Fidelity to Truth
Gandhi and the Genealogy of Civil Disobedience
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 6350472 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Alexander Livingston (0000-0002-7577-1390, Cornell University, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2018 |
| Volume | 46 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 511-536 |
| Publication date | 2018-08-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Political Theory (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0090-5917 • E-ISSN: 1552-7476 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1177/0090591717727275 |
| OpenAlex | W2751386312 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 13 |
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
Civil disobedience · Context (archaeology · Epistemology · Political science · Politics · Sociology · SOCRATES · History · Indian History and Philosophy · Law · Philosophy · Political Theology and Sovereignty · South Asian Studies and Diaspora
Disembodiment
On radical genealogies of civil disobedience
Beyond (and Before) the Transnational Turn
Resistance Among the Druze
Constituent power beyond exceptionalism
Revolutionary leaders and the punishment of critics
Two Different Ways of Nonviolent Resistance
Moral Empire and the Global Meaning of Gandhi's Anti-imperialism
Comradely Critique
Tough Love
Theorizing the Politics of Protest
Feminist Demands and the Problem of Housework
Self-Rule and the Problem of Peoplehood in Colonial India
| Unique citing works | 13 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1,63 |
| Citation span | 2018 - 2026 (9) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 13 |