Sunlight is the best disinfectant? Étienne de la Boétie on corruption and transparency

Systemic corruption: tyranny and the bribe

If corruption is widely defined as the ‘abuse of public office for private gain’, this definition naturally raises more philosophical questions than it answers. What is the right relationship between public and private? What constitutes gain, what abuse? But if the phrase is excessively broad, it can be made to capture radically different conceptions of neglect and abuse of public office, from Aristotelian tyranny to Lockean abuse of prerogative. ⁸ The central civic humanist worry has been about the corruption of citizens such that they neglect the public good; decadent individuals abandon their civic duties for personal ends inimical to free civic life. This leaves them prone to subjection. Étienne de la Boétie’s attack on tyranny as a product of the corruption of citizens follows this humanist line quite closely. But the Discours de la servitude volontaire, otherwise known as the Contr’un, equally appears to have a foot in many other camps: classical philosophy, modern state of nature theory and even anarchism. A masterpiece of renaissance rhetoric, the book’s success lies in its fruitful ambiguities.

The question that La Boétie poses is the following: why do masses of people persist in obeying tyrants? Why would multitudes of reasonable beings persist in obeying a single individual who has no particular merit of which to speak and who even appears determined on courses of action that run counter to his subjects’ most basic interests? It is particularly perverse that people would allow themselves to suffer a thousand cruelties ‘non pas d’un Hercule ni d’un Samson, mais d’un seul hommeau, & le plus souvent le plus lasche et femelin de la nation’. ⁹ It cannot be that subjects are mere cowards, following tyrants because they fear for their lives: on the contrary, some show resolute courage in war, giving their lives for this very cretin who oppresses them. Why, then, do they obey? The entire essay’s argument will flow from the manner in which La Boétie has phrased this question. For the essay’s brilliance is to have posed this question at all; it was certainly a rhetorical coup in 16th-century France to make obedience to one’s monarch appear to be an odd, unhealthy anomaly in need of explanation. ¹⁰ Only someone steeped in classics – Cicero, Livy, Plutarch, Tacitus, Xenophon – could so pose the question as to make the very notion of servitude to a single ruler appear illegitimate from the outset. What is clearly implied in the question is the conclusion that La Boétie is going to draw: authority always derives from the consent – indeed, the desire – of the governed. People must obey tyrants willingly. The real question is one of social psychology: why do people will such a strange thing?

The response is that people allow themselves to be tyrannized because they have become slavish. Servitude itself corrupts subjects – habituated to their condition, they no longer seek freedom. For, La Boétie argues, if people wish to be free, they need merely to stop obeying tyrants. But regrettably, people have lost that love of liberty that was so common among the ancients. La Boétie seeks to shake his readers, awakening them to their misfortune: ‘Pauvres & miserables peuples insenses, nations opiniatres en vostre mal & aveugles en vostre bien,’ he harangues, why do you allow yourselves to be dominated? Tyrants are but little men with two arms, two eyes – ‘D’où a il pris tant d’yeulx, dont il vous espie, si vous ne les luy bailles? Comment a il tant de mains pour vous fraper, s’il ne les prend de vous?’ ¹¹ Subjects of tyrants are complicit in their own subjection.

The current Payot paperback edition of the Contr’un bears the frontispiece from Hobbes’s Leviathan. It is in some ways an apt image of La Boétie’s claim that the power of the ‘one’ is, in fact, the power of all who obey him. The ‘little man’ who seems individually so contemptible is actually the head of a massive artificial man. La Boétie appears equally to be Hobbesian avant la lettre in conceiving of the sovereign’s power as a product of his subjects’ consent and the sum total of the subjects’ power united. La Boétie is, naturally, thoroughly anti-Hobbesian in decrying as tragic this loss of natural liberty. If one can feel a certain civic republican thrill in this heady cry for liberty, one can also conceive of a sensible Hobbesian reluctance to break one's bonds. Indeed, La Boétie’s suggestion that regaining one’s liberty is perfectly easy – a mere question of wanting it, and of ceasing to lend one’s hand to one’s own oppression – comes across as an unforgivable rhetorical excess. But La Boétie’s account of our servitude is more complex than this, and the text is more than a mere exercise in humanist composition. While the beginning of the Discours offers an optimistic, empowering message, the later sections paint a bleak picture of group psychology.

The great question is, what makes a people will so perverse a thing as its own domination? The apparent paradox here is derived from the double sense of the word ‘peuple’: the ‘idiotic peoples’ whom La Boétie addresses are being addressed at the same time as collectivities and as individuals. In brief, La Boétie’s argument is that in the situation of subjection there is no true collectivity, hence no public-spiritedness; the state’s power – the eyes with which it spies and the arms with which it strikes – is born of radically atomized individuals each in their own little way serving, through active participation or passive acquiescence, to buttress the power structure that is so inimical to liberty. People are co-opted into a system of servitude by being individually and collectively corrupted.

His story of collective corruption follows the typical civic humanist story of decadence undermining virtue. The Emperors bribed the people collectively, intoxicating them with spectacles, coliseums, festivals and other populist measures that made the people forget their subjection or come to think that the lack of freedom is in their best interests. Second, he argues that tyrants typically corrupt religion, turning the honest worship of God into a superstitious devotion to the tyrant’s person. He quotes a passage from Virgil approvingly in which a Sybil suffers ‘cruel torments’ ‘pour vouloir imiter les tonnerres du ciel, & feus de Juppiter’, ¹² and he damns to hell contemporary Kings who cultivate such superstitions in their people. ¹³

But if the people are corrupted collectively through populism, luxury and superstition, the main source of slavery, ‘the spring and the secret of domination’, ¹⁴ is the system of individual corruption that the tyrant establishes. La Boétie describes a pyramidal power structure in which a small group of advisers, sharing in the tyrant’s dissipate desires, join him in pillaging the public. They each have, under their control, a hundred clients who maintain the system for rank and profit; they, in turn, have the power of purse, places and rank over their clients, and so on. ¹⁵ The entire system reposes on the cultivation of a tyrannical/servile sensibility in people – they seek individual profit and the joy of possessing power themselves: ‘ces perdus … sont contens d’endurer du mal pour en faire, non pas à celui qui leur en faict, mais à ceus qui endurent comme eus’. ¹⁶ This is the way in which people actively become their own enemies: they are charmed by the idea of wealth and power represented in the dominant figure of the King and his counsellors – like moths seeking some inexplicable pleasure in the flame of the candle, they are drawn to that which destroys them. ¹⁷

Identifying with the source of repression, people make themselves its servants. They do not recognize that the system that they are reinforcing is merely the principle of piracy rendered political: the state becomes entirely dependent on the desire for domination and individual enrichment joined to a constant terror of losing not merely what they have gained, but their lives as well. La Boétie completes his treatise with a classically inspired tableau of horrors decrying as ephemeral the pleasures of the courtier, client and tyrant. With a mixture of erudition and outrage, he illustrates the folly of accepting the tyrant’s bribe, and the dreadful uncertainty in which both the clients of the tyrant and the tyrant himself live. Simply put, the bribe is not worth it; the dependency of the patron–client relationship both habituates people to a slavish condition and renders their existence entirely precarious.

Nature, community and communication

So far we have a familiar, classical picture of tyranny as a product of total corruption – a system in which servile people are entirely dependent on a chain of personal dependency in which the public is merely a source of wealth to be pillaged for private gain. The civic republican picture of corruption as a loss of civic virtue here is fully consonant with our contemporary picture of corruption as patron–client networks preying on the public. And indeed, La Boétie’s description of the tyrannical state, in all its horrors, would not appear out of place in a description of 20th- (and 21st-) century totalitarianisms and kleptocracies. Nor is its relevance limited to these extreme conditions – the phenomena described as the springs of tyranny are the types of social pathology (clientelism, state capture) that are central in any account of contemporary corruption.

If La Boétie is both classical in his allusions and in the philosophical sources, there is something surprisingly modern about his call for liberty: the Discours offers what appears to us to be an embryonic theory of the state of nature. Human beings, he argues, were made to be free. As children, we have a natural inclination and duty to follow our parents, but this is a mere preparation for adulthood when we can follow nothing but our own reason. And, he suggests, at some point in the past we lived in a condition of radical equality, in which each was free from domination.

The Rousseauean dimension of this is striking, and we might wonder whether La Boétie is pointing to some prehistoric condition akin to that found in the Discourse on the Origins of Inequality. Pierre Clastres suggests that La Boétie differs from Rousseau only in that La Boétie believes the original condition actually existed. ¹⁸ In Clastres’s view, La Boétie wrote an anarchist text that envisaged a pre-political society, a society before the state, taken as an institution in which some rule over others. This is an influential reading, and one that has some textual justification, but it overlooks the examples of free societies to which La Boétie refers his readers: Sparta, republican Rome, and democratic Athens. (I hesitate to mention the non-historical example he gives, Plato’s Republic. To laud the ‘liberty’ in Plato’s kallipolis is surely a strange thing, and no clear explanation is offered in the text. We will return to this puzzle later.)

If a Spartan and an Athenian can be said to enjoy liberty, we can hardly conclude that the Boétian ideal is pre-political. It is not a ‘state of nature’ understood as a pre-political society; it is a ‘natural’ state, understood as a political system in which the human telos is realized. Far from being prehistorical, it is a historical reality one can encounter when one enters into discourse, by means of books, with Xenophon, Cicero, Aristotle and Plutarch. But it is difficult to pin down precisely what type of rule he wishes to celebrate. Sparta is not Athens, after all. And if La Boétie appears to be the consummate democrat, he exhibits a thorough disdain for the demos, whom he thinks easily duped by populists. Equally perplexing is the question of whether La Boétie means to condemn princes in general, or whether the text merely attacks tyrants. ¹⁹ In some editions of the Contr’un one can read a clear distinction between the two: ‘Il y a trois sortes de tyrans, je parle des meschans princes.’ ²⁰ This qualifier, however, is widely considered to be a later attempt to water down the text’s radical conflation of prince and tyrant. If the Aristotelian conceptual distinction between a king and a tyrant is never questioned in the text, La Boétie clearly suggests that it is difficult to see ‘anything public in a regime where everything belongs to one’, ²¹ and he articulates the standard republican concern that living under a good prince is bad for citizen virtue. ²² Ultimately, any attempt to determine the precise nature of the republican regime championed in the Discours is bound to be speculative: the text simply does not have enough determinative content to support a full political philosophy. But this is not the text’s purpose: its purpose is to awaken a dormant passion for equality. It is meant to awaken the feelings of a citizen. To establish the precise institutional arrangements entailed by the ideal of non-domination requires us to go beyond this brief display of literary virtuosity to the sources animating La Boétie’s passion. The burden of the philosophical duty is carried by the ancient philosophers and historians to whom La Boétie points. That is, while some readers (notably Claude Lefort) would have us understand this text’s vagueness about regime types as indicating a break from the philosophical tradition, I suggest, on the contrary, that it is only comprehensible in light of a tradition of civic thought to which it points. Its antique references are not ornaments; they are signposts.

La Boétie claims that the love of liberty (defined as obeying nothing but one’s own reason) is a natural human passion, and the strange condition of his fellows – their desire for their own subjection – is a corruption of their fundamental nature. This claim is far from self-evident, and La Boétie defends it with several arguments that hinge on his readers’ aversion to slavery. But ultimately his case rests on a teleological claim: nature has made us for the purpose of friendship and mutual aid: ‘Nostre nature est ainsi, que les communs devoirs de l’amitié emportent une bonne partie du cours de nostre vie.’ ²³ Friendship requires equality and the absence of compulsion, things that are incompatible with a situation of subjection: ‘la nature, la ministre de dieu, la gouvernante des hommes nous a tous faits de mesme forme, et comme il semble, a mesme moule, afin de nous entreconnoistre tous pour compaignons ou plustost pour frères’. ²⁴

Friendship is our natural telos, and because friendship requires a degree of equality and reciprocity, the subjection of some to others is unnatural. Inequalities in talents and strengths exist, of course, but they exist that we might use them to help each other, not to dominate over one another. Most importantly, we were made to know one another (‘de nous entre-connaitre tous pour compagnons’):

… ceste bonne mere [nature] nous a donné à tous toute la terre pour demeure, nous a tous loges aucunement en mesme maison, nous a tous figures a mesme patron afin que chacun se peust mirer & quasi reconnoistre l’un dans l’autre; … elle nous a donné à tous ce grand present de la voix & de la parolle pour nous accointer & fraterniser davantage, & faire, par la commune et mutuelle declaration de nos pensees une communion de nos volontes. ²⁵

It is important not to mistake this for a proto-Hobbesian claim. La Boétie writes, ‘Ce qui rend un ami asseuré de l’autre, c’est la connoissance qu’il a de son integrité.’ ²⁶ The Hobbesian trusts his fellow citizen’s word because the sword of the sovereign, established by mutual consent, is there to back it up. Such a situation is the antithesis of the Boétien ideal: ‘entre les meschans, quand ils s’assemblent, c’est un complot, non pas une compaignie; ils ne s’entr’aiment pas, mais ils s’entrecraignent; ils ne sont pas amis; mais ils sont complices’. ²⁷ Hobbesian human beings are naturally distrustful of others, and can attain confidence under the overawing sword. The very existence of sovereignty is due to individuals’ fearing one another. La Boétie is suggesting that we are naturally gregarious and that it is the artifice of subjection that makes us mutually distrustful.

La Boétie speaks of our natural friendship as something that is both philosophically and temporally prior to servitude: it is both an Aristotelian final cause and a real historical condition. People can be habituated to servitude, much as horses can be habituated to the bit, but this is an unnatural condition and a corruption of their original state. He laments (in a phrase whose Rousseauean overtones have misled modern readers into identifying La Boétie’s nature with a pre-political historical moment): ‘quel mal encontre a esté cela, qui a peu tant denaturer l’homme, seul né, de vrai, pour vivre franchement, & lui faire perdre la souvenance de son premier estre & le desir de le reprendre?’ ²⁸

One source of our initial fall is, paradoxically, our natural penchant for friendship itself. Because our capacity for friendship draws us to and makes us grateful to virtuous people, we have a tendency to accord respect and authority to benefactors that can slip ever so dangerously into servitude. ²⁹ We thus tend to seek out our own domestication – we so easily slip from a rational obedience to outright servitude. It does not take long for people to become habituated to servitude and to lose their memory of equality and liberty. Thus, the people La Boétie insists on browbeating for their servile natures are in a sense not responsible for their condition – like fallen man afflicted with original sin, they are both inculpated and exculpated. But if La Boétie thinks the mass of people can be domesticated and, in a Machiavellian sense, lose their civic virtù, he insists equally that there are always some individuals in whom the yearning for liberty is strong. ³⁰ Custom – habituation to servitude – denatures people, but it never entirely drowns out nature’s voice. What prevents these people from acting is their solitude. And their solitude is ensured by eliminating the means of communication.

The sovereign closes down communication in two ways. First, he prevents the free communication of ideas. La Boétie, the enthusiastic humanist, knew the thrill of – and the radical political inspiration in – reading about ancient liberty. ³¹ (This is precisely why Hobbes would later warn his readers about the dangers of allowing young people to read classic texts. ³² ) By barring access to texts, the tyrant isolates people in their own time such that they can no longer imagine anything better outside of it.

But it is not enough to erase communication with tradition; one must also erase any form of solidarity. The final isolation is achieved by preventing communication between subjects:

Or, communement, le bon zele & affectation de ceux qui ont gardé maugré le temps la devotion à la franchise, pour si grand nombre qu’il y en ait, demeure sans effect pour ne s’entrecongnoistre point : la liberté leur est toute ostee, sous le tiran, de faire, de parler & quasi de penser; ils deviennent tous singuliers en leurs fantaisies. Doncques Mome, le dieu moqueur, ne se moqua pas trop quand il trouva cela à redire en l’homme que Vulcan avoit fait, dequoi il ne lui avoit mis une petite fenestre au coeur, afin que par là on peut voir ses pensees. ³³

The greatest corruption for La Boétie, then, is the destruction of our capacity to know one another. We are rendered atomized, isolated individuals: our natural penchant for communication and friendship is broken down. ‘Abuse of public office for private gain’ is the entire modus operandi of this regime – public office exists for private gain because there is no longer a public good to speak of. Indeed, there is no ‘peuple’, but merely a collection of separated individuals spying on one another. Hence the enormous difficulty involved in renouncing one’s servitude: when La Boétie tells his readers that they are responsible for their own oppression he is addressing the people as people, that very collectivity whose existence depends upon reciprocal knowledge of one another’s character. He may berate the cowardly people as much as he will – there’s no ‘people’ to address, for they have been rendered atomized individuals, prevented from mutual self-revelation. In the condition of subjection, rare are the instances of friendship – each is to the others a terrifying spectre, an eye watching their every act, an arm waiting to strike.

Transparency and corruption

Let us notice what a fine contrast this makes to the Hobbesian story about human nature. In the Hobbesian world, we are naturally strangers. The only way to bring us together is to force words – the windows on our wills – to stay in place. Both the keeping of our word and the keeping of words become the duty of the sovereign, whose sword guarantees contracts and establishes the limits of our rights. The Hobbesian subject is corrupted when his mind is corrupted – he fails to see that justice and obedience are in his interests. This is a result of excessive freedom of communication and the dangerously unclear use of concepts such as the ancient term liberty or dangerous religious opinions, the product of aberrant, uncontained priest-craft. Rational clarity and mutual transparency are produced when the meaning of words and the connection between words and wills are firmly fixed by the force of the sovereign’s sword. In nature we are strangers; in the commonwealth, under the authority of an absolute and arbitrary sovereign, we can finally know one another. The Discours gives the inversion of this teaching – it is the sovereign that breaks down our natural knowledge of one another, thus breaking apart our solidarity. Much depends here on their contrasting views of language – for Hobbes, language is artifice, for La Boétie it is natural. The art directors at Payot ought to have printed Leviathan’s frontispiece in photo-negative.

Let us push this comparison further by considering the Foucaultian complaint about the link between transparency and control. In a sense, the Hobbesian project is both about establishing transparency through force, and establishing force through transparency. But it is a limited transparency: our wills become transparent to one another because we state them in commonly established terms and the law makes sure that our wills conform to our words. The law (and the sword upholding it) thus places fetters on our acts and words (for speaking is an act), thereby eliminating the terrible uncertainty that a state of anarchy engenders. But in the deepest recesses of our minds, we remain impenetrable. This is important, for one of the most important and salutary consequences of Hobbesian solipsism is that the holy inquisition is thereby rendered illogical. Acts of hand and tongue must be regulated; the dark recesses of our thoughts are no more visible than they are governable. But the commonwealth makes a community with words, thereby making us predictable to one another.

If we attend to La Boétie, we will question the cost of this attempt to pin down words and wills with swords. Atomized individuals purchase their security with subjection, but conformity in word and deed must be assured by surveillance. Hobbes himself wrote of the necessity of spies, ‘For discoverers to Ministers of State, are like the beames of the Sunne to the humane soule … and therefore are they no lesse necessary to the preservation of the State, than the rayes of the light are to the conservation of man.’ ³⁴ But La Boétie is suggesting that this surveillance model is inimical to mutual self-revelation. Either we are all transparent to one another – through friendship – or we are made the object of a tyrannical gaze. On La Boétie’s analysis, the insecurity of the ruler’s position leads to an unquenchable interest in the souls of subjects. No ruler can assume that the subject means what she says; no subject can trust the insecure ruler. In the condition of radical hierarchy, the tyrant must deploy the most invasive techniques of surveillance – the many eyes that spy. Of course, this is never entirely possible – hence the ruler’s perpetual unease and perpetual resort to violent threat and example (horrors La Boétie describes with flourish).

So we find ourselves with two radically opposed conceptions of political health as transparency – Hobbesian surveillance and Boétian disclosure. The surveillance model, in its Hobbesian form, is content to rest on the surface of things (you can think whatever you want); the Boétian suggestion is that this is not possible – the psychology that reigns in such a situation of inequality will make the ruler perpetually distrustful and ever in greater search of certainty. Nor does La Boétie suggest that it is desirable, for it undermines the entre-connaissance that he thinks is the hallmark of free social existence – note, indeed, that this is a level of mutual knowledge that Hobbes thought impossible. What I’d like to argue is that there is a trade-off between these ideal-types, transparency through surveillance and transparency through reciprocal self-revelation. When we all lend our eyes to the sovereign, spying on each other, we occlude the possibility of friendship.

This leads me to the much debated question of La Boétie’s ideal regime. Claude Lefort tells us that the Discours is clearly a response not merely to tyranny, but to all principalities, ³⁵ and it is difficult to disagree with this assessment given the necessary inequalities that exist in a monarchy, and indeed in any form of hierarchy that does not involve some sort of shared ruling and being ruled in turn. The implication for Lefort is that the text breaks entirely with the traditional Aristotelian distinction between corrupt and uncorrupted regimes. Some have gone so far as to see in La Boétie’s vague natural condition of liberty a ground not for a republican political project, but rather for the radical revolt against politics itself, against the fact of domination that exists in all states. Eric Voegelin sees this as a weakness, arguing that La Boétie’s spirit of revolt represents the quintessential example of courage without wisdom; a similar claim about his institutional vagueness is made with more celebratory intent in Gauchet and Abensour’s declaration that La Boétie’s revolt forces us ‘à penser la liberté contre le pouvoir’. ³⁶ At the same time, it is difficult to reconcile this with his praise of Sparta (or yet of Plato’s Republic). Lefort argues that while La Boétie mentions these ancient (and ideal) states he fails to identify the good regime precisely because he is claiming that all instantiations of political unity, all regimes, manifest this perverse desire to be dominated. ³⁷ If La Boétie addresses himself to a ‘peuple’ and attributes agency to a ‘peuple’, his back and forth on the collective and yet plural nature of this entity is intended to undermine the view of a unified people. ³⁸ For Lefort, La Boétie is offering a stark warning about the desire for a unity that erases the distinctions between people: it is this ‘singular’ that so bewitches and ‘enchants’ us. ³⁹ It is in La Boétie’s appeal to our linguistic nature that we learn both of our unity and of our separation: ‘Pensant le language, nous pensons déjà le politique, délivrés de l’illusion de l’Un.’ ⁴⁰

Philosophically fruitful as Lefort’s use of La Boétie is, I suggest that it is not entirely faithful to La Boétie, being largely a product of Lefort’s project of illuminating the symbolic form that mediates between the (plural) people and their political unity. In the Discours language does, indeed, provide us with a means of uniting disparate individuals. But that unity is an extreme unity. According to the Discours, the fact of language demonstrates that nature ‘a monstré en toutes choses qu’elle ne vouloit pas tant nous faire tous unis que tous uns’. ⁴¹ Lefort’s take on this phrase is the following:

… affirmer que le destin des hommes est d’être non pas tous unis, mais tous uns, c’est ramener le rapport social à la communication et à l’expression réciproque des agents, accueillir par principe la différence l’un de l’autre, faire entendre qu’elle n’est réductible que dans l’imaginaire et, du même coup … dénoncer le mensonge des gouvernants qui font de l’union de leurs sujets … le signe de la bonne société. ⁴²

For Lefort, the name of the ‘one’ conjures up an image of a massive power that the people, perversely, desire. La Boétie, he tells us, is breaking from traditional political philosophy in that he is not offering any conception of an uncorrupted polity – we shouldn’t try to fill in the blanks with utopian images and collapse society into politics. I do not wish to dissuade readers from attending to Lefort’s reflections, but I would like to suggest that La Boétie was proposing precisely what Lefort wants to warn us about: a radical civic unity. This is a republicanism that has its origins in ancient philosophy. The text’s vagueness about institutional matters is due to its pointing outside of itself to a classical literary tradition (precisely the tradition tyrants wish to silence). The free people who existed prior to the great descent into servitude were free precisely because they were able to establish radical solidarity through mutual transparency. The tyrannical regime corrupts their souls because it makes them incapable of friendship, and thus incapable of solidarity. The artificial unity that tyranny creates is violent and inherently exploitative: it exists at the expense of solidarity. Lefort has rightly noticed that there is something curious in La Boétie’s addressing of a unified ‘peuple’ at all, but we are not thereby to understand that the unified ‘people’ is a dangerous fiction or that the text cannot conceive of any ‘free people’. The Discours is arguing, rather, that domination has been rendered possible because the ‘people’ has been broken down into a collection of individuals. La Boétie is saying to the ‘peuple’, ‘you each individually feel the weight of this domination to which you each individually contribute’. It is as if the will of all runs counter to the general will: the ‘you’ is the collective subject that, could it will collectively, would never will its own subjection, but because people will separately, each in his own cocoon, the wills combine to support an insufferable condition. ⁴⁴ The ruler, in his turn, is rendered more than the weak little individual that he is: he is transformed into an image of power.

The type of unity that Lefort would have us see in La Boétie’s ideal is one of unity in difference. The nature of language, for Lefort, entails differentiation – by claiming that our mutual communication of our natures requires the mediation of language, La Boétie is implicitly arguing for human plurality against the dangerous fiction of unity. Lefort’s is an Arendtian ideal, in which people make themselves known to each other in great speech acts in the civic realm. Hannah Arendt celebrates respect, which, in distinction to love, does not erase the difference between people: ‘Respect, not unlike the Aristotelian philia politikē, is a kind of “friendship” without intimacy and without closeness; it is a regard for the person from the distance which the space of the world puts between us.’ ⁴⁵ But, however accurate this is as a description of Aristotelian political friendship, it is not the model that La Boétie offers: rather, he offers something closer to a perfect Aristotelian friendship of virtue. He writes : ‘l’amitié c’est un nom sacré, c’est une chose sainte; elle ne se met jamais qu’entre gens de bien, & ne se prend que par une mutuelle estime; elle s’entretient non tant par bienfaits, que par la bonne vie’. But what most cements friendship is, as we have already noted, ‘la connoissance quil a de son intégrité’. ⁴⁶ There is an epistemological element to this friendship. We can see how appropriate it was for Montaigne to want to preface his publication of La Boétie’s article with a paean to friendship heavily inspired by Aristotle. Montaigne cited approvingly Aristotle’s view that friendship is the pre-eminent concern for legislators, ⁴⁷ and he celebrated a kind of virtue-friendship that went perhaps further than Aristotle would have wanted, bordering on the complete effacing of differences between friends: ‘En l’amitié dequoy je parle, elles [nos ames] se meslent et confondent l’une en l’autre, d’un meslange si universel, qu’elles effacent, et ne retrouvent plus la cousture qui les a joinctes.’ ⁴⁸ This is a version of what Aristotle called ‘perfect friendship’, though it posits much more unity than Aristotle would have approved of (recall his insistence on heterogeneity in Politics 1261a). Indeed, Aristotle himself might be seen as closer to Lefort’s view that language presupposes heterogeneity, insofar as it is that which permits us to discuss the just and the unjust and to deliberate together (Politics 1253a). La Boétie sounds even closer to the civic ideal of Plato’s Kallipolis, where the guardians all say ‘mine’ and ‘not mine’ to the same things (Republic 462c). For all the rarity that Aristotle and Montaigne – and even La Boétie – see in virtue-friendship, for all that it seems to describe the unity of great souls, the Discours treats it as the dominant principle in the pre-servile condition. The ideal is one of extreme unity through ‘entre-connaissance’, where mutual beneficence is a product of mutual knowledge of one another’s integrity; it is this very knowledge that is undermined in the tyrannical condition.

This mutual transparency is a product of a radical openness to one another – an openness that requires language as a medium, and equality as a condition. ⁴⁹ That is, La Boétie shares Momus’s complaint – since we cannot see one another’s hearts, the only way to feel confident in our neighbours is if they reveal themselves to us. Pointing to the linguistic medium of our mutual recognition does, as Lefort suggests, imply an assumption about plurality, but this is a plurality that La Boétie thinks can be overcome with radical reciprocity. Nature ‘a tasché par tous les moiens de serrer et estreindre si fort le noeud de nostre alliance et société’. ⁵⁰ Such a bond cannot occur in conditions of domination; it requires equality. Equality and unity are inseparable; we are offered here a politics of friendship that ultimately transcends division, and thus that runs counter to the Lefortian and Arendtian project of preserving plurality.

In short, La Boétie’s Discours offers us, in its ideal-types of the tyrannical and free conditions, two social psychologies, one based upon mutual knowledge and trust – a version of classical civic friendship – and another based upon mutual suspicion, where each is a possible enemy to each, and all are held in the chain of short-sighted self-interest; for the ignorant part of the people have a tendency to be ‘soupçonneuse envers celui qui l’aime’ and ‘confiante envers celui qui la trompe et la trahit’. People can be habituated to this condition – and learn to love the very chains that bind them – because they are no longer in a condition of being able to understand civic friendship. They spy on one another because their natural mutual transparency has been broken down.

Friendship and the pacification of troubles

There is much in the Discours that can stir the heart of the modern civic republican or egalitarian. La Boétie’s commitment to a generous form of civic friendship based on equality and mutual recognition is extremely appealing, but its utopian dimensions might appear fanciful. When political thinkers seek to transform politics into friendship they generally face the charge of obscuring or eluding the political itself. We can picture a knowing Florentine smirking at this attempt to found a republic on affection. But if the Discours is a text that warms our hearts as it raises our eyebrows, what are we to make of this Parlementaire’s 1561 Mémoire sur la pacification des troubles, offering political advice in the face of violence between Huguenots and Catholics? For here, La Boétie – ever faithful to his King and church – argued that the tolerationist policy favoured by Catherine de Medici and her chancellor Michel de l'Hôpital was unacceptable for political reasons, and he urged a two-pronged strategy of accommodation and repression. Like many Catholic humanists, La Boétie was convinced that serious reforms were needed in the church – ecclesiastical corruption, he thought, not doctrinal questions, had been the main basis for the popular appeal of the Protestant cause. But he was also convinced that tolerance was an untenable policy and that those Protestants who had manifested violence towards the King’s law should be violently suppressed, and a bloody example made of the leaders. ‘On ne sauroit croir de combien, après ceste tereur, il [le people] sera plus traictable, plus facile à renger, et plus aisé a contenter.’ ⁵¹ It is clear from his condemnation of the counterproductive efforts to convert people with the sword that he would not have supported the St Bartholomew massacre that came eleven years later, but the terror that he advocates here seems remarkably like the type of behaviour we might expect from the tyrant who is so thoroughly denounced in the Discours. One almost wonders how both texts could be the work of the same person.

One response to this tension would be to suggest that La Boétie was no longer the same person: in contrast to the Discours, the Mémoire is the work of a mature man directly implicated in the political life of his province. Certainly he was young (La Boétie was 31 at the time), but this was a very ripe 31, having spent the previous decade serving as a counsellor at the Parliament de Bordeaux – he was certainly not the enthusiastic student of the Discours writing odes to the liberty he found in classic literature. Another possibility would be the suggestion, which has recently resurfaced after a long period of being considered disproven, that the Discours was actually penned by Montaigne – the case for this claim is made by several authors in the collected volume Freedom over Servitude. ⁵² This attribution, while based on a fair amount of conjecture, gains some plausibility when one notes the murky origin of the Discours and Montaigne’s playful use of misdirection in the Essais. It remains, however, a suggestion that has not caught the imagination of the vast majority of La Boétie and Montaigne scholars. ⁵³ One of the things that pushes these authors towards this interpretation is the apparent distance between the Discours and the Mémoire. But I would like to suggest that the gulf between these two texts is not as great as one might think, even if it does somewhat reflect both the distance between youthful extravagance and mature cynicism, and between theory and practice. Without entirely reconciling the texts, I wish to suggest that the primary concern animating his advice in the Mémoire is equally that animating the Discours: the importance of mutual transparency and social unity.

La Boétie argued that the main causes of popular Protestantism were not the subtle theological matters that preoccupied Luther, Zwingli or Calvin, but merely the abuses of the church and the comparative probity of the reform leaders. The second cause of the troubles had been the obstinate and violent response to this cry for reform. Trying to root out unbelief with violence backfired, causing people to flock to the new church not only for its tempting novelty but also out of a sense of respect for martyrs. Things had thus been allowed to fester to such an extent that there were effectively two forms of religion being established in the realm. In response, he championed what in England would later be called ‘comprehension’, a type of doctrinal compromise that would prevent the church from fracturing by weakening the main causes of division. (Somewhat naïvely, he gave some theological and sacramental propositions that he thought would be widely acceptable and he proposed some ways of papering over divisions.) At the same time, those engaged in violent sedition must be punished in an exemplary fashion. For if it had been foolish of Kings François I and Henri II to pursue heresy with fire and sword, it was equally foolish for Catherine de Medici to tolerate the establishment of two churches within the state.

Note that while La Boétie offered an anti-tolerationist teaching, he did not support any type of holy inquisition. On the contrary, his call for the moderation of church doctrine derived from his commitment to respecting (within limits) Protestant consciences. Indeed, as Malcolm Smith has pointed out, La Boétie thought that one was not duty-bound to obey one’s sovereign in matters of religion. ⁵⁴ Nor ought the sovereign to attempt to enforce opinion with fire and sword. Aside from being a tactical error, ⁵⁵ it is simply useless to try to burn one’s way into someone’s mind. La Boétie displays awareness of the observation, most associated with Hobbes, that one can only legislate deeds, not thoughts. (Though the sous-entendu here is always that thoughts will follow practice.)

But why should religious diversity be so untenable? Some of La Boétie’s responses are typical of his age. Like many of his contemporaries, he did not regard tolerance as a virtue, but rather perceived policies of toleration to be mere cease-fires, and not real peace. ⁵⁶ And like many, La Boétie had difficulty countenancing the idea of allowing falsity to flourish – and he was no different from the bulk of his fellows in thinking it untenable that truth and falsehood should both have rights (and his Mémoire suggests a naïve simplicity on the nature of theological truth that is surprising from one so close to Montaigne). ⁵⁷ But La Boétie’s intolerance was largely based on a political concern about the effects of religious division on social unity. He wrote:

Nulle dissention n’est si grande ny si dangereuse que celle qui vient pour la religion. Elle separe les cytoiens, les voisins, les amis, les parens, les freres, le pere et les enfans, le mary et la femme; elle rompt les aliances, les parantés, les mariages, les droitz inviolables de nature, et penetre jusques au fondz des cœurs pour extirper les amitiés et enraciner des haynes irreconsiliables. ⁵⁸

His call for uniformity – indeed, his incipient Gallicanism, for La Boétie intimated that the French church should reform itself – was political rather than theological. ⁶⁴ La Boétie was expressing the view, quite commonly held, that religious pluralism would lead to the demise of social cohesion. Implausible as this seems to us, it speaks to a widespread 16th-century fear, felt by many who had no necessarily strong views on the theological details of salvation by works or faith, that the reformers’ breaking away from the church entailed the destruction of all social bonds. To understand this point it is important to remember the centrality of the church in ordering and facilitating communal life. Attending mass was widely held to be something requiring a clean, repentant soul – to take Eucharist one must have reconciled with one’s enemies; similarly, the pax or ‘kiss of peace’, one of the more important lay experiences in the mass, offered a powerful experience of neighbourly reconciliation and purification. As Virginia Reinburg writes of 16th-century worship, ‘For lay congregants, the mass was less a ceremonial representation of eucharistic doctrine or Christ’s original sacrifice than a sacred rite uniting them with God, the Church, and each other.’ ⁶⁵ The common practice of worshipping was not merely unifying in the way that national festivals or cultural activities are unifying – it was conceived of as itself being the glue that held communities together, and there was a fear that if people worshipped separately they were not merely endangering their own salvation, but were breaking the social bond. Simply put, it was thought to be essential for everyone to come together repeatedly, reconciling any differences through the kiss of peace, forgiving one another their trespasses, reconnecting on a weekly basis with the source of communal trust.

In arguing for the civic importance of uniform worship, La Boétie was not offering anything novel, but was rather giving voice to a commonplace opinion. But I wish to stress the connection between this view and his earlier claim about the importance of mutual transparency for social cohesion and liberty. Religious uniformity, like language, serves as a medium for the mutual revelation of our character to one another. That is, uniform public worship serves to cultivate civic trust and mutual transparency. To split this institution was to undermine trust and friendship.

This is a view with a heritage in the sources La Boétie and Montaigne so admired. The classical opposite of civic friendship is, naturally, not confessional strife, but rather faction and division of opinion. Cicero, in his treatise on friendship, has Laelius argue that ‘friendship is in fact nothing other than a community of views on all matters human and divine, together with goodwill and affection’, and he exclaims, ‘What house is so well established, what state is so strong that it may not be entirely torn to pieces by hatred and division?’ ⁶⁶ ‘Unanimity’, Aristotle insisted, ‘also seems to be a friendly relation.’ This unanimity (homonoia, otherwise translated as concord or harmony) is not the unanimity of opinions about factual matters that are not causes of mutual concern, but about the common itself: ‘a city is unanimous when men have the same opinion about what is to their interest, and choose the same actions, and do what they have resolved in common’ (NE 1167a, 9.6). ⁶⁷ This is the nature of ‘political friendship’ (1167b). The opposite of this unanimity is faction, discord over the nature of justice and who ought to rule. Aristotelian civic friendship is possible between good people – hence it has an element of virtue-friendship to it. Those who are not good ‘cannot be unanimous except to a small extent, any more than they can be friends, since they aim at getting more than their share of advantages … The result is that they are in a state of faction, putting compulsion on each other but unwilling themselves to do what is just’ (1167b). Note how these two conditions appear to mirror respectively La Boétie’s natural (free) and unnatural (servile) conditions in the Discours: the one condition entails mutual transparency, the other entails distrust and exploitation. Now, I do not propose here to answer the thorny question of whether Aristotle’s philia politikē is a friendship of virtue or utility (it appears to share elements of both). What I wish to suggest is that something akin to – or even more extreme than – Aristotle’s ideal is the inspiration for the political friendship that La Boétie thought the defining feature of the political condition that accords with human nature.

It is in this context that we might understand his perplexing reference in the Discours to the ‘liberty of Plato’s Republic’. Is it possible that La Boétie did not throw this in as a mere learned reference, but rather that he intended his readers to consider the Platonic unity created by the strict control over the stories told about the divine? But this raises a significant tension. How can La Boétie on the one hand condemn both the censorship that deprives people of ancient texts and the political usurpation of religion and yet support a policy of civil religion? ⁶⁸ First, we can dispose easily of the usurpation of religion – there is no question of kings pretending to any divine power here. La Boétie’s concern is not to sneak supernatural justification into the justification of rule. The civic interest in church unity is due to its importance in achieving communal unity. Put differently, it’s not about ideological legitimation of the ruling order. The Machiavellian desire to invest citizens with fervent, superstitious civic piety is not the desire animating La Boétie. Indeed, the dispute is not primarily about doctrinal opinion: ‘on se trompe fort si on pense que tant d’hommes se soient separés de nous pour la contrarieté de l’opinion’. ⁶⁹ It is the exterior forms of worship that most offend normal people, and it is here where common ground must be found. La Boétie expressed optimism that these could be sufficiently altered that most people would think matters solved – particularly if preachers are prevented from stirring up divisions. Thus, when he insisted that, once the church was reformed no one be permitted – on pain of death – to preach or administer sacraments outside of the church, it was not because of the theological content of the preaching, but because this was the creation of a separate church which split the population into hostile camps. ⁷⁰

Common worship, like a common language, serves as a means of keeping people open to one another and cultivating social trust. La Boétie’s religious intolerance is based on the view that confessional unity is the minimal condition of civic friendship. But there is also a paradox here. It is as if a dirty secret is let loose in the Mémoire: mutual transparency, the most natural thing of all, requires some artifice to maintain it, a civic religion; but the means required to maintain this might well lead us back to the surveillance society. For, after all, how else would one prevent the type of ecclesiastical splitting if one did not engage in surveillance of some sort?

The trust and mutual self-revelation that La Boétie thought to be the natural human telos were the products of a political project – just as people could be habituated to obedience, so too could they be habituated to liberty and mutual trust. But this requires institutions, and his mature political reflections led him to the disquieting suggestion that trust required ecclesiastical uniformity, even going so far as to grant the King rights to reorganize the church in order to preserve this source of mutual trust. Again, this is not a question of doctrinal content, but rather the maintenance of a common cultural practice that, like language, permits us to overcome the problem of not being able to see into one another’s hearts. But the business of achieving ‘natural’ friendship of a free society entails habituation through well-constructed laws and institutions. Lycurgus, noted La Boétie in the Discours, ‘avec ses loix & sa police, nourrit & feit [fait] si bien les Lacedemoniens, que chacun d’eux eut plus cher de mourir mille morts que de reconnoistre autre seigneur que la loy & la raison’. ⁷¹ Note that Lycurgus did not merely habituate Spartans to love liberty – he made them what they were; he constituted them as a people.

Conclusion: homonoia as the medium of transparency

In exposing the distance between the type of mutual knowledge entailed in civic friendship and the closed, watchful condition of the tyrannical client–patron network, La Boétie’s Discours can be read as powerful indictment of the surveillance society. The ubiquity of cameras, audits, wire-taps, ‘whistle-blowers’, ‘vigilant’ citizens inquiring into the nature of their neighbour’s piety – all these thousand eyes that seek to open up the soul have the effect of closing us up within ourselves. For all that they can ensure some degree of conformity in outward behaviour, these are systems that undermine the very unity they seek to create – people are corrupted by the surveillance society, rendered incapable of trust and more likely to seek out opportunities for private gain at public expense. This is akin to shining a searchlight into a dark room – one side of the objects within appear illuminated, but they cast the darkest shadows behind them. Yet if we allow our eyes to be accustomed to the dark, the objects in the room will disclose themselves to us. The nature of our neighbours will be disclosed to us if we allow ourselves to listen. We are truly transparent to one another when we are friends. Reading La Boétie alerts us to the fact that there is an essential conceptual difference between transparency through mutual surveillance and transparency through mutual friendship. And when comparing the ideals it is surely difficult not to find appealing La Boétie’s philia both in principle and in practice – is one’s relationship with one’s neighbours rendered more secure through friendship, or through having video cameras trained on their front door? In the attempt to cultivate civic virtue through transparency it is worthwhile paying attention to what manner of openness we wish to cultivate. For La Boétie, to be in a position of having to watch one another like hawks is to be already in a corrupted condition.

But surely, it will be objected, this surveillance model is only disturbing when it comes from above. If there is sufficient surveillance from below (sousveillance, as the ugly neologism has it) things will balance out and civic life will not be allowed to erode completely. Certainly, this is an element of the Machiavellian project – the constantly tensed muscles of the plebs and their perpetual distrust of the patricians assures the preservation of free civic life. But such a stance might come at a price, and if the emerging social science literature on the utility of generalized trust is any indication, it may be a price too high for the benefit it confers. ⁷² It is a commonplace observation that corruption undermines trust in institutions; the reverse is also true – lack of trust is corrupting. The two models of transparency we have drawn from La Boétie are ideal-types – no country or organization can be founded on total surveillance, nor yet on pure friendship. My point is that it is important to reflect on the trade-offs between these two psychological dispositions of friendship and distrust. ⁷³

This is not to suggest that we can cure corruption simply by according blind trust to the powerful. I must emphasize that the key to La Boétie’s republican ideal of mutual entre-connaissance is some form of civic equality – radical inequalities are incompatible with friendship and trust. Attempts to undermine oppressive networks of political clientelism need to attend to the regime contexts in which such networks thrive. That is to say, civic republican conceptions of corruption as the loss of civic virtue and the increase of dependence are not mere anachronisms in contemporary debates about corruption, in spite of the irretrievable nature of the ancient polis. The importance of attending to inequality should not be forgotten by those who seek purely cultural determinants of corruption; if the reader will permit the Putnam reference, La Boétie is not merely saying that subjects of tyrants are bowling alone, but that they are pushing and shoving for access to the bowling alley. La Boétie does not spell out the nature and extent of the equality that he thinks congenial to trust and friendship, but he is insistent that friendship ‘a son vrai gibier en l’equalité, qui ne veut iamais clocher, ains est toujours egale’. ⁷⁴ It is worthwhile for students of political corruption to give greater attention to the effects of material inequality and zero-sum competition than is often done.

But if we are thereby offered a powerful defence of equality and friendship, we are also apprised of their great difficulty. The radical virtue-friendship that underwrites La Boétie’s natural ideal is presented by Montaigne and Aristotle as the rarest of things. Indeed, one wonders if one can ever even approach such a complete entre-connaissance; after all, as a reading of Montaigne himself would remind us, it is hard enough to know ourselves. ⁷⁵ What guidance can this ideal offer us in our quest to render political life non-exploitative? This goes beyond the administrative studies’ question of how to cultivate trust in large bureaucratic institutions: it challenges us to think about citizenship anew, all the while raising disquieting questions about the relationship between pluralism and equality. Can we think of non-exclusionary forms of social interaction that nonetheless retain the functions that La Boétie ascribed to the church? We are fortunately at some distance from the communalist view of uniform public worship as a necessary condition of social harmony, but a wider question remains open about what types of uniformity are required for philia politikē and whether these forms of uniformity recreate the exclusions and homogeneity that have come to be associated with the liberty of the ancients.