Reconstructing Nonviolence

A New Theory and Practice for a Post-Secular Society

Roberto Baldoli

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781032094892
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351372602
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Nonviolent methods of action have been a powerful tool since the early twentieth century for social protest and revolutionary social and political change, and there is diffuse awareness that nonviolence is an efficient spontaneous choice of movements, individuals and whole nations. Yet from a conceptual standpoint, nonviolence struggles to engage with key contemporary political issues: the role of religion in a post-secular world; the crisis of democracy; and the use of supposedly 'nonviolent techniques' for violent aims.

Drawing on classic thinkers and contemporary authors, in particular the Italian philosopher Aldo Capitini, this book shows that nonviolence is inherently a non-systematic and flexible system with no pure, immaculate thought at its core. Instead, at the core of nonviolence there is praxis, which is impure because while it aims at freedom and plurality it is made of less than perfect actions performed in an imperfect environment by flawed individuals.

Offering a more progressive, transformative and at the same time pluralistic concept of nonviolence, this book is an original conceptual analysis of political theory which will appeal to students of international relations, global politics, security studies, peace studies and democratic theory.

1The success of a division

The first step in order to pursue the bold aim of ‘reconstructing nonviolence’ is to outline the condition in which we currently find the division between the principled and pragmatic streams. At the moment, this division is living a (still modest) growing success in the literature. To describe this success, this chapter will outline the origin and features of the dominant division between techniques and principle, as well as between the categories of principled and pragmatic nonviolence. As we said in the introduction, I will focus on academic literature.

The first section will look at the origin of this division between a principle and methods of action. This division underlies nonviolence since the 1930s. Indeed, the concept has been interpreted either as a substitute for war and violent protests, or as part of radical pacifism and religion. This division survived throughout the 1940s and 1950s. Yet, it is only with Gene Sharp that nonviolence was definitely split into principle and set of techniques. Section two will outline Sharp’s thought and the development of the categories of principled and pragmatic nonviolence. It will become clear that they represent two very different approaches to nonviolence. While the principled stream focuses on principles and on the power of the person to realise pacifism and religious preaching, pragmatic nonviolence focuses on techniques of action and on people power to face the violence of governments and seize power. Finally, the third section will describe the success and the key reasons of this success: they produced conceptual order; spread the use of the term to groups without asking them to adhere to a creed (and thus moving beyond the idea that nonviolence was possible only in dealing with democratic regimes); and satisfied the need for a secularised concept.

The ‘double soul’ of nonviolence

To understand the success of the division between principles and methods, it is worth having a look at its origin. When did nonviolence become two? The key theorist associated with this division is the American scholar Gene Sharp. Since the 1960s, his contribution to the field had a profound impact on the way people looked at nonviolence. For Zunes, it is thanks to him if consideration of Gandhian campaigns moved beyond religious and ethics courses, and if we witness the development of the study on nonviolent conflict and civil resistance in different fields (Engler, 2013: 63). By many it is even acknowledged that Sharp’s ideas have been the sine qua non of the success of the Otpor! Revolution in Serbia against Slobodan Milošević.

Yet, what was nonviolence before Sharp? Was the ‘double soul’ of nonviolence already out there? The internal tension of nonviolence between a principle and techniques of action is nothing new in the literature. The first one to distinguish between two kinds of nonviolence was Gandhi himself in letters, speeches and newspaper articles. He talked about nonviolence of the weak and of the brave (Hardiman, 2003: 58). How to distinguish between the two? Gandhi never treated the topic systematically. Yet, he talked about ‘nonviolent resistance’ as a weapon of the strong or brave to be distinguished from the nonviolence of the weak based on two reasons. To start, nonviolence of the brave is incompatible with resisting in a cowardly manner. In other words, it is better to resist violently than simply to fly away from a situation of danger. This is the reason why the Pathans (Nagler, 2004: 223) and soldiers (Gandhi, [1917] 1999: 128) are well positioned to make the step towards nonviolence. In addition, this distinction emerges especially when Gandhi had to distinguish nonviolence from the ‘passive resistance’ of the suffragette movement and nonconformists, whose method “whilst it avoids violence, being not open to the weak, it does not exclude its use if, in the opinion of a passive resister, the occasion demands it” (Gandhi, [1921] 1999: 452). If nonviolence has to be taken seriously, not simply to disguise weaknesses, it involves overcoming hatred while supporting forgiveness and construction.

When nonviolence entered the West, the tension between its two souls was evident. Already during the 1920s and 1930s, there was a split between those who considered non-violence a substitute for war, or a principle of a pacifist revolution. The former group includes key authors such as Case, Shridharani and Gregg. In what is considered the first important study on the topic, Non-Violent Coercion: A Study in Methods of Social Pressure, the American sociologist Claren Marsh Case interpreted non-violent resistance as “a principle of social action” (Case, 1923: 4). With these words, Case means a set of methods, techniques used in order to achieve change, with or without mass mobilisation. The aim is to “produce in the mind of the one appealed to, i.e., the subject, a change of mental attitude without the use of coercion” (Case, 1923: 398). Thus, actions of non-violent coercion and passive resistance, synonyms for Case, are forms of collective pressure, a reaction “between submission and resistance” (Case, 1923: 397) to actions which impinge a group’s interests.

In a similar vein, Richard Gregg, in his 1934 book The Power of Non-Violence, conceived of non-violence as a particular and useful way to wage conflicts. He was a pacifist, but he developed a very pragmatic vision of nonviolence. Using “the then prestigious canon of modern psychology” (Scalmer, 2011: 100), even though still underdeveloped, Gregg aimed to understand “the emotional, mental and moral mechanisms” involved (Gregg, 1966: 43) in this particular action at the level of both individuals and groups. From his analysis, nonviolent resistance emerged as an answer to violence. More precisely, nonviolent resistance works as a sort of moral jiu-jitsu: “the nonviolence and good will of the victim acts in the same way that the lack of physical opposition by the user of physical jiu-jitsu, does, causing the attacker to lose his moral balance” (Gregg, 1966: 44).

A few years later, Krishnalal Shridharani, in his work War without Violence, went even further in describing nonviolence. He claimed that satyagraha, or “non-violent direct action” (Shridharani, 1939: 13), is a “new social institution”, a plan for concerted action which is equivalent and can substitute the institution of war. Nonviolence was that kind of “effective action, short of the destructive practice of war” which was able to achieve “realistic and needed ends” (Shridharani, 1939: 13), and it is useful “for attaining group objectives without the aid of Machiavellian physical force and fraud” (Shridharani, 1939: 12–13). In other words, non-violence referred to a “technique of concerted social action” (Shridharani, 1939: 14), which is independent from political and social context, tradition and conditions. Shridharani admitted that it was easier for Indians to adopt non-violence, due to their cultural traits. He also admitted that satyagraha was an expansion of the concept of ahimsa, and it represents the culmination of Hindu heritage (Shridharani, 1939: 154). However, satyagraha “can be substituted for war as simply as outmoded airplanes can be replaced by faster and more powerful ones” (Shridharani, 1939: 188).

Yet, not everybody aligned to the interpretations of Case, Gregg and Shridharani. Indeed, other groups, such as pacifist movements, had a different conception of nonviolence. In particular, it has become a key component of what can be called radical pacifism. Radical pacifism emerged from the peace movement between the world wars, along with anti-war peace advocates. The former, also called absolute pacifists, repudiate all organised violence, war and armed conflict. On the contrary, anti-war peace advocates oppose war and militarism, while supporting defensive wars and even armed social revolution (Bennett, 2003: XII). Nonviolence became the central component of the radical pacifists’ revolution, which does not stop at the political realm, but includes a change in the personal, social and even spiritual spheres.

Within this group, there is a more secular and a more religious variant. Two famous supporters of a more ‘secular’ form of nonviolent revolution are Aldous Huxley and Barthelemy de Ligt. In Means and Ends and The Conquest of Violence, the two authors acknowledged the importance of Case and Gregg, but push the topic in a different direction. In these works, non-violence is not only a method for war or struggle; it is a method of economic, social and cultural revolution. It was both method and spiritual force; it is abstention from any kind of violence, but also absence of fear and hatred in the fight for a different society. De Ligt was clear in saying that “non-violent resistance makes calls on man as a moral being: the more he practices it, the higher a level of human value he will reach” (De Ligt, 1989: 165). For Huxley, non-violence is even a philosophy which embraces individuals and societies. The agents of this reform were described as new men, which De Ligt called ‘soldiers of peace’ (De Ligt, 1989: 210), who fight with heroism, discipline, self-denial, as in armed battle. They take into account even self-sacrifice, even though not subordinated to collective violence, but affirming intellectual and moral individuality (De Ligt, 1989: 211). Their aim is no more to substitute war or violent protests, but to place non-violence at the basis of any individual, social and political relationship in order to achieve peace. Thus, non-violence was described as the key for social liberty, justice (De Ligt, 1989: 268), the construction of “a free and just society” (Huxley, 1969: 15), and it was even deeply linked with religion or cosmology (Huxley, 1969: 7). This means going beyond anti-militarism, because it was insufficient when not embedded in a “wider task, namely the creation of a new culture and society” (De Ligt, 1989: XVI). More generally, we can claim that non-violence was also used as a synonym of peace, which meant much more than simple absence of war. Huxley claimed that “all men desire peace, but very few desire those things that make for peace” (Huxley, 1969: 138). Non-violence was both at the same time.

The approach of Huxley and De Ligt was not the only one that radical pacifism was expressing at the time. Some authors developed much more than them the ties between non-violence and religion. Unfortunately, it is not the aim of this section to look in depth to the importance of the theologians at Howard University (in particular Johnson, Thurman and Mays), of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, James Farmer and the CORE and other groups. Yet, the tendency has been to merge non-violence and religion. Some scholars noticed the deep roots in past philosophies of non-violence of different religions, in spite of their different theologies (Sibley, 1943: 440). Other authors pushed even further the link between pacifism, spirituality and their religions, a phenomenon called ‘over likeness’ (Nepstad, 2015: 155). One example is the radical pacifist Abraham Johannes Muste, a strong believer in the power of nonviolence of Jesus to achieve real social revolution. Among the many writings on peace, he published in 1940 a book titled Non-Violence in an Aggressive World, which epitomises this religious stream of nonviolence. Muste claimed that the Second World War represented the horrible backdrop against which a different world is imagined. The choice was simple: either a life of fear, violence and domination, or of love. Many at his time “bow the knee before Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, [and] some social arbiter or some other idol” (Muste, 1940: 6). This path threatened democracy, social progress and even religion, which depended for survival and triumph “upon the adoption of a thorough-going, deeply motivated, positive, realistic pacifism” (Muste, 1940: 10). The future of civilization depended on a social revolution towards pacifism. This revolution cannot be violent; violence is not a valid way for real change (Muste, 1940: 78). Instead, Muste advised following another example, that of Jesus. Jesus chose the way of love, even though this included pain as well as the likelihood of being defeated and killed. Jesus was an example of non-violence, as he was an example of repentance, love of the enemy, self-suffering, refusal to inflict or desire to inflict sufferance on the others, and repudiation of using Caesar’s weapons (Muste, 1940: 28). Nonviolence was thus a way that grows out of the Christian or Jewish–Christian view of life (Muste, 1940: 30). Jesus “rejected the way of the sword and knew that He would therefore have to tread the way of the Cross” (Muste, 1940: 25). Thus, nonviolence was the way of the Cross, which means complete sacrifice, and was the way in which a person shows the love of God (Muste, 1940: 19).

The two different interpretations of non-violence as a method of struggle or a deep principle of pacifism or religion have never been seriously challenged. The practice of nonviolence developed into new and important experimentations, but the theory remained constant. To the contrary, since the 1940s the two souls of nonviolence are accepted and developed by scholars. One of the first authors to do so was Theodore Paullin, who tried to clarify in his 1944 Introduction to Non-Violence that non-violence can be defined from the idea of a continuum. On one extreme we find violence coupled with hatred, then ‘violence without hate’, ‘hate without violence’, non-violent coercion, satyagraha or nonviolent direct action and non-resistance. At the opposite extreme we find active goodwill and reconciliation. Within this continuum, Paullin claimed that non-violence can be either a principle, “accepted as an end in itself”, or a “means to some other desired end” (Paullin, 1944: 3). Non-violence as a principle is the “highest value and supreme principle” of the absolute pacifist. On the contrary, he acknowledged that many pacifists and non-pacifists consider non-violence as a technique. Being a mere technique, it can be used for different purposes; it is not attached to any value in particular, and it does not have to be followed in any circumstances.

Thus, the division was almost already established in the 1940s, and it continued to manifestly contour the debate on non-violence. The watershed for the history of nonviolence in the West, its first full implementation, was certainly the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 and the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement. The symbol of this movement was Martin Luther King Junior. Through his struggle, King wrote that nonviolence became a ‘way of life’, much more than a bunch of techniques; it was applicable to any situation (King, 2010). It is quite clear from his writings that King did not challenge this internal division in the theory of nonviolence. Indeed, like Gandhi, he never wrote a treaty on nonviolence; he had more important tasks to complete. His speeches and books were part of his key struggle for the American black community.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 The success of a division
• 2 The other side of success
• 3 The nonviolence of Aldo Capitini
• 4 The ‘reality of all’: protest-to-project, transformative realism and open religion
• 5 Reconstructing nonviolence: ideology for freedom and plurality
• 6 Nonviolence in practice: conflict, democracy and religion
• Conclusion
• Index
• Back Cover