The great Enlightenment writer and thinker Rousseau once wrote in his DISCOURSE ON THE ORIGIN AND FOUNDATION OF INEQUALITY that “[I]t is very difficult to reduce to obedience one who does not seek command.”
In order to be free, in order not to be a slave, one must first renounce the desire to be a master.
True freedom is the condition of being “neither master nor slave.”
Ann Hartle, “Montaigne’s Radical Conservatism,” pages 19-28 in Modern Age: A Quarterly Review, Fall 2013, Vol. 55, No. 4.
