{"id":274585,"date":"2016-10-22T01:16:33","date_gmt":"2016-10-22T00:16:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/why-the-media-flip-out\/"},"modified":"2016-10-22T16:25:14","modified_gmt":"2016-10-22T15:25:14","slug":"why-the-media-flip-out","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/why-the-media-flip-out\/","title":{"rendered":"Why the Media Flip Out"},"content":{"rendered":"

This essay was first published under the title of The Political Thought of \u00c9tienne de La Bo\u00e9tie.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00c9tienne de La Bo\u00e9tie[1]<\/a> has been best remembered as the great and close friend of the eminent essayist Michel de Montaigne, in one of history\u2019s most notable friendships. But he would be better remembered, as some historians have come to recognize, as one of the seminal political philosophers, not only as a founder of modern political philosophy in France but also for the timeless relevance of many of his theoretical insights.<\/p>\n

\u00c9tienne de La Bo\u00e9tie was born in Sarlat, in the P\u00e9rigord region of southwest France, in 1530, to an aristocratic family. His father was a royal official of the P\u00e9rigord region and his mother was the sister of the president of the Bordeaux Parlement (assembly of lawyers). Orphaned at an early age, he was brought up by his uncle and namesake, the curate of Bouilbonnas, and received his law degree from the University of Orl\u00e9ans in 1553. His great and precocious ability earned La Bo\u00e9tie a royal appointment to the Bordeaux Parlement the following year, despite his being under the minimum age. There he pursued a distinguished career as judge and diplomatic negotiator until his untimely death in 1563, at the age of thirty-two. La Bo\u00e9tie was also a distinguished poet and humanist, translating Xenophon and Plutarch, and being closely connected with the leading young Pleiade group of poets, including Pierre Ronsard, Jean Dorat, and Jean-Antoine de Baif.<\/p>\n

La Bo\u00e9tie\u2019s great contribution to political thought was written while he was a law student at the University of Orl\u00e9ans, where he imbibed the spirit of free inquiry that prevailed there. In this period of questing and religious ferment, the University of Orl\u00e9ans was a noted center of free and untrammeled discussion. La Bo\u00e9tie\u2019s main teacher there was the fiery Anne du Bourg, later to become a Huguenot martyr, and burned at the stake for heresy in 1559. Du Bourg<\/span> was not yet a Protestant, but was already tending in that direction, and it was no accident that this University was later to become a center of Calvinism, nor that some of La Bo\u00e9tie\u2019s fellow students were to become Huguenot leaders. One of these was La Bo\u00e9tie\u2019s best friend at the University, and Du Bourg\u2019s favorite student, Lambert Daneau. The study of law in those days was an exciting enterprise, a philosophical search for truth and fundamental principles. In the sixteenth century, writes Paul Bonnefon, \u201cThe teaching of the law was a preaching rather than an institution, a sort of search for truth, carried on by teacher and student in common, and which they feverishly undertook together, opening up an endless field for philosophic speculation.\u201d[2]<\/a> It was this kind of atmosphere in the law schools of Orl\u00e9ans and other leading French universities in which Calvin himself, two decades earlier, had begun to develop his ideas of Protestant Reform.[3]<\/a> And it was in that kind of atmosphere, as well, that lawyers were to form one of the most important centers of Calvinist strength in France.<\/p>\n

In the ferment of his law school days at Orl\u00e9ans, \u00c9tienne de La Bo\u00e9tie composed his brief but scintillating, profound and deeply radical Discourse of Voluntary Servitude<\/a> (Discours de la Servitude Volontaire)[4]<\/a> The<\/p>\n

The first striking thing about the monarchomach writers (those sectarian writers who argued for the right of subjects to resist unjust rulers) of the 1570\u2019s and 1580\u2019s, whom La Bo\u00e9tie resembled in his opposition to tyranny. While the Huguenot monarchomachs, best exemplified by Fran\u00e7ois Hotman\u2019s Franco-Gallia<\/a><\/p>\n

The contrast between the proto-eighteenth-century speculative natural rights approach of La Bo\u00e9tie, and the narrowly legalistic and concrete-historical emphasis of the Huguenot writers who reprinted and used the[8]<\/a>In his abstract, universal reasoning, his development of a true political philosophy, and his frequent references to classical antiquity, La Bo\u00e9tie followed the method of Renaissance writers, notably Niccol\u00f2 Machiavelli. There was, however, a crucial difference: whereas Machiavelli attempted to instruct the Prince on ways of cementing his rule, La Bo\u00e9tie was dedicated to discussing ways to overthrow him and thus to secure the liberty of the individual. Thus, Emile Brehier makes a point of contrasting the cynical realism of Machiavelli with the \u201cjuridical idealism\u201d of \u00c9tienne de La Bo\u00e9tie.[5]<\/a> In fact, however, La Bo\u00e9tie\u2019s concentration on abstract reasoning and on the universal rights of the individual might better be characterized as foreshadowing the political thinking of the eighteenth century. As J. W. Allen writes, the Discoursewas an \u201cessay on the natural liberty, equality and fraternity of man.\u201d The essay \u201cgave a general support to the Huguenot pamphleteers by its insistence that natural law and natural rights justified forcible resistance to tyrannous government.\u201d But the language of universal natural rights itself, Allen<\/span> correctly adds, \u201cserved no Huguenot purpose. It served, in truth, no purpose at all at the time, though, one day, it might come to do so.\u201d[6]<\/a> Or, as Harold Laski trenchantly put it: \u201cA sense of popular right such as the friend of Montaigne depicts is, indeed, as remote from the spirit of the time as the anarchy of Herbert Spencer in an age committed to government interference.\u201d[7]<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This essay was first published under the title of The Political Thought of \u00c9tienne de La Bo\u00e9tie. \u00c9tienne de La Bo\u00e9tie[1] has been best remembered as the great and close friend of the eminent essayist Michel de Montaigne, in one of history\u2019s most notable friendships. But he would be better remembered, as some historians have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-274585","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274585","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=274585"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274585\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=274585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=274585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=274585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}