The True Front | 35countless individuals, [can] allow a single person to torture them, abuse them,
and rule over them against their interests and against their will.” Landauer sum-
marizes La Boétie’s view of how humanity lost its natural freedom: “At some
point—caused by outside attack or internal corruption—human beings lost their
freedom. They were followed by individuals who never knew freedom and had
no idea how sweet it tasted. It became a habit to be complacent in servitude; and
habit is stronger than nature.”^99 Add to that the bread and circuses that tyrants
provide, the co-optation of the priesthood, and a class of people close to the king
who profit from the tyranny, and we can understand how servitude becomes pos-
sible. It is at this point that La Boétie makes what Landauer considers his ultimate
contribution. According to La Boétie:
We need nothing... but the desire and the will to be free. We suffer a servitude
that is voluntary. It almost seems as if we humans reject the beautiful gift of
freedom because it is too easy to attain: “Be determined to no longer be ser-
vants and you will be free. I do not encourage you to chase away the tyrant or
to throw him off his throne. All you need to do is stop supporting him—you
will see how he will consequently, like a huge colossus deprived of its base,
tumble and disappear.”^100Landauer compares tyranny in this picture to a fire that cannot be put out by
water but will die if the people who are feeding it cease to do so. As the first to
provide us with this image, and for replacing a negative and critical revolution-
ary stance by a positive one, Landauer puts La Boétie at the head of his own most
precious canon, the anarchist one: “[He] already said what others would later say
in various languages: Godwin, Stirner, Proudhon, Bakunin, Tolstoy.... The mes-
sage is: It is in you! It is not on the outside. It is you. Humans shall not be united
by domination, but as brothers without domination: an-archy. Today, however, we
still lack the consciousness for such a positive motto, so for now the motto must
remain: without domination: __.”^101
The simultaneity of Revolution and Buber’s early Hasidic anthologies is
striking and not usually noted. Revolution is bracketed by them, with Th e Ta l e s
of Rabbi Nachman (1906) on one side and Die Legende des Baalschem (The Legend
of the Baal-Shem) (1908) on the other. Buber’s presentation of Hasidism in these
works attracted attention and wide renown, eventually leading to an invitation
to address the Bar Kochba Society of young Zionists in Prague. The “Speeches on
Judaism” he delivered there, beginning in 1909, made Buber a leader of Central
European Jewish youth; their influence is often described as electrifying.^102 The
mission of the Hasidic anthologies and the “Speeches,” taken together, accord-
ing to Buber, is the renewal (Erneuerung) of Judaism—a word specifically cho-
sen to augment and supplement “renaissance,” perhaps in acknowledgment of
Landauer’s critique of the European Renaissance.^103 At the very beginning of his
work on Rabbi Nachman, echoing Landauer’s statements on the function of his-
tory, Buber disavows a “philological” purpose, proclaiming instead that his goal