Estienne de la Boétie’s Civil Theology and the Paradox of Liberty

• In Event: Early Modern Inequalities

Abstract

Estienne de la Boétie’s “Discourse on Voluntary Servitude” (likely written in 1548) is a strident defense of liberty in which tyranny is excoriated and individual freedom presented as our natural birthright. Excerpts from this fiery polemic were put to work in radical reform and even monarchomaque texts, in the years following his death, securing La Boétie’s place in the history of political thought as a radical defender of freedom. However La Boétie also wrote an unpublished “Mémoire sur la pacification des troubles” a decade after writing the “Discourse” where he explicitly calls for the violent suppression of the Reformed minority in France arguing that public toleration of doctrinal discord would lead to the collapse of the epistemic foundations upon which a rational, peaceful legal order rests. Attempts have been made to resolve the obvious tension between the youthful “Discourse” and the more mature but intolerant “Mémoire.” However, it might be more fruitful to resist the temptation to try to collapse either work into the other or read them as esoterically consonant. We can learn more if we sit with the apparent paradox of La Boétie’s thought. Does freedom from tyranny – that is, living “according to reason and the laws one accords oneself” (“Discourse...”) – require epistemic agreement and universal faith in common ontological assumptions? How does this shared civic faith relate to La Boétie’s insistence on personal freedom of conscience? Writing amidst the internecine violence of the French Wars of Religion, La Boétie knew first-hand the dire consequences of the collapse of the rule of law. The tension within La Boétie’s thought is a synecdoche for the recurring problematic of modern individual liberty under rational, universal law. The conditions of modern pluralism and religious freedom seem to go hand in hand with a civil theology that makes deep ontological and epistemological pluralism a truly existential threat.

Author

• Catherine R. Power, Glendon College, York University