Brief Notes on Solidarity and Political Imagination

Abstract

The main idea of Discours de la Servitude volontaire by Etienne de La Boétie (1530-1563) is simple: People don’t obey because tyrants are powerful, tyrants are powerful because people obey. This disrupts the idea of an inherent stability of dominance and introduce a relational and dynamic concept of power, which is seen to emerge from below, rather than to emanate from above. De La Boétie does not only criticize tyranny, he investigates the conditions of possibility of tyrannic rule: habituation through forgetfulness and lack of imagination. He also gives an image of how society might be if people stuck to what nature and reason demand: acting freely, they would treat each other as equals, or rather as brethren. His description implies a concept of solidarity (or even communism). A “politics of imagination” (Graeber) is both an explicit topic and a performative aspect of the Discourse.

Keywords

• communism
• david graber
• etienne de la boétie
• tyrrany
• anarchism
• imagination
• obedience
• political imagination
• power
• solidarity