Voluntary Servitude
By Russell Kanning, Saturday, May 22 2021.
A nice intro to the subject and La Boetie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse_on_Voluntary_Servitude
Here is the text of the essay: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Discourse_on_Voluntary_Servitude
“I should like merely to understand how it happens that so many men, so many villages, so many cities, so many nations, sometimes suffer under a single tyrant who has no other power than the power they give him; who is able to harm them only to the extent to which they have the willingness to bear with him; who could do them absolutely no injury unless they preferred to put up with him rather than contradict him. Surely a striking situation! Yet it is so common that one must grieve the more and wonder the less at the spectacle of a million men serving in wretchedness, their necks under the yoke, not constrained by a greater multitude than they.
Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces.”
https://mises.org/wire/voluntary-servitude-not-coercion-fuels-states-power
What Murray Rothbard had to say about him: https://mises.org/library/politics-etienne-de-la-boetie
and other ideas from Tolstoy on how should we then live:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/658.The_Kingdom_of_God_Is_Within_You
https://librivox.org/the-kingdom-of-god-is-within-you-by-leo-tolstoy/
PREFACE. In the year 1884 I wrote a book under the title "What I Believe," in which I did in fact make a sincere statement of my beliefs.
In affirming my belief in Christ's teaching, I could not help explaining why I do not believe, and consider as mistaken, the Church's doctrine, which is usually called Christianity.
Among the many points in which this doctrine falls short of the doctrine of Christ I pointed out as the principal one the absence of any commandment of non-resistance to evil by force. The perversion of Christ's teaching by the teaching of the Church is more clearly apparent in this than in any other point of difference.
I know—as we all do—very little of the practice and the spoken and written doctrine of former times on the subject of non-resistance to evil. I knew what had been said on the subject by the fathers of the Church—Origen, Tertullian, and others—I knew too of the existence of some so-called sects of Mennonites, Herrnhuters, and Quakers, who do not allow a Christian the use of weapons, and do not enter military service; but I knew little of what had been done by these so-called sects toward expounding the question.
My book was, as I had anticipated, suppressed by the Russian censorship; but partly owing to my literary reputation, partly because the book had excited people's curiosity, it circulated in manuscript and in lithographed copies in Russia and through translations abroad, and it evolved, on one side, from those who shared my convictions, a series of essays with a great deal of information on the subject, on the other side a series of criticisms on the principles laid down in my book.
A great deal was made clear to me by both hostile and sympathetic criticism, and also by the historical events of late years; and I was led to fresh results and conclusions, which I wish now to expound.
First I will speak of the information I received on the history of the question of non-resistance to evil; then of the views of this question maintained by spiritual critics, that is, by professed believers in the Christian religion, and also by temporal ones, that is, those who do not profess the Christian religion; and lastly I will speak of the conclusions to which I have been brought by all this in the light of the historical events of late years.
L. TOLSTOI. YASNAÏA POLIANA, May 14/26, 1893.
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4602