TGIF: What Egyptians Are Teaching the World

In Egypt the powers that be continue to defy the peaceful throngs in the streets. Yet their rulers’ clumsy efforts to mollify the courageous people remind us of something usually overlooked about the nature of political power, namely, that ideas, not force, ultimately rule, for as Jeffrey Rogers Hummel says, ideas determine the direction in which people aim their guns.

This was well known to the sixteenth-century French political philosopher Étienne de La Boétie, author of The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude, in which he wrote that to rule, tyrants require the cooperation of their subjects. It is doubtful that many Egyptians have read Boétie, but in filling Tahrir (Liberation) Square unarmed, they seem to have grasped his thesis. Here is an appropriate excerpt for the occasion...

Read the rest of TGIF here.

TGIF: Subjugating Ourselves

In The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude, the sixteenth-century French poet, judge, and political philosopher Étienne de La Boétie wondered "how it happens that so many men, so many villages, so many cities, so many nations, sometimes suffer under a single tyrant who has no other power than the power they give him; who is able to harm them only to the extent to which they have the willingness to bear with him; who could do them absolutely no injury unless they preferred to put up with him rather than contradict him. Surely a striking situation!"Read the full TGIF here.