluntary servitude according to La Boétie
For that period, the diagnosis alone is huge. But La Boétie doesn’t stop there! He takes apart the gears of the submission machine one by one. That’s exactly what makes his text so terrifyingly lucid five centuries later.
Habit. The first mechanism, and the worst. People born under tyranny know nothing else. They serve without regret and do willingly what their fathers only did under force. La Boétie sums it up in one clean line: you never miss what you never had. A man who has never tasted freedom doesn’t even know what he’s missing. He takes servitude for his natural state. Just like a horse broken in from birth ends up walking under the harness on its own.
Entertainment. The tyrant doesn’t just rule by force. He puts the people to sleep with pleasures. La Boétie calls them “drogueries,” his word for drugs: theaters, games, farces, shows, festivals… Anything that occupies the mind and pulls attention away from what matters. The Romans had already figured this out with bread and circuses. The principle hasn’t changed, only the delivery has. These days the circus runs 24/7 on every screen we own.
Superstition and the staging of power. Egyptian pharaohs never showed themselves without mysterious symbols on their heads. King Pyrrhus had people believing his thumb worked miracles, and the crowd went ahead and invented new superpowers for him. Reading all this, La Boétie got it exactly: power rests on permanent stagecraft. The tyrant wraps himself in the sacred, in mystery, in ritual… And the people end up believing the man on top is made of finer stuff than they are.
The pyramid chain of accomplices. This is the sharpest piece of analysis in the Discourse. The tyrant never rules alone. He surrounds himself with five or six insiders who have five or six hundred people under their thumb, and those people control five or six thousand. And on it goes… Every link in the chain gets a small advantage out of its position. That’s enough to buy its loyalty. The system feeds itself because everybody gets something out of it, from the cabinet minister down to the lowest clerk. In the end everyone is both accomplice and victim.
The Malencontre. The strangest and deepest idea in the text. La Boétie claims servitude hasn’t always existed. That somewhere in history came a moment, a tragic accident, an original piece of bad luck he calls the Malencontre, the mishap. A moment when human beings fell out of freedom and into servitude. From that tipping point on, the memory of freedom faded, until even the desire to be free disappeared. The effects of that accident keep growing from one generation to the next, until nobody remembers that another world is possible. How do you read that as anything other than an anarchist utopia? Sure, you can call the reading a little anachronistic. But the question deserves to be asked, because it invites constructive debate.
Why do we see Étienne de La Boétie as an anarchist before his time?
Let’s be clear right away. La Boétie never called himself an anarchist. He never joined a political movement, and he spent his short life in the very official post of councilor at the Parlement de Bordeaux. On paper, nothing about him says revolutionary.
Which is exactly what makes his text more radical. La Boétie doesn’t go after one particular tyrant, or even one political regime. He goes after the principle of one man holding power over another. He’s probably the first thinker in history to put in writing that social relations must never get in the way of individual independence. And that right there is the beating heart of anarchist thought.
What sets him apart from every political thinker before him is that he offers no replacement system. He doesn’t say “let’s swap the bad king for a good king.” He doesn’t say “democracy beats monarchy.” Long before Louise Michel, he says something far more fundamental: all power is toxic by nature, because it runs on stripping individuals of their freedom. The fix isn’t a change of regime, it’s a change of consciousness. The day people finally get that they’re themselves the source of the power held over them, domination collapses on its own.
That’s 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 naive in its simplicity. And yet it’s the most powerful weapon against oppression anyone has ever laid out.
Two centuries later, Jean-Jacques Rousseau would write his famous line: “man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” La Boétie goes much further than Rousseau. Where the Enlightenment philosopher just notes the contradiction, the kid from southwest France names its deep causes and offers a way out. It’s no accident that historians of political thought now call him the father of nonviolent disobedience, well before Thoreau, well before Tolstoy and well before Gandhi.
From La Boétie to Gandhi: the transmission chain of civil disobedience
The Discourse on Voluntary Servitude had an insane run. A text written by a teenager in the 1540s, never published in his lifetime, crossing five centuries and shaping the biggest liberation movements in history. Here’s how that wild ride went:
It starts after La Boétie dies in 1563. His best friend, Michel de Montaigne, inherits the manuscript and plans to put it at the center of his own Essays, the centerpiece. Then the times shift. In 1572, the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre drags France into horror, and Protestants grab the text to justify armed resistance against the king. They rename it the Contr’un, Against One, and publish it anonymously in 1574 inside a collective pamphlet. Montaigne gets scared. He pulls the Discourse out of his Essays so nobody links him to the Calvinists, and replaces it with sonnets by his friend. In 1579, the Parlement de Bordeaux orders the book burned in the public square. La Boétie has been dead sixteen years, and his little book is already starting to make power tremble.
After that the text moves through the centuries underground, resurfacing every time somebody fights oppression. During the French Revolution, Marat leans on it heavily to write The Chains of Slavery, lifting whole passages without ever crediting La Boétie. In 1835, Lamennais, a former priest turned socialist deputy, puts the work back in circulation. From then on, the Discourse never leaves the bookshelves of resistance movements.
The chain goes global in the 19th century. In 1849, Henry David Thoreau publishes Civil Disobedience after a night in jail for refusing to pay a tax funding slavery and the war on Mexico. His thinking sits squarely in La Boétie’s line: a citizen has a duty to withdraw consent when the state makes injustice official. Sadly, Thoreau’s text goes completely unnoticed when it comes out. It takes decades to surface, thanks to one Leo Tolstoy, the giant Russian novelist who was also a radical pacifist. Tolstoy translated the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude into Russian himself.
Thoreau and Tolstoy are how the ideas reached Gandhi. In 1906, jailed in South Africa, the young Indian lawyer found Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience and Tolstoy’s pacifist writings. Those readings hit him hard, and out of them he built his concept of Satyagraha, resistance through nonviolence. Over the following decades, Gandhi ran India’s independence struggle with one weapon: the mass withdrawal of popular consent. Exactly what La Boétie had laid out four centuries earlier. In the 1950s and 1960s, Martin Luther King picked up the torch in the United States, leaning openly on Gandhi’s legacy to lead the civil rights movement.
La Boétie, Thoreau, Tolstoy, Gandhi, Martin Luther King. Five names, five centuries, one thread: power only holds through the consent of the people it dominates, and nonviolent disobedience is the strongest weapon for bringing it down. The kid from southwest France obviously couldn’t have pictured his little student essay helping to free India from British colonialism and to break the vile racial segregation of America.
Voluntary servitude in the 21st century: why is La Boétie more relevant than ever?
Five centuries separate us from the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, and yet look around and you’d swear La Boétie wrote it yesterday morning. The mechanisms he described didn’t just survive. They got refined to a degree he probably never would have dared imagine.
Take his famous “drogueries,” the distractions the tyrant handed the people to keep them sleepy. Roman theaters and circus games look pathetic next to what we’ve got now. Infinite scroll on social media, binge-watching on streaming platforms, nonstop phone notifications, video games engineered to hook you… All of it thought through, designed and optimized by armies of engineers whose one job is holding our attention as long as possible. La Boétie called them drogueries. The word has never been more literally right. Digital dopamine is the most widely distributed drug in human history, and we keep asking for more.
Habit, the first pillar of servitude La Boétie picked out, works exactly the same way today. You never miss what you never had. Whole generations are growing up in a world where permanent digital surveillance is the norm, where handing your entire private life to a handful of California multinationals feels as natural as breathing. People who’ve never known a world without ad tracking, without facial recognition, without constant geolocation feel no loss at all. They take for their natural state what’s really a state of servitude.
La Boétie’s pyramid of accomplices found its modern equivalent too. Big Tech doesn’t rule alone. It leans on millions of developers, content creators, influencers, ad people, startups and tech journalists who all pull an advantage out of their spot in the ecosystem. Every link in the chain has a stake in the system lasting. The small Instagram influencer monetizing an audience is the perfect contemporary version of the low-level official in the tyrant’s service who looked away from the abuses in exchange for a few privileges.
And the staging of power La Boétie spotted in pharaohs and kings? It hasn’t gone anywhere, it just changed costumes. Apple keynotes, TED talks, the messianic cult of the visionary CEO, the mythology of the California garage where tech empires are born. All of it does exactly the job King Pyrrhus’s miracle thumb did. It wraps power in a near-mystical aura so nobody thinks to question it.
The most chilling part is still the Malencontre. That collective memory loss La Boétie described five centuries ago is growing right in front of us. Who still remembers the internet was built as a free, decentralized space? Who remembers you could live, work, talk and get informed without depending on a private platform? That memory fades a little more every year, and the desire for another possible world fades with it. Exactly the process La Boétie described: the effects of the Malencontre grow from one generation to the next until nobody remembers we were free.
The democratic illusion and the power of billionaires: La Boétie saw it all coming!
La Boétie never got to watch one side of voluntary servitude unfold, but his analysis lets you understand it with surgical precision. The democratic illusion.
The setup is brutally effective. You give people the right to vote once every four or five years and you let them believe that gesture makes them masters of their own fate. What a citizen actually does in the voting booth is exactly what La Boétie described five centuries ago: he hands his power voluntarily to somebody else. He consents to his own dispossession, and he’s proud of it, because he’s been conditioned to take that for real freedom. La Boétie nailed the mechanism with terrifying clarity: a people ends up mistaking an act of submission for an act of sovereignty. Now stir George Orwell’s 1984 into all that… Welcome to our sorry era!
Real power isn’t even political anymore. Behind the democratic facade, economic powers hold the reins. Billionaires in tech, finance, agribusiness and fossil energy shape our lives infinitely more than any elected official does. You don’t need to be much of an analyst to see who really decides what we eat, what we watch, how we talk to each other, which information reaches us and which stays buried. It’s all built to shape our desires, our habits and our ways of thinking. And not one of these evil outfits was ever elected by anybody.
And these people are only billionaires because we made them billionaires. Every Amazon purchase, every hour on Instagram, every streaming subscription, every tank of gas from an oil company, every meal at McDonald’s is an act of consent. We willingly feed the machine that rules us. La Boétie put it in terms you can’t argue with: the tyrant has no power except what we give him. So let’s just stop giving him credit and almost right away he’s nothing. Just a human being among human beings.
That’s where La Boétie’s thinking runs straight into 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 he was calling for. Gandhi understood that perfectly when he launched the boycott of British goods in India. Martin Luther King understood it when he organized the Montgomery bus boycott. Both times, the economic withdrawal of consent is what made power bend.
Today that weapon is in our hands and it’s stronger than ever. Refusing to buy from a multinational that wrecks the environment, walking away from a social network that monetizes your personal data, picking free software over proprietary, buying local instead of through the big retail platforms: every one of those moves is an act of disobedience in La Boétie’s sense. No spectacular revolt, no armed revolution. A quiet, methodical withdrawal of consent that, if it goes collective, can bring down the most powerful empires there are.
But for all the proven, fearsome power of that method, La Boétie also worked out why it almost never happens. The main reason is the pyramid of accomplices: everybody pulls a small advantage out of the system, and most citizens are scared of losing the illusion of their little comfort. The Amazon worker knows perfectly well the place runs on inhumanity, but he badly needs that thin paycheck. The influencer knows perfectly well he’s feeding a toxic system, but he lives off it and gets a short burst of glory out of it. The consumer knows perfectly well his phone was built under unacceptable conditions, but he isn’t willing to pay the real price to wipe out the ecological and social damage. And in the end everybody is both victim and accomplice, exactly like the tyrant’s subjects La Boétie described five centuries ago. Don’t you think it’s a hell of a shock when it really sinks in?
Bonus: Montaigne and La Boétie, the most famous friendship in French literature
Like I hinted at the top of this piece, you can’t talk about La Boétie without talking about Montaigne. Over the centuries their relationship became the absolute archetype of friendship, to the point of sometimes eclipsing the work itself.
It started with a book. In the 1550s, Michel de Montaigne was a young magistrate at the Parlement de Bordeaux when the manuscript of the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude landed in his hands. The text wasn’t even published, it was just passing hand to hand. Montaigne was so shaken by it that he tried everything to meet the author. When the two men finally ran into each other by chance in 1558 at a party in Bordeaux, it was a kind of intellectual love at first sight. Instant mutual recognition between two brilliant minds who’d been looking for each other without knowing it.
Their friendship lasted six years. Six short years before death broke it all up. In 1563 La Boétie fell seriously ill during a trip in the southwest. Montaigne rushed to his bedside despite the risk of contagion and never left him through his three days of agony. On his deathbed, La Boétie left him his whole library and all his manuscripts. He was only 32.
That grief transformed Montaigne. Before La Boétie’s death, he had never written a thing. Losing his friend is what put a pen in his hand. The Essays, the monumental work that changed world literature, came straight out of Montaigne’s sorrow. A literary landmark built to fill the hole left by a lost friend. In the chapter Of Friendship, Montaigne tried to explain what bound them, in a line that outlived him: “If you press me to say why I loved him, I feel it can only be expressed by answering: because it was he, because it was I.”
Montaigne’s role in the fate of the Discourse is the fascinating part. Without him, the text would probably have vanished. He kept the manuscript, he talked about it, he kept the memory of his friend and his work alive. And Montaigne is also the one who blocked its circulation, pulling it from the Essays when the Protestants grabbed the text for political ends. Protector and censor at once, out of friendship and out of caution. Plenty of people carry that same split. Don’t we all have our contradictions? Especially since we live in a time that keeps pushing us to choose between what’s morally acceptable and what isn’t. So much so that we often end up losing our bearings.
In the end, that great friendship and La Boétie’s thinking fit together perfectly. The Discourse on Voluntary Servitude is at bottom a text about the bonds between human beings. About what binds them freely and what chains them. La Boétie described servitude as a perverted relationship between people. With Montaigne he lived the exact opposite. A relationship between equals, built on mutual respect and reciprocal freedom. Living proof that real human relationships are possible outside any logic of domination.
Conclusion: the power of writing against the steamroller of junk culture
I became a writer very young because I figured out early how powerful writing is, from reading great authors. Not necessarily big names, but big ideas. People like La Boétie, able to shake the world with a few dozen pages.
Unfortunately for me, we’re living through a seriously sorry era. Nobody censors books anymore. Nobody burns them either. It’s way more Machiavellian than that: the market is killing literature slowly, wiping out small committed publishers and squeezing small booksellers into poverty. Meanwhile the shelves get flooded with vile shit that’s a book in name only. Not to mention the mountain of garbage called ebooks, more and more of it written entirely by AI.
So I’m not going to dance around it: literature is dying! It’s almost completely suffocated by Big Tech and other outfits that find culture deeply inconvenient. So readers keep getting scarcer. The brain of homo modernus has been slowly conditioned to only put up with short content. Video stories, micro-blogging posts. And anything that takes a little concentration now gets summarized by AI. Which strips out the soul, obviously.
So after all these years of real joy writing books and meeting my readers, why would I spend time on a book that’ll find no distribution worth the name? It hurt to admit, but my work as an author belongs to another era now. All I have left is NovaFuture and its NovaBooks to carry my freedom of speech.
And even there, I can see it getting harder. The book isn’t the only thing dying, the written format in general is going with it.
So what do you do to win attention back? To keep existing against the steamroller of junk culture? Honestly, I don’t have the answer yet. All I know is I don’t plan on letting the dark forces of tech erase me. Finding a new platform for my voice was a first answer. For the rest, meaning weighing in on public debate again, only our readers can help us build an audience big enough to turn this around. And that can start right now. Thanks to you 🙂
So if you liked this piece and found it useful, please share it as widely as you can. It’ll keep Étienne de La Boétie’s work alive at the same time. And we make it easy, because this content is copyleft. You can republish it on the web and even print it out to hand around if you want. The only thing that matters is that it circulates. Underground works great too. See you very soon for more adventures. Stay tuned to NovaFuture, because we’re nowhere near done bringing the heat.
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