Concedo nulli: On the Necessity and Practice of Refusal
The French Renaissance humanist and close friend of Michel de Montaigne, Étienne de la Boétie, famously contended, in his 1579 Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, that if you “Resolve no longer to be slaves […] you are free”. La Boétie’s remarkable little book suggests, in other words, that tyranny—be it political or personal—requires the willed acquiescence of those whom it enthrals. And this is an insight worth heeding in the current intellectual climate, for the corrupt managerial hierarchies and insidious systems of intellectual surveillance, which have flourished in the Anglo-American academe in recent years, function only because academics and members of the intelligentsia allow them to do so. Put simply, because many twenty-first century humanists choose to serve the powers that be rather than think for themselves, it is they who are in no small part responsible for both their own political marginalization and the insidious marketisation of the academe, in which, to quote Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnet 66’, “art [is] made tongue-tied by authority / And folly, doctor-like, control[s] skill”. There is a pressing need to re-discover the heroic kernel of humanistic study, which is encapsulated by Erasmus’s astonishingly defiant motto of concedo nulli (I yield to none). Whereas a recent governmental report penned by British academics, the Warwick Report, claims that the existence of the arts—or what it calls in its nauseating doublespeak, “the creative industries”—can be justified because they add 3% to the British economy, I contend that justification for continued study of the arts and humanities is to be found in the fact that they teach people to take courage in their own intellectual and ethical convictions. To be sure, the arts help to inculcate a life that is no longer blighted by voluntary servitude and the various types of refusal in Renaissance humanist pedagogics, philosophy and literature offer twenty-first century humanists a model of political praxis.
The French Renaissance humanist and close friend of Michel de Montaigne, Étienne de la Boétie, famously contended, in his 1579 Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, that if you “Resolve no longer to be slaves […] you are free”. La Boétie’s remarkable little book suggests, in other words, that tyranny—be it political or personal—requires the willed acquiescence of those whom it enthrals. And this is an insight worth heeding in the current intellectual climate, for the corrupt managerial hierarchies and insidious systems of intellectual surveillance, which have flourished in the Anglo-American academe in recent years, function only because academics and members of the intelligentsia allow them to do so.
Put simply, because many twenty-first century humanists choose to serve the powers that be rather than think for themselves, it is they who are in no small part responsible for both their own political marginalization and the insidious marketisation of the academe, in which, to quote Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnet 66’, “art [is] made tongue-tied by authority / And folly, doctor-like, control[s] skill”. There is a pressing need to re-discover the heroic kernel of humanistic study, which is encapsulated by Erasmus’s astonishingly defiant motto of concedo nulli (I yield to none).
Whereas a recent governmental report penned by British academics, the Warwick Report, claims that the existence of the arts—or what it calls in its nauseating doublespeak, “the creative industries”—can be justified because they add 3% to the British economy, I contend that justification for continued study of the arts and humanities is to be found in the fact that they teach people to take courage in their own intellectual and ethical convictions. To be sure, the arts help to inculcate a life that is no longer blighted by voluntary servitude and the various types of refusal in Renaissance humanist pedagogics, philosophy and literature offer twenty-first century humanists a model of political praxis.