A war for power is casting its shadow over Europe. It made me think of the theory of power by Étienne de La Boétie. Power is a complex phenomenon with many aspects. One aspect concerns the interaction between political systems and countries, and a power theory can try to explain how it works. In the present situation in Europe, such a theory is interesting, for it can help understand the struggle for power around Ukraine and Russia’s war purposes. This is not what La Boétie’s theory is about. However, political systems and countries are not abstract entities. They are led by persons of flesh and blood, which must build up their positions before they are leaders and then maintain them: Leaders apply power to get and keep their positions. It would be nice to have a universal theory that describes how this happens. However, countries are very diverse. Some are democracies; other countries have an authoritarian structure or are even full dictatorships; again other countries have political systems somewhere between these extremes. Although La Boétie’s theory is about how a leader gets and especially maintains his position, it’s not a universal theory of leadership power. It explains only how leadership in authoritarian systems and dictatorships works. But with this theory, at least we can understand the doings of some actors in the present European conflict. Especially we can understand a bit of Putin’s leadership.
Étienne de
La Boétie (1530-1562) was a French judge, Renaissance writer and political
theorist. He laid his political views down in his Discourse of Voluntary
Servitude. In this treatise, La Boétie raises the question “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.” They should only
have to renounce their obedience without fighting. “For [the tyrant] is
automatically defeated if the country refuses consent to its own enslavement:
it is not necessary to deprive him of anything, but simply to give him nothing.”
So, people agree to their own subjugation. They don’t want freedom, though it’s
so easy to get it. La Boétie cites three reasons for voluntarily serving a tyrant.
Two are less important and I only mention them here: habit and spinelessness. The
third reason for obedience is by far the most important. It is the foundation
of tyranny.
“Whoever
thinks,” so La Boétie, “that [body guards] serve to protect and shield tyrants
is … completely mistaken. These are used … more for ceremony and a show of
force than for any reliance placed in them.” These guards are in fact only
there for the daily order and often a tyrant is killed or driven out by his own
guards. The real power rests on a certain social structure that allows a small
number of people to control an entire country: “[T]here are only four or five
who maintain the dictator, four or five who keep the country in bondage to him.
Five or six have always had access to his ear, and have either gone to him of
their own accord, or else have been summoned by him, to be accomplices in his [oppression
and excesses]. The six have six hundred who profit under them, and with the six
hundred they do what they have accomplished with their tyrant. The six hundred
maintain under them six thousand, whom they promote in rank, upon whom they
confer the government of provinces or the direction of finances, in order that
they may serve as instruments of avarice and cruelty, executing orders at the
proper time and working such havoc all around that they could not last except
under the shadow of the six hundred, nor be exempt from law and punishment
except through their influence. The consequence of all this is fatal indeed.
And whoever is pleased to unwind the skein will observe that not the six
thousand but a hundred thousand, and even millions, cling to the tyrant by this
cord to which they are tied. [Just as] according to Homer, Jupiter boasts of
being able to draw to himself all the gods when he pulls a chain.”
“In short,
when the point is reached, through big or small favours, that large profits or
small are obtained under a tyrant, there are found almost as many people to
whom tyranny seems advantageous as those to whom liberty would seem desirable.”
The whole network is based on ruling, controlling, playing off against each
other and profiting from others, but in the end everybody is connected to the
tyrant. He pulls the strings and the so structured society is like a puppet
theatre, where the one at the top plays the subjects with favours and benefits
like the puppeteer makes his puppets dance. Actually, La Boétie feels a little
sorry for the people at the top of the network, “[f]or, in all honesty, can it
be in any way except in folly that you approach a tyrant, withdrawing further
from your liberty and, so to speak, embracing with both hands your servitude?”
The people at the bottom who have no one under them do what they are asked and,
after they have fulfilled their tasks, they are free to do what they like.
However, those who directly serve the dictator “must anticipate his wishes; to
satisfy him, they must foresee his desires; they must wear themselves out,
torment themselves, kill themselves with work in his interest, and accept his
pleasure as their own, neglecting their preference for his, distorting their
character and corrupting their nature; they must pay heed to his words, to his
intonation, to his gestures, and to his glance.”
This is how
leadership power works, so La Boétie. A power structure is built like a pyramid
and the top keeps down the lower layers. Some call La Boétie’s
theory naïve, but to my mind it gives the basics of how authoritarian
leadership works. Anyway, the Discourse of Voluntary Servitude has withstood
the ages and has become one of the most reprinted and most influential books in
history. Gandhi has even founded his theory of nonviolence on La Boétie’s idea.
And look around: with La Boétie’s idea in your mind, you get already a first
view on how authoritarian leadership works.
Note
The translations from Étienne de La Boétie, Discours
de la servitude volontaire, are from a download in my computer. I couldn’t find it again on the internet.
Here
is another translation.
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