The Milgram Experiment

It was about 1550, according to the standard accounts -- about 14 years before the birth of Shakespeare, about 80 years before the birth of John Locke, about 135 years before the birth of Bach -- that a young Frenchman named Etienne de La Boetie, a young man of what we, today, would call college age, about 20 years old, posed what Murray Rothbard would later describe as "the central problem of political philosophy: the mystery of civil obedience. Why do people, in all times and places, obey the commands of the government, which always constitutes a small minority of the society?"

Blind submission to authority is civil obedience. Tyranny is possible because of it. Whence comes civil disobedience? The Milgram Experiment provided some clues.