Author Archives: dmhart

The Cover Art of Voluntary Servitude

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The Cover Art of Boétie’s Discourse

I was drawn back to Étienne de la Boétie’s wonderful essay on “Voluntary Servitude” (written c. 1550, published 1576) because of recent events. Boétie asked perhaps the most fundamental question of political theory, namely, why does the majority allow itself, even asks for it , to be ruled by a small minority of people (a sovereign monarch, politicians in Parliament, the bureaucrats who run things, and the technocrats who advise the government). They allow this rule over them even when it is at their own expense in terms of their own property, the jobs they work or businesses they run, their freedom of movement and congregation, and even the ideas they are permitted to believe in or discuss.

As he put the question at the beginning of his essay:

I would only understand how it is possible and how it can be that so many Men, so many Cities, so many Nations, tolerate sometimes a single Tyrant, who has no Power but what they give him; who has no Power to hurt them but only so far as they have the Will to suffer him; who can do them no Harm except when they chuse rather to bear him than contradict him. A wonderful Thing, certainly, and nevertheless [5] so common, that we ought to have more Grief and less Astonishment, to see a Million of Millions of Men serve miserably, their Necks under the Yoke, not constrained by a greater Force but, as it were, enchanted and charmed by the single Name of one, whose Power they ought not to be afraid of, since he is alone, nor love his Qualities, since he is with regard to them inhuman and savage. Such is the Weakness of Mankind.
… BUT, good God!—what can this be? How shall we call this? What Misfortune [7] is this? What sort of unhappy Vice is it, to see an infinite Number, not only obey, but serve, not governed but tyrannised, having neither Goods, Parents, Children, nor Life itself which can be called theirs? To bear the Robberies, the Debaucheries, the Cruelties, not of an Army, not of a barbarous Camp, against which we ought to spend Blood, nay even our Lives, but of one Man : not a *Hercules* or *Sampson*, but a little Creature, and very often the most cowardly and effeminate of the whole Nation : One not accustomed to the Smoak of Battles, but scarcely to the Dust of Tilts and Tournaments

So, I decided to gather all the material I had on Boétie and put it online. Over the past few weeks I have put online 9 different versions of the essay – 5 in French (c. 1560s, 1576, 1577, 1892, 1922) and 4 in English translation (1735, 1942/1975, 1966). I also built two pages so one could view the different texts side-by-side. One is the 1922 illustrated version by the Catalonian engraver and typographer Louis Jou (1881-1968) with the illustrations surrounding the text on the left and a modern (also 1922) French version on the right. The second allows the reader to compare many of the different texts side-by-side, either French or English, or either on the right or on the left (depending on what is being compared).

As I searched online for various editions I came to realise two things; one, was that there have been more editions (especially in French) than I had realised; and secondly, that many of these editions had striking cover art. I arranged these covers by theme: chains and cages, classic portraits and art, oppressed figures and their oppressors, minimalist design and abstract art, cartoons and drawings, and advertising for events or performances

Below is a small sampling of what I have found. See this other page for the full collection.

An edition by Flammarion (Jan. 1993) with a roughly drawn empty bird cage with the door open. It suggest that if we could only refuse to voluntarily grant servitude to the state, then we could fly away free as a bird.

An edition by Vrin (Oct. 2014) with essays by André Tournon and Tristan Dagron. The image is Benvenuto Cellini’s statue of “Perseus with the Head of Medusa” (1545–1554). Perseus has beheaded the Gorgon Medusa whose hair is made up of snakes and who turns to stone anyone who looks at her. This is an unusual choice of image as Boétie did not advocate violent resistance to the state (like chopping its head off) but rather non0violent, passive resistance by withholding cooperation.

An edition by “Exuvie” (no date) with a preface by the Belgian anarchist Raoul Vaneigem. The image is of a very small figure of Atlas carrying on his shoulders a very large rock. It is interesting that the left have also seized upon Boétie’s essay. The German socialist anarchist Gustave Landauer translated it into German in 1910 and this Belgian anarchist wrote an introduction to this more recent edition. What struck me was the Randian connotation of the image: Boétie was in fact urging Atlas to “shrug” off the burden of the state in order to be free.

Another socialist version of Boétie. This is a German edition by Malik-Verlag (1924). It has a cover by the artist Georg Grosz which shows a submissive worker standing before a rich capitalist who is enjoying the finer things of life. Servitude according this interpretation is a result of working for wages within the capitalist system. Freedom will thus come about when the workers’ go on strike and overthrow the system in a socialist/Bolshevik revolution.

This edition by Payot (2016) shows the classic illustration from Thomas Hobbes’ book Leviathan (1652). The “leviathan” monarch’s body is composed of thousands of small figures of his subjects. If the individuals which made up the Leviathan’s body decided to walk away or do something else, then the “body politic” would collapse and the Leviathan would then no longer exist.

This is a striking but rather cryptic cover for the edition by Librio (Sept. 1993). It also contains Benjamin Constant’s “De la Liberté des Anciens et les Modernes”, and La Fontaine’s fable of “The Wolf and the Dog” (hence the cover illustration of the dog). In Fontaine’s fable the wolf was wild, free, but hungry; the dog was domesticated and well-fed but had the scars of the collar it wore around its neck. Thus people, by implication, can either lead a free but uncertain life (like the wolf), or have the security, regular meals, and shelter enjoyed by a house-trained and domesticated dog, but the sot of this is having to wear a collar and come at the master’s whistle or call.

Being a text-oriented person, I found this edition by Bouchene (Jan. 2015) beautiful, elegant, and clean. The cover shows the opening paragraphs of the Mesmes manuscript edition.

Plutology II: Disney Plutology vs. WB Bugsology

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Being a mischievous sort of chap, when I first came across the name Hearn gave his book I immediately thought it must have been a scientific study of Walt Disney’s cartoon character “Pluto the Pup”.

The connection between Pluto and wealth or money was rather tenuous until I came across this image of Disney play money with Pluto on the $1,000,000 bill:

Being a timorous creature, Pluto never was able to stand up for himself when the predatory bull-dog attempted to steal his food (i.e. his “wealth”):

In the historical context when Disney, Mickey, and Pluto were made and were very popular, the 1930s and 1940s, one could interpret the heavily dog-collared “Butch” as a fascist or communist tyrant preying upon the docile dogs of the neighbourhood.

By own preference in cartoon characters is not the saccharine, obedient and conformist Mickey Mouse, Mini Mouse, and their pet dog Pluto; but rather the anarchistic, disrespectful, Brooklyn accented, and uncontrollable Bugs Bunny:

Whose face adorns a much more modest $1 dollar bill:

When faced with a tyrant, Bugs preferred to undermine the system from within (as in “Gremlins in the Kremlin”) or outright mockery )of Nazis like Herman Goering):

Or, when he turns into a “Rebel Rabbit” (1949):1

who takes on the entire government when he finds out that some bureaucrat in Washington D.C. – the “Game Commissioner” – thought that rabbits were so harmless that the bounty placed on their capture or killing by hunters was a paltry 2 cents (whereas foxes had a bounty of $50). Bugs considers this to be an act of “discrimination.” and decides to confront the Commissioner. Bugs is put in his place by the abusive government bureaucrat:

so he decides to go on a rampage of protest and resistance, by beating a government guard with his own truncheon:

defacing the Washington Monument by painting it like a barber pole;

and selling the island of Manhattan back to the Indians:

The result is that a new bounty of $1 million is placed on his head:

and the entire U.S. military is mobilised to capture him:

It takes the entire “War Department” to capture Bugs and incarcerate him in Alcatraz Prison, from which he will no doubt escape by tunneling out as he always does:

  1. See the entry for “Rebel Rabbit” Wikipedia and a copy of the whole cartoon here. [↩]

Plutology I: William Edward Hearn (1826-1888)

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I first came across the name William Hearn in Rothbard’s history of economic thought where he discusses some early precursors of Austrian economics.1

That he lived and worked in Australia at the University of Melbourne (1854-88) was an added bonus. Hearn’s book on Plutology (1864) should really have been the second volume in the series CIS Classics planned by the Centre for Independent Studies which only saw one volume published (2005) before it was aborted. That was Bruce Smith’s Liberty and Liberalism 1887) which I have resurrected and put online here.

I have put online four of Hearn’s books. He only wrote one on economics, the oddly named Plutology (1865)2 based on his lectures at the University of Melbourne. For decades it was the only economics book published in Australia until the 1920s, but since he was a laissez-faire free trader and, given the direction Australian economic policy went, nobody must have read it or taken any of its ideas to heart. The new Commonwealth of Australia which arose in 1901 was based on four sturdy pillars of statism, namely, protectionism, compulsory wage arbitration, the “White” Australia policy to prevent Asian immigration, and massive government ownership and control of infrastructure (or what was called at the time “state socialism”). Hearn would have been appalled.

Hearn’s contributions to economics have been dismissed by historians such as La Nauze as either superficial or plagiarised.3 Rothbard’s keen eye immediately saw that Hearns was moving in an entirely different direction to the mainstream “classical school” against which Hearns has been improperly judged and compared. In my own reading I was struck by how “Bastiat-like” his arguments were. Note especially this interesting chapter on the proper functions of the state: Chapter XXIII. “Of the Impediments Presented to Industry by Government”.

The Australia economist Greg Moore at the University of Notre Dame4 also takes Hearn’s ideas more seriously, seeing them as part of a much larger social theory about individual liberty and free societies, which he pursued in the volumes which followed Plutology which dealt with law, the sociology of the family and the clan, and the rise of the state. I have put all these books online (in facs. PDF) to begin with, but have made an initial attempt at putting Plutology in HTML as well.

David Kemp in his multi-volume history of Australian liberalism also has some positive things to say about Hearn: David Kemp, A Free Country: Australia’s Search for Utopia, 1861–1901 (Melbourne: The Miegunya Press, 2019). Section on Hearn in Chap. 10 “Liberalism and the New Economics.”

My collection of Hearn’s books can be found here. The HTML version of Plutology here.

  1. Volume II: Classical Economics (2006), “14.8 Plutology: Hearn and Donisthorpe,” pp. 463-65. See Hearn’s bio page for an extract from this here. [↩]
  2. From the Greek πλοῦτος, ploutos, ‘wealth’ , and λόγος logos , ‘speech’, ‘account’, ‘story’. [↩]
  3. J. A. La Nauze, “Hearn, William Edward (1826–1888)” Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 4, (Melbourne University Press, 1972). [↩]
  4. Gregory Moore, “The Anglo-Irish context for William Edward Hearn’s economic beliefs and the ultimate failure of his Plutology,” European Journal of the History of Economic Thought (2009). [↩]

Rothbard on Strategy

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While I was researching Murray Rothbard’s theory of class for a monograph I am writing on The Libertarian Theory of Class Draft I came across some of his other writings on the strategy/ies needed to bring about a free society, which I thought would be useful to gather together for further analysis and discussion. Some were new to me; others I had read decades ago.

When I first made personal contact with the American libertarian movement in August 1978, when I attended a Cato Summer Seminar and Stanford University (at which Rothbard lectured), and a bit later in the summer of 1981 when I began studying for my Masters at Stanford (when I met Rothbard several times as he was then living and working in San Francisco at the Cato Institute), the libertarian movement was in the throws of a bitter debate about strategy which ultimately led to Rothbard’s expulsion from Cato.

This debate had to do with the function and role to be played by the Cato Institute, the Libertarian Party (LP), and the Center for Libertarian Studies (CLS). The Cato Institute had been founded by Ed Crane, Charles Koch, and Murray Rothbard in 1974 and had its HQ in San Francisco; the American Libertarian Party had been founded at the end of 1971, and it too had moved its HQ to SFO sometime in the mid- or late-1970s; and the CLS had been founded in New York City in 1976 by Rothbard and Burt Blumert, and it too moved to moved to Northern California at much the same time.

Rothbard was very active in all three groups as part of his overall strategy of developing and promoting libertarian scholarship (the role of the CLS and its journal the Journal of Libertarian Studies (founded 1976)); reaching intellectuals and other well-informed people and policy makers (the role of Cato and its flagship magazine Inquiry (founded 1977)); reaching ordinary voters and political activists (the LP).

In order to map out the proper functions and strategies to be adopted by these three different groups within the libertarian movement Rothbard and Charles Koch organised a conference on strategy in 1976 in NYC. A number of libertarian scholars and intellectuals were asked to deliver papers which analysed how other ideological groups in the past had organised themselves, and to evaluate the strategies they had used with the idea of applying what they learned to the libertarian movement. The following is a list of the papers I have so far heard about (but not yet seen or read):

  • Joseph R. Stromberg, “Fabianism and Social Change: The Perpetuity of Gradualism” (Unpublished MS., 1976)
  • Charles G. Koch, “The John Birch Society” (unpublished MS., 1976)
  • Ralph Raico, “Liberal Revolutions in Europe in the 19th Century”, (unpublished MS., 1976)
  • (Charles Koch?) “The Fabian Society” (unpublished MS., July, 1976)
  • Williamson M. Evers, “Lenin and his Critics on the Organizational Question”, (unpublished MS.)
  • Joseph R. Stromberg, “Fabianism and Social Change: The Perpetuity of Gradualism” (Unpublished MS., 1976)
  • Leonard P. Liggio, “National Socialist Political Strategy: Social Change in a Modern Industrial Society with an Authoritarian Tradition”, (Unpublished MS, 1976)
  • Walter Grinder and John Hagel III, “Towards a Theory of Social Transformation”, (unpublished MS., 1976)
  • Edward H. Crane III, “Analysis of the Prospects for the Libertarian Party”

Rothbard probably delivered an early version of his long paper “Toward a Strategy for Libertarian Social Change” in which he attempted to synthesise what the other papers had discovered and put forwards his own proposals. His paper was later circulated (the copy I have is dated April, 1977) among other libertarians (which is how I got hold of may copy). I have had online my old copy (missing a few papers and of poor quality because it had been circulated around the movement like a Russian samizdat publication (Russian самизда́т, lit. “self-publishing”). Even though it has been online for 10 years it has stimulated very little reaction (or perhaps I should say “no response” whatever). I recently came across a clean and complete copy which I have put online in a facs. PDF version and an HTML version so it is now searchable.

In August 1978, the month I arrived in the U.S. to attend the Cato Seminar, the magazine Libertarian Forum (edited by Roy Childs) had “A Special Section on Strategies for Achieving Liberty” with the following essays:

  • Milton Mueller, “Toward a Libertarian Theory of Revolution,” pp. 14-17
  • Murray Rothbard, “Strategies for a Libertarian Victory,” pp. 18-24
  • Ed Crane, “Taking Politics Seriously,” pp. 26-27. HTML version ; PDF version
  • Leonard Liggio, “The Disenchanted Electorate: Capturing the Independent Voter,” pp. 28-29
  • Charles Koch, “The Business Community: Resisting Regulation,” pp. 30-34
  • Bill Evers, “Party Newsletters: No more Kvetching,” pp. 36-37
  • David Theroux, “Lessons for Libertarian Campus Radicalism,” pp. 38-41

See the entire issue of Libertarian Review with articles by Milton Mueller, Ed Crane, Leonard Liggio, Charles Koch, Bill Evers, and David Theroux: PDF version .

Rothbard’s essay on “Libertarian Victory” was a condensed version of his essay “Toward a Strategy for Libertarian Social Change” which had been published the previous year. He is very confident in this paper that both the “objective conditions” (economic crisis, political scandals, defeat in an unpopular war) as well as the “subjective conditions” (a great increase in interest in and support for libertarian ideas) meant that Marx’s conditions for a successful “revolutionary” change had been met. It must be noted that by “revolution” Rothbard did not mean violent revolution since free elections were the best way to change the course of the government.

Rothbard kept coming back to the topic of strategy in a number of other writings over the years which I plan to put online as well. His last essay on strategy was published in October 1994 – “A New Strategy for Liberty” HTML version; facs. PDF version. He died a few months later on January 7, 1995. They include In chronological order):

  • 1965: “Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty”, Left and Right. A Journal of Libertarian Thought, Spring 1965, no. 1, pp. 4-22. Facs. PDF version; HTML version .
  • 1973: Chap. 14 “A Strategy for Liberty” in For a New Liberty (New York: Macmillan, 1973), pp. 301-17. PDF version; HTML version (from the 2006 edition).
  • 1977: “Toward a Strategy for Libertarian Social Change” (April, 1977). facs. PDF version and an HTML version.
  • 1978: his 1977 paper was summarised and published with a collection of other essays on libertarian strategy in Libertarian Review (Aug. 1978) – “Strategies for a Libertarian Victory”. HTML version ; PDF version
  • see the entire issue of Libertarian Review with articles by Milton Mueller, Ed Crane, Leonard Liggio, Charles Koch, Bill Evers, and David Theroux: PDF version .
  • 1982: “Toward a Theory of Strategy for Liberty” in The Ethics of Liberty, with a new introduction by Hans-Hermann Hoppe (New York University Press, 1998), chap. 30, pp. 257-73. PDF version ; and HTML version .
  • 1986: Murray N. Rothbard, “Concepts of the Role of Intellectuals in Social Change Toward Laissez Faire”, The Journal of Libertarian Studies, vol. IX, no. 2 (Fall 1990), pp. 43-67. [Paper given in Poland in March, 1986.] Facs. PDF version.
  • 1992 Jan.: “Right-Wing Populism: A Strategy for the Paleo Movement,” Rothbard-Rockwell Report (Jan. 1992) pp. 5-14. facs. PDF version; HTML version. A truncated version of this essay was republished in The Irrepressible Rothbard: The Rothbard-Rockwell Report Essays of Murray N. Rothbard. Edited with an introduction by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.. Preface by JoAnn Rothbard (Burlingame, California: The Center for Libertarian Studies, Inc., 2000), pp. 37-42.
  • 1992 Jan.: “A Strategy for the Right,” Rothbard-Rockwell Report (January 1992). HTML
  • 1994 Oct.: “A New Strategy for Liberty,” Rothbard-Rockwell Report (October 1994). HTML version; facs. PDF version.

I have also written on strategy, using past intellectual and political movements as object lessons for us today. They are:

  • March 2015: a Liberty Matters discussion I hosted in 2015 at the OLL website: “The Spread of Classical Liberal Ideas” (March, 2015) in HTML.
  • June 2015: a Discussion Group “On the Spread of Classical Liberal Ideas: History, Theory, and Strategy” which I organised at an IHS Advanced Studies Summer Seminar “Liberty & Scholarship: Challenges and Critiques” at Bryn Mawr College in June 2015;
  • Nov. 2015: a paper on this called “Entrepreneurs, Investors, and Scribblers: An Austrian Analysis of the Structure of Production and Distribution of Ideas” which I gave at the Southern Economics Association, New Orleans, November 21-23, 2015. HTML.
  • Feb. 2018: a couple of position papers I wrote which were part of Liberty Fund’s “Strategic Refresh” during 2018-19
  • “An Historical Examination of Past and Present Strategies used to bring about Ideological and Political Change” (Feb. 2020) HTML .
  • “How the Online Library of Liberty follows the Strategies outlined by Pierre F. Goodrich” (Feb. 2018) HTML
  • “Pierre F. Goodrich’s Goals and Strategy for the Liberty Fund: A Reconstruction” (Feb. 2018, 23 June 2019). HTML .

I hope others will find this material interesting and perhaps think a bit more deeply about strategies for achieving liberty, in these difficult and hostile times for libertarians.

Coding and Decoding Rothbard

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The Mises Institute has made available an electronic version of Rothbard’s important “newsletter”, called The Libertarian for the first few issues, and then afterwards The Libertarian Forum, which played an important role in the early years of the modern libertarian movement. It can be found at its website in ePub and facsimile PDF versions here.

Facsimile PDF version: The Complete Libertarian Forum 1969-1984. Edited by Murray N. Rothbard. Volume 1: 1969-1975 and Volume 2: 1976-1984 (Auburn, Alabama: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2006).

ePub version: The Complete Libertarian Forum 1969-1984. Edited by Murray N. Rothbard. (Auburn, Alabama: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2012).

Unfortunately neither version is as useful to researchers as they could be since they are not easily searchable. I do not understand why they would spend so much money to make these “electronic books” available in their “electronic bookshop” and not take the extra step of coding them properly so they could become part of an even more useful “electronic research library” with proper bibliographical information for each title, books and authors categorized according to period, subject area, and topics, and key word searchable for academic citation purposes. This proper coding would mean using a standard academic library DTD such as the TEI P4 of the TEI Consortium (Text Encoding Initiative).

Fortunately they published the volumes under the Creative Commons Attribution License 3.0. so I could put online this “improved” and hopefully more useful version.

The source of my frustration was my desire to find out more information about a couple of matters relating to Rothbard’s intellectual evolution, specifically:
1. when exactly Rothbard began using the term “anarcho-capitalism” in his writings
2. when and how he charged his mind about using the term “class”, which he put in quote marks because he shared for some time Mises view that “caste” was a better term for classical liberals to use.

Ideally, the Mises Institute should have coded all of Rothbard’s works (as well as all the others in their collection) in such a way that scholars could search for key terms like these across his entire body of work, find where they occur, and read further accordingly. Unfortunately this is not possible. Instead, one has to download each book from its digital bookshop shelf, and figuratively “flick through” each one in a laborious fashion, and then do the same for the next one off the shelf.

The coding and citation methods I developed for Liberty Fund’s Online Library of Library is one model to follow.

I will post soon on what I found about the use of “anarcho-capitalism” in the pages of The Libertarian Forum.