Etienne de La Boétie (1530-1563) was a French humanist writer, poet and jurist best known for two things: his famous friendship with Michel de Montaigne (“Because it was him, because it was me”) and his Discourse on Voluntary Servitude. In this early work, written at the age of 17 “in honor of liberty and against tyrants”, he asks : how can a people continue to submit to their tyrant, an isolated man with neither strength nor prestige, when all it would take is their will to free themselves?
Some schools of thought interpret Discourse on Voluntary Servitude as a call for revolution. We think this is a misinterpretation.
A member of the Bordeaux parliament, like his friend Montaigne, La Boétie was at once loyal, provocative and intellectually honest. He sought balance and fairness. “La Boétie […] admired the courage and wisdom with which [Michel de L’hôpital] had dared to officially condemn both the sedition of the Huguenots and the intransigence of the Catholics at the Estates General in Orleans on December 13, 1560.”
There are many links between Etienne de La Boétie’s thinking and the way we approach our trade.
- We believe that everyone, bosses and employees alike, has a responsibility in what happens in an organization. Our constant concern is to help everyone “do their part”.
- Like La Boétie, we believe that habit shapes us, and sometimes freezes us. We seek to change habits in our workshops.
- Like La Boétie, we are convinced that everyone has a talent, but that the other side of the coin is never far away — that is what we call our “dark” side and our “light” side.
- We like to see collective intelligence as a way of guarding against the tyranny that each individual may be tempted to exercise as soon as he or she has power. But like La Boétie, we are convinced of the importance of authority.
- Like him, we seek not to overthrow existing systems and their leaders, but to improve them, without dreaming of an illusory ideal.
- Just as La Boétie championed pragmatic solutions that took into account the just aspirations of Catholics and Protestants in troubled times when everyone was struggling to live together, we help to find integrative paths between sometimes conflicting points of view.
- Like him, we believe in the power of responsibility and we love freedom. And like him, we believe that it’s not so easy to reconcile freedom and responsibility; that’s why we’ve built our operating model so that it enables each and every one of us to live our freedom to the full and exercise our responsibility seriously.
- We love his quest for timeless wisdom. As a Renaissance man, La Boétie drew his inspiration from the acknowledged authors of antiquity. We are wary of managerial fads.
- In his writings, La Boétie showed a constant concern for uprightness and nuance. His intellectual honesty inspires us.
A few quotations
- “Thus the first reason for voluntary servitude is custom.”
- “Be resolved to serve no more and you are free.”
- “For the fire that burns me is the fire that enlightens me.”
- “And yet this tyrant, alone, need not be fought, nor even resisted; he is undone by himself, so long as the people do not consent to their servitude. There is no need to take anything from him—only to give him nothing.”
- “It is unbelievable how the people, as soon as they are subjugated, fall so suddenly into such a deep and profound oblivion of frankness, that it is not possible for them to wake up to get it back.”
- “Friendship is a holy thing, it is never born but between good people, and comes only with mutual esteem; it is not so much maintained by kindness as by a virtuous life. What makes one friend assured of another is the knowledge he has of his integrity.”
Sources:
- Étienne de la Boétie, Le discours de la servitude volontaire. Presentation by Simone Goyard-Fabre. Dossier by Raphaël Fabre, Garnier-Flammarion 2016.
- Anne-Marie Cocula-Vaillières, Étienne de La Boétie et le destin du Discours de la servitude volontaire, Études montaignistes n. 65, Classiques Garnier 2018.
- August 2024 La Boétie Partners seminar.
