Montaigne: Selected Essays

This essay is written by Montaigne’s great friend and mentor, Étienne de la Boétie, whose beliefs profoundly affect Montaigne; they amount to source material for much of Montaigne’s political philosophy.

The purpose of the essay is to describe how freedom can be snatched from a people, and how tyranny grows and sustains itself. Beyond Montaigne, it also influenced revolutionaries in subsequent centuries and affected writers and leaders such as Thoreau, Tolstoy, and Gandhi.

Of the three roads to tyranny listed by La Boétie—conquest, inheritance, and election—the latter is the most problematic: how can a leader chosen directly by the people turn on them and take their freedom? La Boétie suggests it must be done thoroughly and cruelly, stamping out all resistance and obliterating the people’s memory of their former freedom. Is this even possible? Yes: A good example of a modern tyrant who came to power through a democratic process is Adolf Hitler, who is elected Chancellor of Germany in 1933 and quickly proceeds to replace constitutional liberties with a tyrannical regime. Other examples include Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe and Hugo Chavez and his successors in Venezuela.

La Boétie suggests that it is the high-born, the learned men of good character, who will lead any move to regain freedom from a tyrant. He also implies that such attempts are unlikely: for one thing, a people downtrodden have trouble standing back up; for another, the high-born often align themselves with an authoritarian regime. The essay is in large part an attempt to talk them out of capitulating, reflecting La Boétie’s theory that a tyrant will fall if enough people simply withdraw from participating in the tyranny.

He writes that “it is a profound misfortune to be subject to one master, who you can never be sure will be good, since it is always in his power to be bad when he wishes to” (284). This is true in any situation where one person has power over others. Sociological studies support the idea that persons in authority tend to cheat on their promises but hold their subjects strictly to their own duties. There may come a time when, for arbitrary reasons, the master—or king, or religious leader, or corporate tycoon—begins making decisions at the expense of underlings. There is no way to guarantee this won’t happen; when it does, the underlings’ choices often are drastic: defy and be punished, escape and be hunted down, quit and starve.

A footnote points to a similarity between La Boétie’s argument and a passage in the Declaration of Independence: “That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it […]”. Both documents share beliefs with John Locke, whose late-1600s essays on political freedom led to the Declaration itself.