Non-Violence

A History Beyond the Myth

By (author) Domenico Losurdo Translated by Gregory Elliott

Not available to order

Publication date:

09 April 2015

Length of book:

246 pages

Publisher

Lexington Books

ISBN-13: 9781498502207

We know of the blood and tears provoked by the projects of transformation of the world through war or revolution. Starting from the essay published in 1921 by Walter Benjamin, twentieth century philosophy has been committed to the criticism of violence, even when it has claimed to follow noble ends. But what do we know of the dilemmas, of the “betrayals,” of the disappointments and tragedies which the movement of non-violence has suffered? This book tells a fascinating history: from the American Christian organizations in the first decades of the nineteenth century who wanted to eliminate slavery and war in a non-violent way, to the protagonists of movements—Thoreau, Tolstoy, Gandhi, Capitini, M. L. King, the Dalai Lama—who either for idealism or for political calculation flew the flag of non-violence, up to the leaders of today’s “color revolutions.”

Introduction: From the Broken Promises of Perpetual Peace to Non-Violence
1. Christian Abolitionism and Pacifism in the USA
2. From Pacifist Abolitionism to Gandhi and Tolstoy
3. Gandhi and the Socialist Movement: Violence as Discrimination?
4. The Anti-Colonialist Movement, Lenin’s Party, and Gandhi’s Party
5. Non-Violence in the Face of Fascism and the Second World War
6. Martin Luther King as the “Black Gandhi” and Afro-American Radicalism
7. Gandhi’s Global Reputation and the Construction of the Non-Violent Pantheon
8. From Gandhi to the Dalai Lama?
9. “Non-Violence," the “Color Revolutions," and the Great Game
10. A Realistic Non-Violence in a World Prey to Nuclear Catastrophe

In attempting to make nonviolence into a myth, the Italian philosopher Losurdo examines several theorists and practitioners of nonviolence from early Quakers and Martin Luther King Jr. in the US to Chinese demonstrators in Tiananmen Square. In the several cases he examines, the author finds that nonviolence rhetoric invariably occurs alongside some, and often considerable, violence . . . Presenting several cases in which Gandhi endorsed violence, such as his support for Britain in WW I, the author portrays Gandhi’s nonviolence as a sham. The Dalai Lama also emerges as an endorser of both nonviolence and violence . . . Summing Up: Recommended. Research collections.