Fidelity to Truth: Gandhi and the Genealogy of Civil Disobedience

Abstract

Mohandas Gandhi is civil disobedience’s most original theorist and most influential mythmaker. As a newspaper editor in South Africa, he chronicled his experiments with satyagraha by drawing parallels to ennobling historical precedents. Most enduring of these were Socrates and Henry David Thoreau. The genealogy Gandhi invented in these years has become a cornerstone of contemporary liberal narratives of civil disobedience as a continuous tradition of conscientious appeal ranging from Socrates to King to Rawls. One consequence of this contemporary canonization of Gandhi’s narrative, however, has been to obscure the radical critique of violence that originally motivated it. This essay draws on Edward Said’s account of travelling theory to unsettle the myth of doctrine that has formed around civil disobedience. By placing Gandhi’s genealogy in the context of his critique of modern civilization, as well as his formative but often-overlooked encounter with the British women’s suffrage movement, it reconstructs Gandhi’s paradoxical notion that sacrificial political action is the fullest expression of self-rule. For Gandhi, Socrates and Thoreau exemplify civil disobedience as a fearless practice of fidelity to truth profoundly at odds with liberal conceptions of disobedience as fidelity to law.

Constituent power beyond exceptionalism: Irregular migration, disobedience, and (re-)constitution

“…Instead of discussing the many limitations of this normatively loaded and overly restrictive liberal conception (for an extended critique, see Brownlee, 2012; Celikates, 2016a, 2016b; Smith, 2013), I here want to suggest a significantly less constrained, defensive, and idealized understanding that is anchored in the actual practice of disobedience and corresponds better to its complex history, including the paradigm cases of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr, which are often subjected to one-sided and domesticating misrepresentations in the current debate (for critiques of these misrepresentations, see, for example, Livingston, 2018; Lyons, 1998; Pineda, 2015). On this revised understanding, civil disobedience is a principled collective act of protest that involves breaking the law and aims at politicizing or changing laws, policies, or institutions in ways that can be seen as civil—as opposed to organized and conducted in a militarized way and aiming at the destruction of the “enemy.” Civil disobedience is thus not primarily a form of conscientious protest of individual rights-bearers against governments and political majorities.…”

Self-Rule and the Problem of Peoplehood in Colonial India

“…To this extent, self-rule and self-control are inseparable (1997, 118). Critical of the defense of impatience as a political virtue (see Livingston 2018; Mehta 2011), Gandhi affirmed the possibility of immediately authorizing oneself to enact swaraj, while emphasizing the patient work on the self needed to cultivate self-control and to avoid the temptations of instrumental action.…”

Feminist Demands and the Problem of Housework

“…In doing so, I contribute to efforts in the political theory of social movements to read those movements as “social theorists in their own right” (Pineda 2018, 339; cf. Hayward 2020; Hooker 2016; Livingston 2018; Mantena 2012; Schwartzberg 2020; Shelby and Terry 2018; Weeks 2011; Zerilli 2005). I also suggest, following Kathi Weeks’s (2011, 114) method of “creative reappropriation,” that their insights can be redeployed: the feminist vision of demand-making can provide a way of making sense of contemporary demands concerning care work and other issues.…”