Drawn from James B. Atkinson and David Sices’ Montaigne: Selected Essays, this annotated translation of Etienne de La Boetie’s political masterpiece offers an ideal opportunity to become acquainted with the thought of a brilliant though short-lived sixteenth-century French thinker known for his mortal and sworn hatred for all vice, as his friend Michel de Montaigne put it, but particularly for that sordid traffic concocted under the honorable title of justice.