Étienne de La Boétie

Written around 1548, when he was about eighteen, and circulated in manuscript rather than printed. It is the oldest text in this project and it asks the question everything else here is still answering.

A tyrant has no power except the power people lend him. Stop lending it and he falls, with no violence required.

The argument

A tyrant is one man. He has two eyes, two hands, one body. Everything he uses against you, he got from you: the soldiers are your sons, the money is your taxes, the informers are your neighbours. He is strong only in the sense that you carry him.

So the puzzle is not oppression. It is obedience. Why do people who could simply stop, not stop?

His answers are still the ones in use. Habit, first: people born into a condition take it for nature and cannot imagine the alternative. Then the ladder of complicity, which is the sharp part: the tyrant buys a handful of people, those buy a few hundred, the hundreds buy thousands, until a large part of the population has a stake in the arrangement and polices it without being told to.

Why it belongs here

Every later argument on this site is a version of this one with more evidence. Gramsci supplies the institutions that manufacture the habit. Bourdieu supplies the school that installs it in a child. Havel supplies the greengrocer, which is the ladder of complicity described from inside a single shop window.

Serious objections

• It is a moral argument rather than an empirical one. Withdrawing consent is easy to write and lethal to attempt, and the essay has little to say about the cost.
• It treats obedience as a choice people could simply revoke, which underrates coercion, material dependence and the coordination problem: nobody moves first.
• Later thinkers in this project treat that gap as the actual subject. Hegemony, misrecognition and disciplinary power are all attempts to explain what La Boétie only names.

Read next

Havel, the twentieth-century restatement. Gramsci, for the machinery. Gene Sharp for the strategic version, which is downstream of this essay.