La Boétie and republican liberty: Voluntary servitude and non-domination
| Author | Saul Newman |
| Date | 01 January 2022 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1474885119863141 |
| Published date | 01 January 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article EJPT
La Boe
´tie and republican
liberty: Voluntary
servitude and
non-domination
Saul Newman
Goldsmiths University of London, UK
Abstract
The 16th-century French humanist writer Etienne de La Boe
´tie has not often been
considered in literature on republican political thought, despite his famous essay,
Discours de la Servitude Volontaire, displaying a number of clear republican tropes and
themes, being largely concerned with the problem of arbitrary power embodied in the
figure of the tyrant. Yet, I argue that the real significance of La Boe
´tie’s text is in
his radical concept of voluntary servitude and the way it adds a new dimension to
the neo-republican theory of liberty as non-domination. The problem of self-
domination or wilful obedience to authority is a form of ideological domination that
Pettit’s understanding of arbitrary power relationships between agents does not ade-
quately account for. Furthermore, La Boe
´tie shows that freedom is an ontological
condition and is realised not – or not entirely – through the rule of law as the guarantee
against arbitrariness, as neo-republicans advocate, but rather through acts of self-
emancipation and civil disobedience. Here I understand La Boe
´tie’s thinking in terms
of a certain anarcho-republicanism in which the promotion of freedom depends not
so much on institutions, as Pettit suggests, but rather on autonomous relations of
friendship, love and solidarity between individuals.
Keywords
Anarcho-republicanism, La Boetie, liberty, non-domination, republicanism, voluntary
servitude
Corresponding author:
Saul Newman, Goldsmiths University of London, New Cross, London, SE14 6NW, UK.
Email: s.newman@gold.ac.uk
European Journal of Political Theory
!The Author(s) 2019
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/1474885119863141
journals.sagepub.com/home/ept
2022, Vol. 21(1) 134–154
The plain fact is that to be subject of a master who always has the power to be wicked,
and who can therefore never be relied upon to be good, is an extreme misfortune ...
(De La Boe
´tie, 1988: 37)
1
In his essay on friendship, ‘De l’amitie
´’, devoted to his late friend Etienne de La
Boe
´tie, Michel de Montaigne refers to La Boe
´tie’s famous work, ‘Discours de la
Servitude Volontaire’ (‘Discourse on Voluntary Servitude’) as a discourse written
‘in honour of liberty against tyrants’ (De Montaigne, 1877: XXVII). In this text,
La Boe
´tie outlines a theory of tyranny, domination and freedom that, I suggest,
reflects many of the themes of republican political thought, despite his general
absence in the scholarship on that tradition.
This article explores the importance that La Boe
´tie’s consideration of tyranny
has specifically for the modern neo-republican understanding of freedom as non-
domination. Here, domination is defined by Quentin Skinner and, especially, by
Philip Pettit, in terms of the arbitrary power relationships that produce a con-
dition of dependency, insecurity and a consequent loss of freedom. While show-
ing that La Boe
´tie shares this concern with arbitrariness, particularly in relation
to the experience of living under the tyrant’s rule, I will argue that his key
concept of voluntary servitude or wilful obedience deepens and problematises
the neo-republican account of domination. By showing how our submission to
the arbitrary rule of another might be voluntary rather than coerced, La Boe
´tie
adds a new and hitherto neglected dimension to this understanding of power. He
highlights the limits of the neo-republican model of domination, opening up a
troubling set of questions about why people willingly abandon their own freedom
and voluntarily submit to relationships of power and authority in the first place.
La Boe
´tie’s notion of voluntary servitude reveals a phenomenon of power that
the neo-republican model does not account for – a desire for one’s own domi-
nation that allows power relations to take hold and to be sustained. La Boe
´tie
sees this as a perverted desire, a form of psychic sickness or moral weakness – a
view that has clear parallels with earlier republican concerns about moral cor-
ruption and the loss of civic virtue, but which has been largely neglected in
modern neo-republican theory.
My claim in this article is that La Boe
´tie’s radical notion of voluntary servitude
presents a significant challenge to the neo-republican model of freedom as non-
domination or the absence of arbitrary rule. Firstly, if the power of the tyrant or
master is really based on the voluntary consent of the subject, then this means that
power is a specular illusion sustained by continual obedience. Secondly, the phe-
nomenon of voluntary servitude shows that freedom is never entirely absent, even
in relationships of domination. Rather, it is the permanent ontological condition of
the subject, needing only to be acknowledged within oneself and thus activated.
This means that, contra Pettit, one is essentially free even if one is subject to
arbitrary interference. So, for La Boe
´tie, the answer to domination lies not,
135Newman
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