Abstract
Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910), Mohandas Gandhi (1869–1948) and Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968) each espoused love as a practice of peace. In the twentieth century, Tolstoy’s ‘law of love’ was to inspire civil disobedience internationally; Mohandas Gandhi’s ahimsa comprised an important element of the Indian independence movement, and Martin Luther King’s conception of love formed the cornerstone of his civil rights activism in the U.S. These continuities are not a coincidence. Tolstoy’s influence on Gandhi and Gandhi’s influence on King have been well documented. What has formed less of a focus are the distinct theological underpinnings and articulations of love, and consequently, praxes of pacifism. This chapter offers an engagement with this transnational history of love and non-violence and its various transmutations in the thought of three significant figures of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It seeks to illuminate how a thematic focus on love renders visible a more plural politics and a more expansive international.
I am grateful to Chris Brown, Kimberly Hutchings, Jacob Matthews, Vassilios Paipais and Ty Solomon for their thought-provoking and helpful feedback on a previous draft. I am indebted to Cian O’Driscoll for conversations which helped clarify my thinking, and for reading and commenting on several drafts.
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Notes
- 1.
For a discussion of some of the reasons for love’s neglect, see Eric Gregory (2011), Politics and the Order of Love: An Augustinian Ethic of Democratic Citizenship. Chicago: University of Chicago Press., 36–38; Anna G Jonasdottir and Ann Ferguson. (2014). Love: A Question for Feminism in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Routledge., 2 and 18–19; Veronique Pin-Fat. (2019) ‘What’s Love Got to Do With it?: Ethics, Emotions and Encounter in International Relations’, Review of International Studies 45, no. 2, 181–200.
- 2.
Some key texts on the subject include Denis de Rougemont. (1983). Love in the Western World, (M. Belgion, Trans.). New Jersey: Princeton University Press., Anders Nygren, Arthur Gabriel. Hebert, and Philip S. Watson (1932). Agape and Eros: A Study of the Christian Idea of Love. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge., Alan Soble (1993). Eros, Agape, and Philia: Readings in the Philosophy of Love St Paul: Paragon House Publishers.
- 3.
1 John 4:16.
- 4.
Note The Cossacks was in fact published in 1863.
- 5.
For a discussion of Mueller’s influence, see Sudipta. Kaviraj. (2010). The Imaginary Institution of India: Politics and Ideas New York: Columbia University Press, 72.
- 6.
I thank Kimberly Hutchings for drawing the distinction between love as a mode of understanding and love as a principle of political practice.
- 7.
I am grateful to Vassilios Paipais for this insight and vocabulary.
- 8.
Steven Marks, How Russia Shaped the Modern World: From Art to Anti-Semitism, Ballet to Bolshevism (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2003), 135–138.
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Hartnett, L. (2020). Love as a Practice of Peace: The Political Theologies of Tolstoy, Gandhi and King. In: Paipais, V. (eds) Theology and World Politics. International Political Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37602-4_11
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