Discourse on Voluntary Servitude

Abstract

Drawn from James B. Atkinson and David Sices' Montaigne: Selected Essays, this annotated translation of Étienne de La Boétie's political masterpiece offers an ideal opportunity to become acquainted with the thought of a brilliant though short-lived sixteenth-century French thinker known for "his mortal and sworn hatred for all vice," as his friend Michel de Montaigne put it, "but particularly for that sordid traffic concocted under the honorable title of justice." Atkinsons Introduction fleshes out a portrait of the life and work of this Renaissance poet, scholar, and magistrate whose insistence on viewing customary practices with a cold eye made him a beacon of conscience not only for Montaigne but for such later readers of him as Emerson, Thoreau, Tolstoy, and Gandhi.