Rozprava o dobrovolném otroctví – de La Boétie Étienne (2011)

Why do people actually agree to their own enslavement? Why do they comply? Why do they voluntarily, even willingly, serve? Why do they listen to and support an evil government that always constitutes only a tiny minority in society? Why do they create their own tyrants? Why do they choose their own misfortune? How is it possible that people fight for their enslavement as if it were their salvation? And how can they (that is, how can we) free ourselves from the shackles of that masochistic pleasure, from the chains that may today bind us even more tightly than at the time of the creation of La Boétie's Discourse on Voluntary Servitude? An exceptionally prescient, even prophetic text written nearly five hundred years ago, which has not yet been translated into Czech, offers a penetrating reflection with timeless relevance on the nature of tyrannical government and subjugation. Its author, who is best known as a close friend of the famous French essayist Michel de Montaigne, was the first thinker in the history of European thought to turn upside down the traditional notion of the relationship between the ruler and the ruled, between the master and the slave. He does not focus on the analysis of power, the power apparatus, but rather starts from the will of the subdued, from their desire: the ruled are not passive victims in the hands of a despotic tyrant, but rather they themselves want to be ruled.