The Politics of Nonviolence in a Violent World by Isak Tranvik

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Beyond Moderation: The Politics of Nonviolence in a Violent World

Isak Tranvik

Department of Political Science Duke University

Approved:

______Jack Knight, Advisor

______Ruth Grant

______Alexander Kirshner

______Jeff Spinner-Halev

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Political Science in the Graduate School of Duke University 2020

ABSTRACT

Beyond Moderation: The Politics of Nonviolence in a Violent World

Isak Tranvik

Department of Political Science Duke University

Approved:

______Jack Knight, Advisor

______Ruth Grant

______Alexander Kirshner

______Jeff Spinner-Halev

An abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Political Science in the Graduate School of Duke University 2020

Abstract

This dissertation challenges the long-standing albeit usually implicit association between political moderation and nonviolent political action. For the three figures I examine here—Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Václav Havel— nonviolence is not a middle way between resignation and the kind of violent resistance many democratic theorists now endorse. Gandhi, King, and Havel each reject violent forms of resistance on the grounds that it marks a continuation instead of a break from a world built on and sustained by state or state-sanctioned violence. Put bluntly, violent forms of resistance are not too radical for Gandhi, King, and Havel; they are not radical enough. I ultimately argue that Gandhi, King, and Havel’s uncompromising commitment to nonviolent political action means that they are better described as zealots than political moderates. They exceed the bounds of normal politics as they ardently pursue their cause.

What motivates and sustains their zealous politics? I contend that Gandhi, King, and Havel’s zealotry is underpinned by what feminist and womanist theorists have called relationality—to be human, Gandhi, King, and Havel, believe, is to be constituted by the needs of the concrete and particular other. As a result, Gandhi, King, and Havel are compelled to respond when they witness someone harmed by state or state- sanctioned violence, even when doing so carried enormous costs and even if the

likelihood of mitigating the harm is minimal, at best. Crucially, Gandhi, King, and Havel not only understand themselves as inextricably related to those who are harmed, but to the perpetrators of harm as well. Hence their embrace of nonviolent political action; they are unwilling to harm those who harm others.

I do not think democratic theorists should be in the business of arguing that those subject to state or state-sponsored violence should refuse to respond in kind. As such, I am not proposing that Gandhi, King, and Havel offer a new normative model of resistance. That said, I contend that Gandhi, King, and Havel give democratic theorists reason to re-examine the role of zealotry in pluralistic political communities. In brief,

Gandhi, King, and Havel show that not all zealots introduce, entrench, or exacerbate injustice. Pluralistic political communities, then, should make room for zealots like

Gandhi, King, and Havel. And doing so requires considering the ontology—I am principally concerned with conceptions of human being or social ontology, here—of the various zealots who exceed the bounds of normal politics when ardently pursuing their cause. I introduce a negative standard of ontological exceptionalism to help democratic theorists distinguish between zealots that introduce, entrench, or exacerbate injustices and those who, like Gandhi, King, and Havel, seem to have the opposite effect.

Contents

Abstract ...... iv

Acknowledgements ...... viii

1.Introduction ...... 1

1.1 Nonviolence and Political Moderation ...... 5

1.2 The Politics of the Impossible ...... 13

1.3 Relationality and a Different Kind of Politics ...... 20

1.4 A Pundit, a Preacher, and a Playwright ...... 30

1.5 Chapter Overview ...... 35

2. Gandhi on the Atman, Social Service, and Satyagraha ...... 41

2.1 Gandhi and Democratic Theory ...... 45

2.2 Religion and Modern Politics ...... 53

2.3 Realizing the Atman ...... 59

2.4 Self-Renunciation and Constructive Nonviolence ...... 64

2.5 Limitations and Objections ...... 74

2.6 Conclusion ...... 78

3. King on the Neighbor, Love, and Civil Disobedience ...... 80

3.1 Utopia and Realism ...... 85

3.2 A Theologian of the Cross ...... 95

3.3 Neighborly Ethics ...... 102

3.4 Neighborly Politics ...... 110

3.5 Limitations and Objections ...... 116

3.6 Conclusion ...... 118

4. Havel on the “Dissident,” Radical Responsibility, and Anti-Political Politics ...... 121

4.1 The Limitations of Normal Politics ...... 126

4.2 Identity as Radical Responsibility ...... 135

4.3 “Living Within the Truth” as Small-Scale Work ...... 141

4.4 Parallel Polis ...... 147

4.5 Limitations and Objections ...... 152

4.6 Conclusion ...... 154

5. Conclusion ...... 156

5.1 Making Sense of Zealots ...... 164

5.2 Ontology and Political Legitimacy ...... 171

5.3 A Negative Standard of Ontological Exceptionalism...... 177

5.4 Limitations and Objections ...... 186

5.5 Conclusion ...... 192

References ...... 193

Biography ...... 213

vii

Acknowledgements

There are too many people to thank and not enough space to thank them all.

Moreover, I lack the words to express my gratitude to all who have helped me along the way. What follows, then, is surely incomplete and inadequate.

Thanks to the political theory faculty at Duke and UNC for their wisdom and support over the last six years, especially Michael Gillespie, Ruth Grant, Alex Kirshner, and Jack Knight. A special thanks goes to Jack for his patience and to Alex for allowing me to present versions of several chapters in his seminars—and for providing invaluable feedback too many times to count. I’d also like to thank Jeff Spinner-Halev for treating me like I was one of his graduate students. Although he is not a faculty member at Duke or UNC, Harry Boyte has been hugely helpful, both intellectually but also as an exemplar of public work. Also, thanks to Luke Bretherton, Nora Hanagan, Mike

Lienesch, Richard Lischer, Leela Prasad Geneviève Rousselière, Tom Spragens, and Joe

Winters, among others, for reading or discussing parts of this project with me at some point. Thanks to Kyle Beardsley and Pablo Beramendi for their support, as well.

Thanks to all the staff members who make the Duke Political Science Department go. A special thanks goes to Fonda Anthony, Kathy Ivanov, and Steff Shouse—without them, no graduate student would ever finish a single semester, much less a dissertation.

That’s especially true for me.

viii

Thanks to the many colleagues and friends at Duke and UNC who have provided feedback and encouragement over the last six years, especially Sam Bagg,

Lucy Britt, Gent Carrabregu, Eric Cheng, Devin Christenson, Mike Hawley, Jihyun

Jeong, Chris Kennedy, Jacob Little, Antong Liu, Elliot Mamet, Charlie Nathan, Alex

Oprea, Wan Ning Seah, Jeremy Spater, Brian Spisiak, Matt Young, and Somia Youssef. A special thanks goes out to Eric and Antong for humoring me for five years.

Thanks to friends in the broader Durham community for teaching me about some of the themes I try to articulate here, especially Jovita Byemerwa, Gebrehiwot

Esseyas, Fitwi Gebrehiwot, Caleb Harrison, Petros Okubagergis, Sarah Pearson, and

Gebremichael Tela. I learned more about politics in the reading group at Butner than I have in any other classroom. Thanks especially to Joe, Obie, S.K., Micah, and Bruce for sharing their wisdom. The same could be said for the teacher’s lounge at Gateway

Middle School in St. Louis: thanks especially to Mr. Cashman, Ms. Craig, Ms. Glass, Ms.

Grace, Ms. Hargrove, and Ms. Rogers, among others. It has taken me a while to appreciate how much I learned there—and I am eternally grateful for their patience.

Thanks to David for putting up with me through thick and thin. Thanks to Ann for always showing me what matters. Thanks to Mark, for doing the same—and for reading and discussing far too many terrible ideas over the years. And last but certainly not least, thanks to Ali. I couldn’t even scratch the surface of my gratitude for her wisdom, kindness, graciousness, and courage here, so I’ll just leave it at that.

1.Introduction

“The exception explains the general and itself. And if one wants to study the general correctly, one only needs to look around for a true exception. It reveals everything more clearly than does the general. Endless talk about the general becomes boring; there are exceptions. If they cannot be explained, then the general also cannot be explained. The difficulty is usually not noticed because the general is not thought about with passion but with a comfortable superficiality. The exception, on the other hand, thinks the general with more intense passion.” – Soren Kierkegaard

In June of 1924, Mohandas Gandhi was seriously ill. Recently released from prison due to his health problems and still unable to travel, the then fifty-five year-old dedicated much of time to writing letters and publishing editorials in his newspaper,

Young India. These were not slow news days. Two years earlier, Gandhi had called off the non-cooperation movement after the death of twenty-two policemen and three civilians in Chauri Chaura. His time in jail did not quell the controversy generated by that decision. Two of Gandhi’s key allies had left the Congress Party and their new, more militant party, the Swaraj Party, was quickly gaining influence. They not only questioned Gandhi’s judgment regarding non-cooperation, they also challenged his views about the necessity of nonviolence.1 At the same time, Muslim-Hindu relations had worsened. Several regions were wracked with religious violence (Tejani 2007, 261).

1 Gandhi openly admitted as much: “I see that many members, if not the majority, did not believe in nonviolence and truth as an integral part of the Congress creed. They would not allow that ‘peaceful’ meant ‘non-violent’ and that ‘legitimate’ meant ‘truthful.’ I know that today there is more of the violent and untruthful spirit in us than we had in February 1922” (Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi vol. 28, 63-34; hereafter CWMG). 1

Many blamed Gandhi for the bloodshed.2 Although parts of the infamous Rowlett Act had been repealed in 1922, the British Raj seemed to have consolidated its power in the intervening years. It had not only survived a direct challenge, opposition to it seemed to be weakening. The future of Gandhi’s movement was bleak. Yet, Gandhi seemed unaffected:

“We should remain non-violent, unmindful of whether we succeed or fail in our undertaking. This is the only natural way of demonstrating the principle of non-violence. It would be more correct to say that the result of ahimsa is always good. Such being our firm faith, we are not concerned whether our efforts are crowned with success today or years later” (CWMG vol. 28, 186).

***

More than four decades later and half a world away, Martin Luther King Jr. stepped to the podium in at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s 1967 retreat in Frogmore, South Carolina. The movement King helped lead was also splintering.

Black nationalists criticized him for moving too slowly. Members of his own coalition thought King had become too radical; his condemnation of American involvement in

Vietnam and plans for a massive “Poor People’s Campaign” alienated powerful allies.3

In the meantime, many white moderates and liberals held King responsible for the riots breaking out in cities across the country. King was under siege. But like Gandhi, King

2 See, for instance, the May 29, 1924 edition of Young India (CWMG vol. 28, 43-62). 3 Like Roy Wilkins, chairman of the NAACP. 2

doubled down on his core commitments, seemingly without concern for the consequences.

At the conclusion of his Frogmore address, King—ever a preacher—turned to the

Hebrew scriptures to explain why. “Centuries ago King Nebuchadnezzar issues an order to all of who fell under his domain. That order was that at the sound of the trumpet everyone was to bow before the golden image. The refusal to [follow it] would result in being thrown into the fiery furnace” (n.d.a., 11). King continues, “There were three young men who heard the order. They knew of the injunction that had been issued by the king, but something deep down within them told them that they had to violate the injunction and practice civil disobedience. They stood before the king and said, ‘We know that the god that we worship is able to deliver us, but if not, we will not bow. We know that he is able to deliver us from the fiery furnace, but if not, we will not bow”

(n.d.a, 11; emphasis in original). King spells out the implications for his congregants:

“They were saying something there. They were saying that they had discovered something, so dear, so precious, so great that they were going on to live with it. They had come to say that they were going to do what conscience told them was right—not to avoid hell nor to get to heaven, but they were going to do it because it was right…So I say to you in closing tonight, that I have taken a vow. I, Martin Luther King, take thee, non-violence, to be my wedded wife, for better or worse, (this isn’t a ‘bargaining’ experience,) for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part” (n.d.a., 12).

***

Little more than a decade later, Czech dissident Václav Havel was penning an essay for a planned 1978 symposium of Polish and Czech dissidents on power and freedom. Havel was arrested before the piece, “Power of the Powerless,” was published.

He would not be released for nearly four years. This was not Havel’s first setback.

Minimal progress had been made since Soviet tanks brought the 1968 Prague Spring to an abrupt halt. Ten years later, the Soviet Empire seemed to be at the height of its powers. Its adversaries in Eastern and Central Europe seemed to be without any power at all. Havel had recently lost his friend, mentor, and fellow spokesman of the Charta 77 dissident group, the philosopher Jan Patočka, after a lengthy police interrogation. Havel himself had just gotten out of prison for his involvement with Charta 77. Zbygniew

Bujak, a Polish activist, describes the prevailing mood among Eastern European dissidents in the late 1970s as follows: “People thought we were crazy. Why were we doing this? Why were we taking such risks? Not seeing any immediate and tangible results, we began to doubt the purposefulness of what we were doing. Shouldn’t we be coming up with other methods, other ways?” (Havel 1992, 125-126). But like Gandhi and

King, Havel was seemingly unconcerned with the hopelessness of his endeavors. He too demonstrated an unwavering commitment to his fundamental beliefs:

“Living within the truth…is clearly a moral act, not only because one must pay so dearly for it, but principally because it is not self-serving: the risk may bring rewards in the form of a general amelioration in the situation, or it may not. In this regard, as I stated previously, it is an all- or-nothing gamble, and it is difficult to imagine a reasonable person

embarking on such a course merely because he reckons that sacrifice today will bring rewards tomorrow” (1992, 153).

1.1 Nonviolence and Political Moderation

After a period of relative neglect, democratic theorists have begun to reexamine politics in circumstances of injustice. Some suggest “fugitivity” is the only option for people of color living in a world structured by white supremacy (Harney and Moten

2013; Hesse 2014). Others have examined how deliberation works “before the revolution” (Fung 2005). Still others have theorized the revolution itself (Hardt and

Negri 2001). Many scholars, however, have turned to nonviolent forms of resistance in search of a middle path between a kind of resignation and outright revolution (Brownlee

2012; Celikates 2016a, 2016b; Harcourt 2012; Livingston 2018, n.d.; Mantena 2012a, 2018;

Markovits 2005; Scheuerman 2015, 2018). These efforts, I propose, are best understood as attempts to recover a radical yet restrained type of political action—a courageous but moderate way to contest profound injustice.

And at first glance, nonviolent political action seems to go hand in hand with a moderate approach to politics, which I take to be characterized by three fundamental traits: (1) ideological flexibility; (2) a commitment to normal politics—the politics of debate, negotiation, and compromise (and the kinds of liberal democratic institutions

that foster such politics); and (3) a preference for the practical rather than the perfect.4

Recognizing their own fallibility and the irreducible contingency of political life, nonviolent political moderates avoid irreversible or final (e.g. violent) acts. And while direct action sometimes requires acting outside normal political channels, nonviolence differs in degree rather than kind from the politics of debate, negotiation, and compromise; it is not physically forceful. Most importantly, the decision to reject forceful forms of resistance reveals the nonviolent moderate’s preference for the practical rather than the perfect; better to seek incremental change than pursuing a cure that may be worse than the disease. It is also worth noting that, on this view, nonviolent political action is understood to be less demanding than uncivil or forceful forms of resistance— one need not be fully and completely committed to the cause to participate.5

Perhaps this helps explain why Mohandas Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and

Václav Havel, three of the most prominent defenders of nonviolent political action, are often linked—implicitly or explicitly—with the moderate political tradition. They are read as flexible political actors who, because of their awareness of the tensions and tradeoffs of politics, refuse to give up on normal politics as they contest profound

4 This definition of political moderation is inspired by Craiutu’s recent book on the topic (2017, 13-33). Others have defended accounts of political moderation on similar grounds. See, for instance, Grant (2008), Oakeshott (1996), and Rosenblum (2010). Importantly, Grant does not necessarily give priority to the moderate approach to political action. And she points out that there are many types of moderates—and some are morally admirable while others are not (2008). 5 Chenoweth and Stephan argue that this is one of the key reasons why nonviolent resistance is more effective than violent resistance (2011). 6

injustices. Moreover, although certainly not lacking in courage, they pursue practical solutions to political problems. While revolutionary violence may have some appeal to those that bear the brunt of injustice, Gandhi, King, and Havel appreciate that it would likely do more harm than good. Better to work with what one has than to risk anarchy and the counter-revolutionary backlash that inevitably follows the use of force.

This is not to say that scholars treat these three practitioners of nonviolent political action as being exactly alike. Because moderation is characterized by a general approach to politics rather than a fixed set of ideological principles, political moderates come in various shapes and sizes.6 Gandhi, for instance, has been described as what I call a realist moderate: he embraces nonviolence because he recognizes that politics is about power and interests rather than reason and morality, to use Ian Shapiro’s concise formulation (1999). Nonviolent resistance, then, is the tool Gandhi develops to contest colonialism without causing complete chaos (Mantena 2012a; Sharp 1979). Whereas forceful forms of resistance causes irreversible damage, nonviolent political action is less permanent. And although Gandhi thinks English-rule is “Satanic,” he is flexible enough to find a practical solution to the problem of British colonialism.

King, of course, operated in a different context. While deeply flawed, his political community provided some space for normal politics. As such, King had recourse to mechanisms for political change that Gandhi did not. Unsurprisingly, scholars have

6 Craiutu, for instance, claims six thinkers with very different views for the moderate camp (2017). 7

interpreted King’s embrace of nonviolent political action to be a product of his commitment to the politics of debate, negotiation, and compromise that liberal democratic institutions make possible (e.g. Habermas 1985; Rawls 2009). More specifically, King is treated as what I call a communicative moderate: civil disobedience is his way of alerting the democratic majority to the gap between its professed ideals and existing realities. Nonviolent political action, on this account, is a form of moral suasion.

As such, King is hailed for retaining his faith in liberal democratic institutions at a time when many believed that more forceful measures were needed to dismantle white supremacy. The ultimate success of the Freedom Movement he helped lead is attributed to King’s double vision: he kept his eyes on both the possible and the ultimate prize.

Havel is often overlooked by democratic theorists. But scholars who discuss him tend to treat him as a moral exemplar, a figure who appreciated the innate worth of the individual (e.g. Elshtain 1995; Pontuso 2004). In a certain sense, Havel seems to be remembered for ushering in the inevitable: the expansion of liberal democracy

(Fukuyama 2006). “Dissent,” Havel’s peculiar but apparently powerful form of nonviolent protest, supplied the straw that (eventually) broke the camel’s back. Havel did not need to rely on more extreme measures because he had History on his side.

Havel might be called a progressive moderate: he refused more forceful forms of resistance

because he recognized that nonviolent political action supplied the spark needed to jumpstart the wheels of progress.7

These are not air-tight categories, of course.8 But I think they capture the various ways that scholars have connected Gandhi, King, and Havel’s embrace of nonviolent political action with political moderation.9 In sum, Gandhi, King, and Havel are lauded for walking the tightrope—for finding a path between resignation to an unjust status quo and forceful forms of resistance. They remained faithful to the moderate course in times of tremendous trial. Taken together, their nonviolent approach to politics evinces their flexibility, commitment to normal politics—the politics of debate, negotiation, and compromise (and the institutions that facilitate such politics)—and preference for the possible rather than the perfect. Moreover, the story goes, their efforts ultimately paid off. As a result, the expulsion of the British, the passage of the American Civil Rights

Act, and the collapse of the Soviet Union, respectively, appear as credits on the political moderate’s balance sheet. It is also worth noting that the political moderate’s nonviolent victory is double one: a win for political moderation is a loss for their adversaries—the zealots continually clamoring for more extreme forms of politics.

7 Craiutu might call Havel a “trimmer” (2017, 4). “Trimmers,” Craiutu writes, “[are those] who seek to adjust the cargo and trim the sails of the ship of the state in order to keep in on an even keel. Although their adjustments may be small an unheroic at times, they are often enough to save the state from ruin” (2017, 4). 8 As I discuss in more detail below, some scholars have begun to read both Gandhi and King as realists. And there has been important work challenging the teleological reading of the 1989 revolutions (e.g. Isaac 1995). 9 Craiutu explicitly makes the connection (2017, 23-25). Most writing about Gandhi, King, and Havel do not. 9

I argue that the moderate interpretations of Gandhi, King, and Havel suffer from a series of fundamental shortcomings. First, it is difficult to reconcile Gandhi the moderate realist with the Gandhi quoted earlier: “We should remain non-violent, unmindful of whether we succeed or fail in our undertaking” (CWMG vol. 28, 186). The same challenge arises with attempts to understand King as a communicative moderate.

Recall the conclusion of his Frogmore speech: “So I say to you in closing tonight, that I have taken a vow. I, Martin Luther King, take thee, non-violence, to be my wedded wife, for better or worse, (this isn’t a ‘bargaining’ experience,), for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part” (n.d.a., 12). And Havel’s explicit endorsement of an all-or-nothing approach to politics is hard to square with any kind of political moderation: “As I stated previously, [living within the truth] is an all-or-nothing gamble, and it is difficult to imagine a reasonable person embarking on such a course merely because he reckons that sacrifice today will bring rewards tomorrow” (1992, 153; emphasis added). Each seems to offer a much more rigid defense of nonviolence than one would expect from a flexible political moderate. In a certain sense, for these three figures, nonviolence appears to be dogma—perhaps the antithesis of political moderation.

Moreover, Gandhi, King, and Havel were not as committed to normal politics— the politics of debate, compromise, and negotiation and the kinds of institutions that make such politics possible—as it might seem. Each was subject to relentless criticism

for their highly disruptive and quite novel forms of political action, even or especially by those broadly supportive of their efforts. Gandhi attempted to drive what was then the most powerful army in the world out of India, the crown jewel of the British Empire, with “Truth-force” or “soul-force.” King thought love was the only thing that might move white supremacists’ hardened hearts—and the “freedom church” that embodied it consisted largely of unarmed women and children dressed in their Sunday best. Havel called for the creation of a parallel polis grounded in anti-political politics.

And, although often read as pursuing the practical rather than the perfect, a closer look at their circumstances only makes matter worse for those who understand

Gandhi, King, and Havel’s embrace of nonviolence as evidence that they belong to the moderate political tradition. In brief, each attempted the impossible. The British,

American, and Soviet regimes demonstrated that they were more than willing to crush those who challenged the existing order. Few imagined India without the English, the

American South without Jim Crow, or Czechoslovakia without the Soviets. And even fewer could imagine Indian peasants, African Americans, or ordinary Czechs effectively challenging decades or even centuries of domination without resorting to arms until they actually did so. It is only after Indian Independence, American Civil Rights legislation, and the fall of the Soviet Union that some began to treat Gandhi, King, and

Havel’s nonviolent approach as a prudent means to some end (e.g. Sabl 2001; Sharp

1973). Not only does this revisionist history diminish the gravity of the injustices

Gandhi, King, and Havel encountered, it also seems question begging; because nonviolence is understood as the practical alternative to forceful forms of resistance, scholars assume that Gandhi, King, and Havel chose nonviolence for broadly consequentialist reasons. As noted above, each describes their commitment to nonviolent political action in decidedly different terms.

Finally, Gandhi, King, and Havel knew that challenging the existing regime would come with significant costs, to put it mildly. They not only embraced such risks, they viewed personal sacrifice as an inevitable and even essential part of nonviolent political action. All three, for instance, accepted the substantial prison sentences handed to them by profoundly unjust regimes. Gandhi and King called on others to do the same.

Gandhi and King even expected to be killed in their freedom struggles, and both eventually were. To state the obvious, laying down one’s life for the cause is not part of the moderate’s repertoire. If contesting profound injustice entails a lengthy prison stay or even death, moderates would choose not to participate. This is especially true when prison or death is unlikely to have any lasting impact.

Taken together, then, the moderate reading of Gandhi, King, and Havel is deeply flawed. This is due in part, I think, to the fact that democratic theorists seem to assume that the primary choice that figures like Gandhi, King, and Havel face is whether to employ nonviolence or violence in their struggles against profound injustice. Because each chose the former, they are grouped with political moderates. As I discuss in more

detail below, however, Gandhi, King, and Havel “chose” nonviolence not because it is less radical than forceful resistance, but because it is more so. But more importantly, there is a third option that democratic theorists have neglected: staying home. Given the hopelessness of Gandhi, King, and Havel’s circumstances, I contend that foregoing any sort of political action was the politically moderate option. Flexible, committed to normal politics, and focused on the possible rather than the perfect, it is hard to imagine a political moderate endangering her life contesting profound injustices—and calling on others to do the same—when she does not and could not expect any tangible gain from doing so. To reiterate: if Gandhi, King, and Havel were political moderates, they would have stayed home.10

1.2 The Politics of the Impossible

All this leaves democratic theorists with a series of questions: Why did figures like Gandhi, King, and Havel risk prison or even death while nonviolently challenging profound injustices? And if they are not political moderates, why did they refuse to embrace the “uncivil” or forceful forms resistance that some democratic theorists now endorse (e.g. Delmas 2018; Pasternak 2018)? Why not reciprocate when supporters of

10 Maybe they failed to appreciate the fervor of their oppressors or maybe they misjudged how deeply entrenched injustice was in their political communities? No—like other prominent dissidents, Gandhi, King, and Havel knew what they were up against. Most who challenge the existing order are too familiar with the widespread abuse of state power to believe that a little extra-institutional effort can establish a more or less just basic structure. And Gandhi, King, and Havel witnessed too much cruelty to be optimistic about future cooperation, much less believe in the inevitability of progress. 13

unjust regimes harm those who challenge it, especially when doing so would seem to stop a killer from killing?

These are the first set of questions this dissertation proposes to answer. To do so,

I examine the essays, letters, and speeches of Gandhi, King, and Havel. I argue Gandhi,

King, and Havel are better described as (relational) zealots than political moderates.11

Drawing on Joel Olson’s work, I understand zealots as political actors who are ardently devoted to their cause, willing to sacrifice everything for the promise of nothing, and exceed the bounds of normal politics in the process (2007).12 If flexibility, normal politics, and a preference for the practical are hallmarks of political moderation, devotion, sacrifice, and excess characterizes the life of zealots (or fanatics).13 Indeed, a key difference between political moderates and zealots is that the latter do not separate their lives into separate spheres.

For Gandhi, King, and Havel nonviolence is a way of life rather than a tactic, a mode of reason-giving, or a lever to propel history forward.

This is not to say that political moderation and nonviolent political action do not sometimes go together. Many who engage in nonviolent political action are assuredly political moderates—some are realists, others are communicative, and still others are

11 Many of Gandhi, King, and Havel’s contemporaries—both adversaries and admirers—reached similar conclusions. George Orwell called Gandhi an “anti-humanist” and a “reactionary” (1949); the Birmingham clergy branded King an “extremist” (1986, 298); and Havel was described as a “maniac” (1992, 359). Some contemporary commentators have noted as much, too. See, for instance, Grant (2008, 97n80). 12 Olson insists that zealots are partial to Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction. As I discuss in more detail below, Gandhi, King, and Havel each reject Schmitt’s framework. 13 I use the term “zealot” instead of “fanatic” or “extremist” mainly for the sake of consistency. But the term zealot also captures the religiosity of Gandhi and King in a way that “fanatic” or “extremist,” other terms often used to describe those whom I call zealots, does not (e.g. Olson 2007; Toscano 2017). 14

progressives. But the first key argument defended here is that Gandhi, King, and Havel are not among them. They are zealots; they engage in a kind of risky or even reckless nonviolent political action in circumstances of profound injustice regardless of cost or consequence, a kind of politics that the no moderate partakes in. As a result, Gandhi,

King, and Havel also seem to validate for Olson’s most interesting and theoretically significant insight: zealotry can make politics less unjust, at least temporarily. The conditional nature of this claim is worth highlighting; clearly not all zealots have the same effect as Gandhi, King, and Havel. As Alberto Toscano notes, Nazis were not only fanatics, they explicitly embraced the term (2010, xxvn34). These observations raise the second set of questions that this dissertation proposes to answer: is there a way to systematically distinguish between zealots that seem to mitigate injustices, like Gandhi,

King, and Havel, and zealots that introduce, entrench, or exacerbate injustice? And, if so, is there room for the former in pluralistic political communities?

The most intuitive response merits immediate consideration: in short, isn’t zealotry simply too dangerous to be included in pluralistic political communities?

Indeed, the zealots that Olson and Toscano—the two leading contemporary theorists of zealotry—describe either seem to precipitate or explicitly endorse extra-judicial political violence.14 And while such forceful forms of resistance may be necessary, at times, few

14 See, for instance, Olson’s essay on the abolitionist John Brown and the anti-abortion activist Paul Hill (2011). Toscano also associates zealotry and revolutionary violence (2017, xvi-xvii). In an otherwise 15

would posit that it has a place in pluralistic political communities. It must remain the exception to the rule. This seems to be the conclusion democratic theorists have drawn.15

Variously denounced as unreasonable, intolerant, dogmatic, and terroristic, Olson catalogues the decorated line of political philosophers, from Plato to Kant to Rawls, who have portrayed zealotry as an obstacle to establishing a better political order or a pathology that threatens the health of a more or less just body politic (2007, 687-688).16

For these thinkers, zealotry is a hindrance, at best. At worst, it is a debilitating disease.

And as the case of Nazism demonstrates, such fears are not unfounded.

Tempting as it may be, however, Michael Walzer succinctly captures the shortcomings of a blanket prohibition on zealotry. “To replace heat with light,” he writes, “…might be a good thing if it were possible to do it. But it is not possible. To understand why, we have only to think about the realities of political life…the passionate intensity of the terrorists and murderers is, at least sometimes, matched by their most heroic and effective opponents” (2002, 622). Walzer’s insight is apt. He rightfully points out that passionate intensity—a more general way to describe zealotry,

wonderful etymology of the term “zealotry,” for example, Toscano uncritically equates (self-) sacrifice with “unchecked violence” (2017, xvii). 15 That said, even some of the most strident defenders of political moderation recognize that politics life requires both zealots and moderates (e.g. Craiutu 2017, 22). As I discuss in more detail below, however, the claim here is that there are different types of zealots—and that paying closer attention to the various strains of zealotry reveals important distinctions between them. Most theorists of moderation lump all zealots together. 16 Also see Toscano (2017). 16

as I understand it—is a fact of real-world politics. Moreover, Walzer notes that it can counteract evil, not only produce it.17 Unfortunately, however, Walzer does not say much more about the terrorist and murderer’s zealous opponents—figures like Gandhi,

King, and Havel—other than gesturing towards the Freedom Movement and the Velvet

Revolution (2002, 624).18 As a result, Walzer does not help us with the second set of questions—distinguishing between zealots and making space for some but not others— this dissertation proposes to answer.

How to proceed? How to adjudicate the claims of zealots? And given the intransigence of injustice as well as the continued presence of terrorists and murders, what part, if any, can some zealots play in pluralistic political communities? There is a seemingly obvious answer, of course: nonviolence. Nonviolent zealots are legitimate and whereas zealots who employ some form of physical force are not. As I discuss in much greater detail in the last chapter, this response is too quick and ultimately unsatisfying. On the one hand, nonviolence and violence are both essentially contested concepts (Butler 2020). On the other hand, and perhaps more importantly, Candice

Delmas has shown that there are times that “uncivil” or forceful forms of resistance— acts that are “covert, evasive, anonymous, violent, or deliberately offensive”—can be

17 Walzer is by no means the first scholar to make this point. Also see Canovan (1999) and Grant (2008), among others. 18 Indeed, Walzer seems to be more concerned with critiquing hyper-rationalistic accounts of politics than examining, much less systematically defending, zealous figures or groups. 17

justified in real-world political communities, formally democratic or not (2018, 17).19

Indeed, Delmas has persuasively argued that such resistance may be a duty of liberal democratic citizens (2018, 47-71). Even there was some agreement about what kind of excessive political action counts as violent, then, uncivil or forceful forms of resistance cannot be categorically prohibited.20

Others have proposed different standards to evaluate zealots. Olson argues that

“democracy” can help scholars distinguish between zealous political actors (2007). Yet it is not clear what he means by democracy nor is it clear what such a standard would mean for zealots with a complicated relationship to democracy, like Gandhi and Havel.

For Toscano, universal egalitarianism adjudicates the claims of fanatical groups, the term Toscano prefers to zealotry (2017). While more precise than Olson, Toscano seems more concerned with recovering Marxian radicalism than theorizing zealotry writ large.

As a result, his framework is less helpful for those working outside the liberal/Marxist binary, like Gandhi, King, and Havel. Theorists like John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas have long posited that public reason does the work that Olson and Toscano want

19 Delmas writes: “There is a place for uncivil disobedience in liberal democratic societies when the following conditions apply: the public is assured of the state’s commitment to respecting everyone’s full and equal status, a commitment typically embedded in a constitution or other basic law that guides institutional design and lawmaking; some citizens are effectively (de facto but not de jure) denied full and equal status; and the injustice of this denial is not publicly recognized, perhaps because that injustice is not deliberate but results from the interplay of social practices and institutional structures, as in cases of structural injustice” (2018, 63-64). Also see Pasternak (2018) for a similar argument. 20 I use the terms uncivil and forceful interchangeably throughout. I am less concerned with providing a precise definition of these terms, assuming that were possible, because each of the three figures I examine reject the kinds of political actions that typically qualify as forceful or uncivil (e.g. guerilla theater, antifacist tactics, riots, leaks, vigilantism, defensive violence, etc.). The list of examples comes from Delmas (2018, 17). 18

democracy and universalism, respectively, to do (Habermas 2008; Rawls 2009). The problem with public reason, however, is that Gandhi and King’s nonviolent political action is publicly unjustifiable; Gandhi and King’s claims are not universally accessible and cannot be translated into universally accessible terms. Finally, while I am broadly sympathetic to their general framework, liberal pluralists like Jacob Levy have little to say about political action that exceeds the bounds of normal politics—a hallmark of the kind of zealous politics I am interested in here (2017).

This brings us to the second major argument defended in this dissertation: my reading of Gandhi, King, and Havel suggests that ontology—here I am principally concerned with claims about the nature of human being—can help democratic theorists answer critically important questions about zealotry, injustice, and pluralistic political communities. I contend that ontology functions as a kind of skeleton key; it enables democratic theorists to parse the claims of zealous figures which, in turn, provides a way for democratic theorists to make space for some but not all forms of zealotry in pluralistic political communities. And considering ontology also helps democratic theorists grapple with related political phenomena, namely the return of religion and the rise of “populism.” To explain why, a bit more needs to be said about the strain of zealotry Gandhi, King, and Havel endorse.

1.3 Relationality and a Different Kind of Politics

I read Gandhi, King, and Havel’s zealous political action as being powered by a distinctive and uncompromising commitment to what feminist and womanist theorists have called “relationality” (e.g. Butler 2005; hooks 2018; Maldonado-Torres 2007; Wynter

2003). Relationality, as I use the term here, captures the idea that to be human is to be constituted by the needs of the concrete and particular other.21 Relationality blurs the distinction between identity and ethics/politics. Regarding identity, Gandhi, King, and

Havel each think that each “individual” is always already entangled with every other.

Before one is an “I,” in other words, there is a concrete and particular “other” (or “you”).

Regarding ethics/politics, one committed to relationality is always already responding to the concrete and particulate other’s needs. This is simply the fact of existence.22

Consequently, one does not conceive of one’s “personal” well-being, much less one’s plan of life, apart from the needs of every concrete and particular other one encounters.

21 This may sound familiar to readers of French philosopher and Jewish theologian Emmanuel Levinas (1969). As I discuss in more detail in the fourth chapter, after Havel read one of Levinas’ essays in prison he remarked that “[Levinas’] idea that…responsibility establishes an asymmetrical ethical situation, and that it cannot preached, but merely borne, corresponds exactly to my experience and my opinion” (1990, 305). Later, Havel elaborates, “We have an identity because we are responsible, wherein we find ourselves in a state of responsibility before having decided it, before we could choose to be responsible at all” (1990, 312). This is not to say that Havel is a follower of Levinas. He was not. Rather, I make the comparison to show that like Levinas, Havel was trying to think the human beyond Western conceptions of the self. 22 None of the three offers rational or naturalistic justifications for their views. Gandhi and King, of course, both drew on local faith traditions when articulating their ideas; Gandhi uses the Advaita tradition in Hinduism to explain relationality whereas King claims that “God structured reality” in a relational way. Although Havel eschewed formal religion, he does not offer any reasons for his existential sense of responsibility. 20

In fact, one can do no such thing; the concrete and particular other’s needs prefigure one’s own.23

Importantly, this does not make Gandhi, King, and Havel universalists or cosmopolitans. As I describe in more detail below, each resists such philosophical generalizations. And I argue that this is due to the fact that they believe such abstractions inevitably lead to ontological distinctions like, for instance, liberal

(ontological) distinctions self and world and communitarian (ontological) distinctions between insiders and outsiders. Gandhi, King, and Havel also reject collectivist abstractions that subsume the concrete and particular other’s needs under the banner of the greater good.

This means their cause is not an abstract one. Thrown into relationality, they are ardently devoted to the needs of the concrete and particular other.24 By ardent, I mean to capture the uncompromising and all-encompassing nature of this devotion. Gandhi is especially instructive on this point. Referring to his ongoing effort to meet the needs of the concrete and particular other as “social service,” Gandhi writes: “There is no escape

23 It is worth noting briefly that Gandhi, King, and Havel’s conceptions of what it means to be human stand in stark contrast with understandings of the human that one typically finds in Western political philosophy. Whereas liberal or communitarian subjects are “selves” in some sense—they are either self-governing individuals or members of a group—Gandhi, King, and Havel think to be human is to be thrown into relationality. To reiterate, for those thrown into relationality, the “I” is constituted by the concrete and particular other’s needs. “I” cannot think about myself, indeed “I” do not even exist, apart from those needs. 24 In a certain, Gandhi, King, and Havel each endorse a position that resembles what has been described as a “second-person” approach to both ethics and politics (e.g. Critchley 2013; Darwall 2009; Habermas 2015). Gandhi and King are not concerned with autonomy, however. They are strictly committed to the needs of the concrete and particular other. Havel is a bit more complicated. 21

from social service; there is no happiness on earth beyond or apart from it. Social service here must be taken to include every department of life. In this scheme there is nothing low, nothing high. For all is one, though we seem to be many” (CWMG vol. 66, 112). King and Havel make similar claims.

Given their ardent devotion to the needs of the concrete and particular other,

Gandhi, King, and Havel cannot remain on the sidelines when someone is harmed. They must respond, even (or especially) when doing so is likely to be costly. They are willing to sacrifice—to suffer—in order to meet the concrete and particular other’s needs. This point is critical. It marks a significant difference between Gandhi, King, and Havel and the separate subjects more familiar to democratic theorists: if necessary, Gandhi, King, and Havel are “dangerously unselfish,” to use King’s words. King’s sermon on the parable of Good Samaritan illustrates.25

In a conversation with religious authorities, Jesus tells the story of a man lying injured in a ditch along a dark road known to be patrolled by robbers and thieves.

Several people pass by the man. King offers several reasons why they do not stop.

Perhaps, he suggests, they are afraid that they will get hurt trying to help. King concedes that such concerns are eminently reasonable. The robbers and thieves may not have left

25 He draws on the Good Samaritan in many different sermons. In what follows, I rely mainly on the unpublished text of the sermon titled “Who is My Neighbor?” he preached at his home church, Ebenezer Baptist, less than two months before he was assassinated (n.d.b.). As I discuss in more detail in the third chapter, King’s later sermons and speeches take a markedly different tone than his earlier work, including “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” and his “I Have a Dream” speech. 22

the scene—they could be waiting for their next victim. As a result, the travelers keep going. I call these individuals liberal subjects; they continue on their way because they are prudent. And, according to liberal principle, they cannot be condemned for doing so.

These travelers did not harm the man in the ditch. Although they might be praised for helping, they cannot be blamed for his plight nor are they obliged to risk their personal safety to assist another.

By contrast, King suggests that those who take collective well-being into account,

I call these collective subjects, may be more willing to put themselves in harm’s way than liberals. They may sacrifice themselves (or others) in the name of the greater good. But they only do so if it advances their own emancipatory project. Because it is hard to see how helping a single man in a ditch furthers their cause, they, too, pass the man by.26

Finally, communitarian subjects do not assist the injured man because, in King’s telling, it turns out that the man is not one of their own kind (King 1986, 286). Communitarian subjects take care of their own, even at great personal cost. But they are not required to do the same for outsiders, like the man in the ditch.

The Samaritan, in stark contrast, stops. King explains: “Finally, a man of another race came by. (Yes sir) He got down from his beast, decided not to be compassionate by proxy. But he got down with him, administered first aid, and helped the man in need.

26 “Maybe,” King preached, “they were going down to Jerusalem, or down to Jericho, rather, to organize a Jericho Road Improvement Association. (Laughter). That’s a possibility. Maybe they felt it was better to deal with the problem from the causal root, rather than to get bogged down with an individual effect” (1986, 284). 23

Jesus ended up saying this was the good man, this was the great man because he had the capacity to project the ‘I’ into the ‘thou,’ and to be concerned about his brother” (1986,

284).27 King calls the Samaritan a “neighbor.” I suggest that the neighbor is relational zealot. He understands himself to be entangled with every other he encounters. As a result, he cannot distance himself from needs of the man in the ditch. And this is true despite the fact that Samaritan might be harmed when helping him, despite the fact that assisting the man in the ditch does not advance an abstract cause, and despite the fact that the man in the ditch is not of the Samaritan’s “own kind.”28 Ardently devoted to man in the ditch, the Samaritan engages in risky or even reckless action—he is willing to sacrifice his “own” well-being—as he attempts to meet the man’s needs. Gandhi’s atman and Havel’s “dissident” are also willing to sacrifice on behalf of the concrete and particular other.

More than engage in ephemeral albeit courageous acts of charity, King’s neighbors, Gandhi’s atman, and Havel’s “dissident” also contest the structural sources of harm. Indeed, relational zealots exceed the bounds of normal politics as they attempt to respond to the concrete and particular other’s needs. More specifically, they are drawn into excessive political action. I use the modifier excessive as a sort of catch-all term to describe the kinds of politics that have little to do with the politics of debate, negotiation,

27 King is referring to Martin Buber’s famous essay of the same name, here. See Buber (2010). King quoted Buber frequently. 28 Implicit in King’s telling of the story is a rejection of what might be called the friend/enemy justification for inaction. King notes that the Samaritan was of a different race than the man in the ditch (n.d.b.). 24

and compromise or the liberal democratic institutions that foster them. Excessive politics can be but are not necessarily extra-institutional. They can be but are not necessarily illegal. They can be but are not necessarily highly disruptive. Some examples of what I call excessive politics include mass civil disobedience, boycotts, sit-ins, hunger strikes, direct action, or the creation of entirely new institutional forms, like ashrams, freedom churches, or alternative schools, theaters, and unions.29 So committed is Havel to mitigating injustice, for instance, that he aims to create a parallel polis, “an area,” he writes, “where a different life can be lived, a life that is in harmony with its own aims and which in turn structures itself in harmony with those aims” (1992, 194). For Havel, excessive politics are part and parcel of the life of the “dissident.” Again, Gandhi and

King make similar claims.

Although unafraid of exceeding the bounds of normal politics, Gandhi, King, and Havel insist that relational zealots are uninterested in uncivil or forceful forms of resistance, even when they (or those to whom they are inextricably linked) are unjustly subject to acts of state or state-sanctioned harm. But this is not because they are concerned with sustaining or returning to normal politics nor with the practical rather than the perfect. Instead, it is a function their uncompromising commitment to relationality; relational zealots refuse to reciprocate when harmed because they believe they are ethically related to or even constituted by the needs of the concrete and

29 See Sharp (1973) for an exhaustive list of the more disruptive versions of such actions. 25

particular enemy, too. As a result, they do not intentionally harm the other who harms them.30

All this means that Gandhi, King, and Havel do not endorse nonviolent political action because they are hoping to strike a middle path between apparent resignation and revolution. It should be noted that such a view presumes that nonviolent political action is less disruptive than physical force. It also presumes the relational zealot is willing to drop a nonviolent approach should circumstances change. Gandhi, King, and

Havel reject both assumptions. For them, forceful forms of resistance are not too extreme.

To the contrary, they are not extreme enough. Violence is the means that separate subjects use to destroy things they fear, hate, or cannot control. Because it destroys the other who prefigures one’s very existence, Gandhi, King, and Havel believe the use of force is self-defeating. Yet their disavowal of violent tactics does not render them any less zealous than those traditionally associated with zealotry. In a certain sense, Gandhi,

King, and Havel seem more zealous than their uncivil counterparts. As Gandhi points out, it takes more courage to confront an enemy without a gun than it does with one (CWMG vol. 17, 131).

30 That said, none of the three are pacifists. All three allow for violence in certain circumstances, especially in cases of self-defense. But as Judith Butler has pointed out in an excellent contribution to the ethics and politics of nonviolence, those who defend violence in the name of self-defense often fail to define who counts as a “self” (2020). More generally, relationality is not incompatible with violence. One could argue that the concrete and particular other needs to be killed. Indeed, Gandhi said as much regarding euthanasia. On the relational approach articulated here, however, a defense of violence must take into account the needs of the concrete and particular other that one determines to harm or kill. 26

None of this is to say that Gandhi, King, and Havel’s theories of what I call relational zealotry are the same. Each draws on a local narrative (Hinduism, Black

Protestantism, and Czech philosophy) to elaborate their respective claims about nonviolent political action.31 That said, insofar as all three are trying to find a way beyond the liberal/Marxist binary, it is not surprising that their theories of identity and ethics/politics bear a family resemblance to one another.

I can now preview the second major argument advanced in this dissertation.

Given the intransigence of injustice in real-world political communities and the continued presence of political actors that introduce, entrench, or exacerbate injustice, I contend that there should be space for figures like Gandhi, King, and Havel in pluralistic political communities. I think part of the reason Gandhi, King, and Havel are read as political moderates is that doing so seems to render their political action legitimate. Even the most restrictive theories of political legitimacy allow for flexible political actors who,

31 Very briefly, Havel ultimately seems to embrace a version of humanism while Gandhi and King do not. For the latter two, political action is a response to a “religious” call; the social servant and neighbor are propelled into the action by Truth or God, respectively. Gandhi might think Truth is just another name for King’s God. King would disagree. Although King had great respect for Gandhi’s religious commitments, he remained a theologian of the cross; he believed politics would be impossible without Christ’s defeat of death. Moreover, all three have different views about the role of formal political institutions. While each tends to view them as negative goods, King often seems more sanguine than Gandhi or Havel about their potential for promoting justice. And King and Havel often distinguish between human and non-human kinds of life whereas Gandhi does not. Finally, all three have a somewhat tragic view of politics. But Havel seems to suggest that there will be a day when “dissent” will be the norm rather than the exception. 27

committed to practical solutions to real-world problems, stick to the politics of debate, negotiation and compromise as they contest injustice.32

But if Gandhi, King, and Havel are zealots, matters become more complicated.

Not all zealots mitigate injustice, of course. How can Gandhi, King, and Havel be brought into the fold while guarding against zealotry’s deadlier strains? As alluded to above, I contend that doing so requires giving careful consideration to what Sylvia

Wynter has called the “politics of being,” the often hidden but continual struggle over

“the descriptive statement of the human” (2003, 318).33 In short, Wynter shows that ontology matters; one’s conception of the human shapes what one does. I introduce a negative standard of ontological exceptionalism to highlight critically important but frequently overlooked claims about what it means to be human. More specifically, I argue that zealots who are committed to some form of ontological exceptionalism— those who draw (explicitly or not) hard and fast distinctions between self and world, saved and damned, friends and enemies, or the collective and the individual—threaten to undermine pluralistic politics. In brief, they are willing to sacrifice all those they perceive to have lesser (ontological) status as they ardently pursue their cause beyond the bounds of normal politics. As I discuss in greater detail in the last chapter, such zealots tend to leave many bodies in their wake (Sharpe 2018). Yet relational zealots who

32 Like the most demanding accounts of public reason, for instance. 33 Also see Bagg (2018), Meehan (2017), Nichols (2014), Rosenthal (2019), and White (2000) for discussions of ontology in political theory. 28

do not draw such ontological distinctions, like Gandhi, King, and Havel, may mitigate rather than introduce, entrench, or exacerbate injustice. Because they are ardently devoted to meeting the needs of the concrete and particular other, they are only willing to sacrifice themselves—not others—as they engage in excessive political action.

To be clear, I am not claiming that Gandhi, King, and Havel offer a new model of political action. I do not think democratic theorists should be in the business of arguing that those subject to state or state-sponsored violence when challenging a profound injustice should refuse to respond in kind. But given the intransigence of injustice and the continued presence of zealots who introduce, entrench, or exacerbate such injustices, the negative standard of ontological exceptionalism introduced here intends to create space for the murderers and terrorists’ zealous opponents—figures like Gandhi, King, and Havel—in pluralistic political communities.

There are also other benefits to adopting a negative standard of ontological exceptionalism. First, a turn to ontology sheds new light on longstanding debates about the role of religions as well as religious zealots in such communities. After groundbreaking work questioning both the analytical and causal thrust of the secularization thesis, scholars in several disciplines have begun rethinking the concept of

“religion” (Asad 1993, 2003; Casanova 1994, 2011; Mahmood 2011, 2015; Taylor 2007,

2011). Gandhi and King show that not all untranslatable and publicly disruptive religions are normatively problematic. A negative standard of ontological

exceptionalism helps explain why: ontologically exceptional religions should concern democratic theorists. Others need not.

And second, the negative standard helps democratic theorists make sense of and respond to one of the most pressing problems in contemporary politics: the rise of so- called “populism” (e.g. Mudde 2017; Müller 2016). A standard of ontological exceptionalism shows that populists’ invocation of sovereignty, an ontologically exceptional concept, is what threatens pluralistic politics.34 Put otherwise, many populists are problematic because their beliefs are predicated on the idea that “the people” is ontologically exceptional.

1.4 A Pundit, a Preacher, and a Playwright

Why these three figures, the reader might wonder? Gandhi, King, and Havel, of course, are not the most obvious choices for a project on zealotry. There are two answers, one anecdotal and the other more theoretical. Regarding the former, this project was originally conceived in the aftermath of Michael Brown’s death on August 9,

2014 in Ferguson, Missouri. Having spent the previous years teaching at the secondary level in an adjacent school district, the responses to the demonstrations, marches, and rallies that followed Brown’s death raised several questions. Among them was the

34 This is not to say that only explicitly racist or explicitly xenophobic nationalist groups are underpinned by a claim to ontological exceptionalism. Christian traditions, for instance, that embrace supersession theology—the idea that the New Testament Christians replaced or transcended the Jewish people of the Hebrew Scriptures—are committed to some form of ontological exceptionalism. This is not a marginal view. It includes most of white Christianity (Carter 2008). 30

following: why did most commentators seem to think that demonstrators ought to remain “civil” or nonviolent in a political community saturated by state and state- sponsored violence?35 Besides blatant hypocrisy, what ideas, principles, or beliefs sustain the view that those harmed by state and state-sponsored violence should not reciprocate or, at the very least, defend themselves?

As I perused the scholarly literature in search of answers, Gandhi and King’s names kept coming up. Almost every democratic theorist interested in nonviolence discusses them in some detail. As noted above, both are largely misunderstood; Gandhi and King endorse nonviolent political action not because they think violent resistance is too radical but because it is not radical enough. Hence their inclusion in this project. At the same time, I began reading the works of others who had written about nonviolent political action in the circumstances of injustice, Havel’s “Power of the Powerless” among them. Although Havel speaks a different language than Gandhi or King, Havel’s call for small-scale work appeared to echo Gandhi’s conception of social service and

King’s claims about neighborliness. Havel also discusses identity at length in his prison letters. I include him in this study to show that there are many ways to think about relational zealotry, including others I do not mention here.36

35 See, for instance, the Department of Justice’s report on the Ferguson Police (Shaw and United States Civil Rights Department 2015). Little has changed in subsequent years (Friedersdorf 2018). 36 And whom I hope to discuss in future work, like French philosopher Simone Weil, Civil Rights leader Septima Clark, and novelist and essayist Toni Morrison. 31

More theoretically, I eventually recognized that scholars have linked Gandhi,

King, and Havel’s respective commitments to nonviolent political action with political moderation. As noted above, Gandhian nonviolence is associated with realism. For

King, nonviolence is associated with a commitment to the politics of debate, negotiation, and compromise. And with Havel, nonviolence is associated with teleology. Each of these misunderstandings is instructive. On the one hand, they show the ways that existing scholarly paradigms can warp the claims of real-world political actors less uninterested in ongoing debates in democratic theory. On the other hand, the more I read about these three figures, the clearer it became that their theories of nonviolence raised important albeit overlooked issues about the relationship between moderation and injustice.

Many seem to recognize that, in certain circumstances, some sort of zealous politics may be needed to mitigate profound injustices (e.g. Craiutu 2017; Walzer 2002;

Wolin 1994). The actions of abolitionist John Brown, for instance, may be acknowledged as necessary—even if extra-judicial violence is illegitimate (e.g. Olson 2011). One way to defend zealotry, then, is to show that zealots traditionally deemed beyond the pale of normal politics played critically important parts in mitigating injustice. This might be called the “dirty hands” defense of zealotry; such efforts demonstrate that just ends often require unjust means.

I approach the problem of zealotry from the opposite direction. Rather than trying to expand the circle of political legitimacy to include those obviously outside it, I intend to show that it is already overly restrictive. As noted above, Gandhi, King, and

Havel are typically treated as exemplifying the best that moderate politics has to offer.

But by demonstrating that they are, in fact, zealots, I hope to establish that moderate politics are less normatively appealing than one might think.37 Put more bluntly, it is one thing if John Brown is an exception or outlier, but quite another if Martin Luther King Jr. is, too. If neither can be explained by the rule—normal politics—then the assumed relationship between political moderation and injustice may be more tenuous than many democratic theorists seem to think (e.g. Pettit 2012; Rawls 2005; Shapiro 2001; Young

2002). Hence my introduction of a negative standard of ontological exceptionalism; I aim to make space for relational zealots like Gandhi, King, and Havel in pluralistic political communities that would be much less attractive without them.

Before previewing the remainder of the dissertation, I must say a bit more about how I read Gandhi, King, and Havel. As noted above, none of them are academic political theorists. Consequently, they are uninterested in scholarly debates about justice, democracy, or political legitimacy. Moreover, each is actually doing politics—meaning they are trying to move both their supporters and critics. On the one hand, this seems to

37 There are many others to choose from, of course. I picked these three figures mainly because of their prominence. 33

give them insights that more detached observers—myself included—often miss, like the intransigence of injustice and the affective aspects of political action (Mills 2005).38 On the other hand, it means they say different things to different audiences. And their views change with circumstances. As a result, I do not pretend to get any or all of them “right.”

My aim is much more modest. I hope to express some of their key ideas in terms more familiar to scholars. This is no small task. As comparative political theorists have argued, doing so requires competence in multiple “languages” (Dallmayr 2004).

Consequently, I have spent the last few years trying to familiarize myself with

Hinduism, black Christianity, and Czech philosophy.

But there are further complications. Not only does each come from a different philosophical tradition, each articulates their ideas in the genre native to that tradition.

Gandhi is a prolific letter writer and editorialist—a political pundit in his time. Even his most systematic texts on political theory, Hind Swaraj (2009) and Autobiography: My

Experiments in Truth (1993), are written in the form of a dialogue.39 Distilling the kind of intimate conversation that constitutes much of Gandhi’s work is fraught with pitfalls. I have tried to preserve Gandhi’s dialogic method by quoting complete exchanges

38 Regarding my detachment, I am a straight, white man gainfully employed at an elite, private university. In short, I do not know what it is like to be hated or resented for reasons entirely beyond my control. As a result, I do not know how difficult it is to refuse to respond in kind. Put more bluntly, I cannot imagine remaining nonviolent in the face of horrific and arbitrary acts of violence. This is why I am not arguing that Gandhi, King, and Havel should be emulated. Rather, I merely want to show that Gandhi, King, and Havel challenge extant accounts of nonviolence. 39 Hereafter HS and AB, respectively. 34

between Gandhi and his interlocutors when possible, but space constraints render it impossible to fully reproduce his style. I acknowledge that something is inevitably lost when one tries to extract Gandhi’s political ideas from their original form.

The problems are no less significant with King and Havel. King is a preacher.

And in the American black church tradition, preaching often takes on a call-and- response form (Lischer 1997). Again, I have attempted to direct the reader’s attention to that fact by including his audience’s verbal replies to King’s spoken word. That said, anyone who has listened to recordings of King is keenly aware that transcripts, while powerful in their own right, cannot capture the affective aspect of his sermons and speeches. Finally, Havel is a playwright and an essayist. But his essays’ dramatic tone is perhaps better suited for the stage than systematic theorizing.40 As such, I focus on the narrative arc of the characters in Havel’s essays when explicating his ideas in an effort to preserve the performative dimension of his written works. I admit that this too has its limitations.

1.5 Chapter Overview

The remainder of this dissertation proceeds as follows. In the next chapter, I address the most common misunderstanding of nonviolent political action: that it is a weapon to be used in a struggle against regimes that prohibit other forms of political

40 Havel’s most famous essay, “Power of the Powerless,” begins with the character of the greengrocer, for instance. It is not a stretch to say that this fictional figure is better-known than most real-life dissidents. 35

expression. To do so, I turn to Gandhi’s theory of nonviolence. For Gandhi, nonviolent politics is part and parcel of an ardent devotion to Truth, which is God. 41 Gandhi insists religion cannot be separated from politics. “Those who say religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means,” he writes (AB, 504).

I unpack these claims by first showing that Gandhi’s relational conception of the human in grounded in his Hindu commitments. An immanent and active force rather than an unmoved mover, Truth (which is God) literally makes life possible. In a certain sense, it is life. More importantly, Gandhi believes that each individual can and should become a vessel through which Truth flows. When one does so, one literally carries the force, Truth, that sustains all life. As Parel points out, to have this experience is to catch a glimpse of the atman, the Real Self (HS, xc). Channeling Truth, in other words, enables one to recognize one’s real identity: that each living thing is connected to every other in

Truth. Realization of the atman does not leave one in a state of contemplative bliss, however. Quite the contrary; because Truth is an immanent and active force, the atman cannot but attempt to sustain the life of everything it encounters. It is propelled into the world. The atman, then, is thrown into “social service”—which I read to be a version of

41 Before 1929, Gandhi frequently described Truth as God (Skaria 2016, 175). Afterwards, he began describing God as Truth. Ajay Skaria argues that this shift can be traced to Gandhi’s frustration with the idea of God as a ruler (2016, 176). So rather than trying to deemphasize God’s sovereignty, he replaced God with Truth. I use the later formulation throughout the essay. 36

relationality.42 And because Truth is life, ahimsa or nonviolence are constitutive of such social service.

While Truth connects and sustains all life, it is difficult to become a vessel for it.

The individual self must first be “reduced…to a zero” (AB, 505). Or, as Gandhi puts it elsewhere, one must “become a cipher” in order to become an instrument of Truth

(CWMG vol. 39, 24). Hence Gandhi’s insistence on vows, fasting, and relentless self- examination, practices not associated with moderate forms of resistance—realist or not.

In fact, Gandhi insists that nonviolent political action is impossible without such preparation. For satyagrahis or civil resistors are not fighting to establish a more or less just basic structure, they quite literally cling (agraha) to Truth (satya) as they are propelled towards the concrete and particular other, including their (concrete and particular) enemy. Satyagraha is not a tactic; it is something the atman cannot but do.

In the third chapter, I take on another common misunderstanding of nonviolent political action: that it evinces a commitment to normal politics—the politics of debate, negotiation, and compromise made possible by liberal democratic institutions. Contra leading theorists of civil disobedience, I show that Martin Luther King Jr. places his faith in a God that makes a way out of no way, not the democratic majority’s sense of justice.

Put more bluntly, King is driven and sustained by “black faith” (Cone 1992, 122). And

42 While Gandhi did not, to my knowledge, translate satyagraha as “passive resistance” in English for this reason, he often describes how the satyagrahi must wait for God or Truth (Skaria 2016, 235-237). 37

his “black faith” is nothing if not keenly attuned to the costliness of love. Indeed, King provides a poignant and painful example of the zealot’s willingness to sacrifice.

Following James Cone, the founder of black liberation theology, I read King as a theologian of the cross (2013, 63-95). Most importantly for our purposes here, a theology of the cross is incompatible with the philosophical anthropology underpinning modern political thought, religious and secular alike. In place of separate subjects, I argue that

King thinks to be human is to be a neighbor. And I contend that neighbors are thrown into relationality; King believes that all are (ethically) related in Jesus Christ—who is love.43 For King, Jesus’ death and resurrection transforms separate subjects into relational zealots.44

The result? The relational zealot cannot but take part in risky or even reckless nonviolent political action. Because King’s neighbor recognizes that all life is interrelated, she understands that the needs of concrete and particular other she encounters cannot be separated from her own. As noted above, the neighbor embodies a kind of “dangerous unselfishness” (King 1986, 284). This means she does not stand idly by when she encounters someone in need; she acts regardless of personal cost. And she refuses to reciprocate if harmed. She believes she is inextricably linked in Jesus’ love

43 As I discuss in more detail below, this sets him apart from both other Protestant traditions as well as Catholics. The former tends to emphasize God’s sovereignty will the latter stress God’s natural order. 44 King believed that Jesus’ death and resurrection gave new life to all, even those who killed him. While I briefly discuss how he thinks this “works” below, these theological/philosophical debates are beyond the purview of this chapter. 38

with her concrete and particular enemy, too. Hence her commitment to nonviolent political action. While she may participate in marches, boycotts, and sit-ins, such highly visible efforts are merely one part of her life. Neighborliness, in other words, infects every part of her existence—including her work in neighborhood, her place of employment, and, of course, her politics.45 But all this is impossible without that part that usually remains obscured by religious metaphysics: the sense of relationality grounded in King’s “black faith.”

In the fourth chapter, I show that nonviolent political action is neither the straw that breaks the camel’s back nor it is only accessible to those with traditionally religious commitments. There are many roads to Rome, in other words. One of them is traveled by Havel, a Czech dissident who draws on a different philosophical tradition when theorizing relational zealotry. Havel’s claims highlight how relational zealots always already exceed the bounds of normal politics.

Not political in a traditional sense, for Havel “dissent” is a manifestation of living within the truth. And “truth” is that to be human is to be radically responsible to the concrete and particular other. “Responsibility,” Havel writes, “exists, as it were, before the ‘I’ itself. First I find myself in it, and only then…do I constitute myself as the person I am” (1990, 323). Rather than reject or attempt to outsource this responsibility to

45 King, however, does not explicitly question modern distinction between public and private. He does not challenge modern conceptions of gender, either. He has been justifiably criticized for these shortcomings, which are all the more disappointing given that his deepest insights would seem to unsettle such categories. See Terry and Threadcraft (2018) for a recent overview of scholarship on the topic. 39

some set of political institutions, "dissidents" embrace it as the defining attribute of their existence. I understand Havel’s claims about radical responsibility to be another type of relationality. “Dissidents,” then, are also always already responding to the needs of the concrete and particular other.

Like political realists, “dissidents” acknowledge the imperfections of all real- world political institutions, the unequal distribution of power that produces them, and the limited rational capacities of people to design—much less implement—a better basic structure. Unlike many realists, “dissidents” are not resigned to a deeply flawed but stable status quo. “Dissidents” can and must act. But they are not necessarily activists, much less heroes. “Dissidents” are ordinary people who both acknowledge and attempt to meet the needs of the concrete and particular other. When they act in concert, a popular movement may emerge. Yet Havel is adamant that mass political action is only one aspect of “dissent.” It is part and parcel of embracing the radical responsibility that constitutes one’s existence.

In the final chapter, I explicate the negative standard of ontological exceptionalism outlined above, arguing that democratic theorists should pay more attention to the ontological claims underpinning zealous actors or groups. The chapter concludes by discussing the scope and limitations of the standard as well as considering some potential objections to it.

2. Gandhi on the Atman, Social Service, and Satyagraha

Mohandas Gandhi not only left an indelible mark on the Indian subcontinent— home to around a quarter of the world’s population—his ideas have influenced laypeople, activists, and academics alike across the globe. His life is the topic of countless biographies and a blockbuster film. A burgeoning academic discipline, Civil

Resistance Studies, traces its origins to Gandhi’s theory of nonviolent action (Schock

2015). And leaders in the Freedom Movement, Philippine’s People Power, and countless lesser-known struggles frequently invoked Gandhi when elaborating their political projects. Uday Mehta succinctly summarizes Gandhi’s impact: “[Gandhi] did more than any individual in the twentieth century—more than even Lenin or Mao—to bring the common man and woman into the fold of public life” (2010, 356).

That said, Gandhi is somewhat of an enigma in democratic theory. Although he has been referenced occasionally in scholarly discussions of civil disobedience, relatively few democratic theorists have engaged his ideas in detail.1 In recent years, however, this has begun to change. Karuna Mantena recovers a distinctly Gandhian kind of political realism (2012a). Alexander Livingston explains why Gandhian civil disobedience is not legalistic (2018). Mehta contends that there is more to Gandhi than nonviolent resistance; he calls Gandhi a theorist of “everyday politics” (2010). These are valuable and

1 There are important exceptions, of course. See, for instance, Parekh (1989) and Terchek(1999). 41

important contributions.2 Each make clear that Gandhi’s ideas are relevant to ongoing scholarly debates in democratic theory.

At the same time, however, efforts to recover Gandhi from the dustbin of history also seem to have stripped Gandhi of the parts of his thought that many contemporary readers find unappealing or outdated, namely his intense “religiosity.”3 To be sure,

Gandhi’s religious commitments are usually acknowledged, at least in passing. But the

Gandhi discussed by democratic theorists is either a) an innovative and sophisticated strategist who also sought Truth (e.g. Mantena 2012a) or b) a sharp critic of liberalism, in part due to his religious commitments (e.g. Livingston 2018; Mehta 2010). Either way,

Gandhi’s religious commitments appear to be tangential to the insights he offers democratic theorists today. Although few are as explicit as Faraj Godrej, her treatment of

Gandhi’s religiosity is telling; she attempts to “extract from the Gandhian model a secular doctrine of political action that performs the same functions…without depending on the metaphysical assumptions of Hinduism, as Gandhi does” (2006, 300).

In this chapter, I argue that Gandhi is relevant to democratic theorists because of his religiosity, not in spite of it. As many have noted, his religious commitments inform

2 There are many others, as well. See, for instance, Godrej (2006), Gray and Hughes (2015), Jahanbegloo (2015), and Parel (2016). There have also been several contributions to Gandhi scholarship that does not directly engage democratic theory (e.g. Dasgupta 2017; Klausen 2014; Mukherjee 2010; Sultan 2020). 3 As I discuss in more detail below, the term “religion” must be used advisedly when discussing Gandhi. In an essay on Gandhi’s religion, Akeel Bilgrami notes that he “conjoin[s] ‘religions’ and ‘morality’ deliberatively and frequently throughout the essay [on Gandhi’s religion]. Nothing short of this conjunction is appropriate for an essay on Gandhi’s religious thought. As [Gandhi] often said, he could never separate religion from morals (2011, 114n5). That said, I use the word “religion” rather than morality to capture the fact that Gandhi’s views are not secular, at least not in the Weberian sense. 42

his resolute rejection of forceful forms of resistance (Godrej 2006; Livingston 2018;

Mantena 2012a). But less appreciated is that these commitments are what compelled him to attempt the seemingly impossible in the first place: expel the British from their most prized colonial possession. Indeed, the central contention of this chapter is that Gandhi’s theory of civil resistance only makes sense once one recognizes that he is ardently devoted to realizing the atman, what Gandhi sometimes refers to as the “Real Self”

(CWMG vol. 76, 167). I am not the first to say as much.4 Instead of advancing an entirely new reading of Gandhi’s theory of civil resistance, then, I highlight the part of Gandhi’s thought—namely, his religious commitment to a kind of relationality—that has been neglected in the recent resurgence of Gandhi scholarship. In doing so, I intend to demonstrate Gandhi is more than a moderate realist. He is more accurately described as a relational zealot.

Critically, Gandhi’s religion is unlike the kind of European Christianity at least vaguely familiar to most democratic theorists. For Gandhi, Truth (which is God) is an immanent and active force. In a certain sense, it is life. It sustains and connects all living things (including non-human animals and plants) at all time and in all places. What follows? Gandhi believes one should become a vessel through which Truth flows.5 To do

4 Ajay Skaria has adeptly highlighted how Gandhi’s fundamental views on metaphysics, ontology, epistemology, and ethics diverge from conventional Western views (2002, 2016). I draw heavily on his work throughout the chapter. Also see Bilgrami (2003, 2011). 5 Gandhi seeks moksha, which translated literally means “freedom from birth and death,” or self-realization (AB, xxvi). 43

so is to realize the atman or Real Self. Connected to all living things in Truth, the atman is propelled into social service to the other to whom it is inextricably linked. It is always already engaged in ahimsa—usually translated as nonviolence. What, exactly, does the atman do? Most frequently, it partakes in the rather mundane tasks Gandhi lays out in the “constructive programme.” But it may also engage in satyagraha or civil resistance for which Gandhi is famous.

For Gandhi, however, the principal political struggle takes place at the personal rather than ethical or institutional level: Gandhi believes that each human is caught between the atman and the individual self, a kind of hedonistic subject. While the former channels Truth and sustains life, the latter participates in a web of destruction.

Concerned only with its own physical well-being, the individual self must kill to live.

While that self can never be completely overcome, Gandhi insists that it can and must be renounced. Self-renunciation opens one up to Truth. As such, such self-renunciation is the star around which Gandhian politics orbits.

Gandhi’s religious politics are not oriented towards an abstract or other-worldly end nor the proper way to realize it. Rather, they are part and parcel of a different conception of what it means to be human: channeling Truth in the world, the atman is thrown into relationality. When democratic theorists neglect Gandhi’s religious commitments, they misunderstand what motivates and sustains his resistance. “My bent is not political,” he wrote, “but religious…I take part in politics because I feel that there

is no department of life which can be divorced from religion” (CWMG vol. 18, 255).

Gandhi is ardently devoted to realizing the atman, which, in turn, is always already selflessly serving the concrete and particular other. Moreover, it is willing to sacrifice

“itself,” but not the other, and exceed the bounds of normal politics as it attempts to meet the other’s needs. Nonviolence is not a prudent choice. It is not really a choice at all. It is what results from the realization of the atman.

In the remainder of this chapter, I defend these claims and proceed as follows.

First, after some preliminary methodological remarks I situate Gandhi in colonial India.

In particular, I explain his diagnosis of the problem of British imperialism and the conditions of modernity he thinks it is founded upon. In the next section, I argue he turns to local religious traditions to formulate a response. Next, I attempt to articulate the theory political action that results. Finally, I consider some objections to his thought.

2.1 Reading Gandhi Today

Gandhi is not a systematic thinker (Bilgrami 2011, 96). And he does not pretend his views are static or complete. Writing primarily to a popular Indian audience, he often comments on specific events only to change his mind later. But he is not only unconcerned with the inconsistency of his ideas as they evolve over a period of fifty years, he seems to take pride in it.6 His work, then, poses at least two serious

6 As I discuss in more detail later, Gandhi believes that change is evidence one has not stopped experimenting with Truth. 45

methodological problems for democratic theorists. First, it is impossible to address much less meaningfully engage all of Gandhi’s significant ideas in a single chapter. As a result,

I do not pretend to offer the definitive account of his ideas about political action here.

Because I intend to show that he is better understood as a zealot than a political moderate, I mostly engage the work of democratic theorists who address his ideas about civil resistance. There are obviously many contributions to the immense secondary literature on Gandhi that I do not discuss here.7 Second, Gandhi does not speak the language of academic political philosophers. Accordingly, I use terms that Gandhi did not to highlight the differences between his claims and the views of scholars who might be interested in his ideas.8

Although these interpretative issues are not insignificant, substantive matters pose an even bigger challenge. In short, Gandhi is a resolutely anti-modern thinker

(Suhrud 2011, 72-74).9 He rejects the assumptions and conclusions of most modern political philosophy, including its two most prominent schools, liberalism and Marxism

(Mantena 2012a, 458). This put him at odds with most of his contemporaries. “Maoists, religious sectarians (Hindus and Muslims) and secular advocates of a strong state,”

7 See, for instance, Chakrabarty (2007) Gandhi (1998), and Parel (2006). 8 More specifically, Gandhi does not use the language of the “other.” Following Skaria, however, I think that the other is critical to understanding Gandhi’s thought (2016, 287-299). Even when he uses concepts familiar to most democratic theorists, like freedom, self-rule, and nonviolence, he bends and twists them in ways that render them almost unrecognizable (Tahmasebi-Birgani 2014). 9 His best-known work, Hind Swaraj, usually translated as “Home Rule,” is a polemic against modern civilization, not the English. As I discuss in more detail below, however, he is more modern than he would like to admit. 46

Mehta notes, “have all equally reviled [Gandhi] and what he stood for” (2010, 357). It also puts Gandhi at odds with much of Anglo-American democratic theory. This does not mean Gandhi is “pre-modern.” Instead, I contend he is engaged in what Walter

Mignolo—drawing on the groundbreaking work of Gloria Anzaldúa (2012)—calls

“border thinking” (2012). Actively resisting modern or Western civilization without being defined by it, what results is a kind of “hybrid” political theory.10 Gandhi’s religious approach to politics, in other words, draws on both indigenous and foreign sources. Gandhi’s use of the term “religion” and emphasis on the Bhagavat Gita demonstrates as much. Scholars have shown that the concept of religion—and the idea that religions have a sacred text that reveal a divine order or will—originated in Europe during the nineteenth century (Masuzawa 2005). Some have argued that the idea that

Hinduism is a “religion”—Gandhi’s professed religion, it is worth adding—was invented by English orientalists in the 1800s (King 1999; Lorenzen 1999). This is not to say that Gandhi’s religious commitments were actually or essentially modern or

Western. The point, rather, is that Gandhi draws freely from many traditions.11 As

Bhikhu Parekh notes, Gandhi often described the relationship between Hinduism and

10 I borrow this term from Cornel West (2017, 95-108). 11 In an important essay on Gandhi’s conception of freedom, Mukherjee contends that this is because Gandhi rejects the kind of authorial selfhood Western readers expect. Gandhi, Mukherjee persuasively argues, draws freely on several sources because he writes not as a self-enclosed individual but as a samnyasin or renouncer: “It is because Gandhi donned the enunciative persona of a samnyasin that the Indic tradition of renunciative freedom became the basis for a new kind of politic—a politics of nonviolence (2010, 458). 47

other religions as a house with its windows open; he was rooted in his tradition but exposed to and continually refreshed by others (2001, 45-46).

Despite these challenges, several democratic theorists have recently attempted to rehabilitate Gandhi’s political philosophy as well as his theory of civil resistance.12 In an influential and insightful article, Mantena argues that Gandhi’s ideas about nonviolent political action should be reconsidered in light of the realist turn in political theory

(2012a).13 According to Mantena, Gandhi’s theory of nonviolence both avoids acquiescence to an unjust status quo as well as the dangers of forceful forms of resistance. “The novelty of Gandhian satyagraha (nonviolent action),” Mantena writes,

“lies in its self-limiting character; it is a form of action that seeks both to constrain the negative consequences of politics and work toward the reform of existing political relations and institutions” (2012a, 457). More specifically, Mantena argues that Gandhi’s refusal to separate means and ends distinguishes him from other realists. Because

Gandhi takes political action as the “starting point of politics,” his realism escapes the conservatism favored by some realists, and the pure instrumentalism embraced by others (Mantena 2012a, 457).

Mantena’s reconstruction of a “Gandhian realism” is a welcome contribution to the literature on both Gandhi and political realism. As with others contesting profound

12 In many ways, Gene Sharp anticipated the return to Gandhi. He attempts to salvage parts of Gandhi’s ideas about nonviolent political action from his (presumably unsalvageable) religious commitments (1979). 13 Godrej (2006) adopts a similar view but does not place Gandhi in the realist camp. 48

injustices, there is assuredly a realist thread running throughout Gandhi’s thought. And

I agree with Mantena’s view that Gandhian realism, as Mantena describes it, is distinct from other political realisms. That said, it remains unclear what makes Mantena’s

Gandhi act in the first place. Put otherwise, a focus on the means of political action does not necessarily entail acting. It could be that there is simply no feasible way forward.

Indeed, such seemed to be Gandhi’s circumstances. The fact that his first book, Hind

Swaraj, can be read as a clarion call to action suggests that most Indians had reached similar conclusions.14 A moderate Gandhian realism may make some sense in the abstract. But it is hard to imagine engaging in any kind of political action, much less moderating realism, against a colonial superpower that massacred several hundred unarmed people gathering to pray.15 (CWMG vol. 28, 186). So why does Gandhi advocate risking jail or even death by nonviolently contesting profound injustice if there is little reason to think doing so will have a noticeable effect, not to mention be successful?

Mantena’s reconstruction of Gandhi’s realism cannot answer this important question. To be fair, it is not clear that she must do so; in many ways, Mantena seems more interested in political realism than Gandhi. Yet I think one key reason that Gandhi merits the attention of democratic theorists is that he acted when few others did. He

14 As I discuss in more detail below, it is also a condemnation of violent revolution. 15 This, of course, is a reference to the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. In 1919, British troops killed several hundred unarmed men, women, and children in an enclosed public square (Wagner 2019). 49

took on seemingly insurmountable obstacles at a time when many were resigned to or paralyzed by profound injustice. To restate the question, then: what made Gandhi take immense risks while most stayed home? And why not take up arms against an armed oppressor?16

I contend the answer can be found in Gandhi’s religious commitments— commitments that Mantena does not discuss in any detail. Other democratic theorists seem to agree. In an article on Gandhian civil disobedience, for instance, Livingston argues that Gandhian political action “is a model of truth-seeking” (2018, 17). Livingston notes that Truth is rooted in Gandhi’s Hinduism and, more importantly, that satyagraha cannot be understood apart from it (2018, 17). But because Livingston seems more concerned with elaborating a new and ostensibly more relevant model of radical political action, his treatment of Gandhi’s religiosity is rather abbreviated (2018, 20). It is clear Livingston’s Gandhi is not a Rawlsian liberal, but it is not clear what moves and sustains Gandhi, nor what, if anything, follows.

Mehta also shows that there is more to Gandhi’s politics than a realist kind of political resistance (2010). Mehta rightfully points out that Gandhi is a “deeply anti- political thinker” (2010, 363). Gandhian non-violence, Mehta writes, “is a form of individual existence that is scrupulously attentive to the contingent or arbitrarily given

16 Gandhi wrote an entire book, Hind Swaraj, defending himself against critics who endorsed violent resistance. See Parekh (1989) for debates between Gandhi and Indian nationalists who supported using physical force to drive the British out of India. Also see Klausen (2014) and Ghosh (2016). 50

features of everyday life—things such as where one is born, where one earns one’s livelihood, and who would care for one’s kinsfolk” (2010, 371). For Mehta, Gandhi’s

Hindu commitments motivate a host of daily economic, political, and social practices.

Yet Mehta’s emphasis is on the latter rather than the former, leaving the open the question of why Gandhi engages in remarkable costly acts of satyagraha or civil resistance. Moreover, because Mehta is less interested in Gandhi’s religious commitments than leveling a Gandhi-inspired critique of liberalism, Mehta has little to say about Gandhi’s religiosity.

Both Livingston and Mehta acknowledge Gandhi’s religious commitments. But they also sidestep it; Gandhi’s Hinduism appears incidental to Livingston and Mehta’s principal aims: criticizing “high liberalism.”17 Unlike Mantena, neither attempts to provide a wholesale defense of Gandhian politics. More specifically, whereas Mantena endorses a Gandhian realism, Livingston and Mehta use Gandhi to point out a problem rather than offer a full-blown Gandhian theory of dissent or local politics, respectively.

Perhaps this is because they recognize what George Orwell pointed out shortly after

Gandhi’s death:

“Of late years it has been the fashion to talk about Gandhi as though he were not only sympathetic to the Western Left-wing movement, but were integrally a part of it. Anarchists and pacifists, in particular, have claimed him for their own, noticing only that he was opposed to centralism and

17 I use the label “high liberalism” to describe the rationalistic or deliberative strands of democratic theory associated with figures like Jurgen Habermas and John Rawls. 51

State violence and ignoring the other-worldly, anti-humanist tendency of his doctrines. But one should, I think, realize that Gandhi’s teachings cannot be squared with the belief that Man is the measure of all things…They make sense only on the assumption that God exists” (1949, 87; emphasis added).

On this point, at least, Orwell’s analysis is spot-on; Gandhi is not a leftist. Moreover,

Orwell is correct about Gandhi’s teachings—they only make sense if God exists. Orwell outlines the problem this poses for many of Gandhi’s admirers: “One must choose between God and Man, and all ‘radicals’ and ‘progressives,’ from the mildest Liberal to the most extreme Anarchist, have in effect chosen Man” (1949, 87).18 Orwell’s willingness to take Gandhi’s religiosity head-on is refreshing. It is also quite rare, at least among democratic theorists.

In sum, scholars who rehabilitate a Gandhian politics, like Mantena, more or less ignore Gandhi’s religiosity.19 Those who mobilize Gandhi for other reasons, like

Livingston and Mehta, tend to evade it. They acknowledge his religiosity before moving on to other tasks. All this means that Gandhi’s religious commitments remain a “black box” amongst democratic theorists. They should not be. Not only is Gandhi’s religiosity what compelled him to attempt the seemingly impossible, Ajay Skaria’s recent explication of Gandhi’s religion includes several important insights about Gandhi’s

18 As for himself, Orwell ultimately dismisses Gandhi’s “basic aims as anti-human and reactionary” (1949, 92). 19 Also see Godrej (2006). 52

theory of political action (2016).20 I draw on his work, then, to show that Gandhi’s religion underpins his ideas about relationality and the zealous political action that results.21

2.2 Religion and Modern Politics

To begin, it is worth noting that Gandhi insists that a post- or non-modern politics must be religious. “The message,” Gandhi writes, “is to spiritualize the political life and the political institutions of the country. We must immediately set about realizing its practice…Politics cannot be divorced from religion. Politics divorced from religion becomes debasing. Modern culture and modern civilization are such politics” (CWMG vol. 14, 425). Elsewhere, Gandhi is even more polemical: “It is my conviction that the root of evil is want of a living faith in a living God” (HS, 42). This does not make Gandhi a theocrat who wants to impose God’s sovereign commands or natural order on the secular world. The European-Christian schematic that seems to implicitly inform most democratic theorists’ ideas about religion simply does not fit Gandhi’s views.

Gandhi is an innovative and experimental religious thinker (Bilgrami 2011, 96).

Unsurprisingly, monographs have been dedicated to explicating his rather novel ideas about religion.22 As such, it is not possible to do any justice to its depth and breadth here.

20 Also see Bilgrami (2011) and Skaria (2002). 21 As I discuss below, however, even Skaria ultimately seems to want to transcend or move beyond Gandhi’s religiosity. As such, Skaria claims to recover from Gandhi an “unconditional” commitment to equality. In contrast, I contend that Gandhi is best understood as relational zealot. 22 See, for instance, Chatterjee (1983). 53

But a brief sketch of his religious commitments is necessary. Although Gandhi borrows from several traditions—especially Jainism, Christianity, and Islam—he considers himself to be a Hindu: “I can’t explain why I delight in calling myself and remaining a

Hindu, but my remaining does not prevent me from assimilating all that is good and noble in Christianity, Islam, and other faiths of the world” (CWMG vol. 42, 428). He turns to the Bhagavat Gita time and again when attempting to articulate his religious politics.23

As Bilgrami notes, however, Gandhi is not “someone who commends a strict adherence to a textually articulated doctrine” (2011, 94). Rather, for Gandhi the “appeal of Hinduism…was precisely that there was…neither doctrine nor authoritative institutions” (Bilgrami 2011, 94). The structural differences between Gandhi’s religion and European Christianity are immediately apparent. Unlike the latter, Gandhi’s

Hinduism is not underpinned by a set of doctrinal precepts (e.g. the moral or natural law) codified or instantiated in a constellation of institutions (e.g. the spiritual Church protected by the secular State).

23 Again, this illustrates Gandhi’s hybridity or even Westernness. As noted previously, the idea that a religion must have a single sacred text is a Western one (Masazawa 2005). Moreover, Gandhi often quotes the Bible—he was particularly fond of Jesus’ “Sermon on the Mount.” And as many commentators have pointed out, he selectively engaged with the work of Socrates, Ruskin, Tolstoy, and Thoreau, among others prominent Western thinkers (e.g. Mukherjee 2010). Yet Gandhi cites Indian philosophers and poets more often than the aforementioned figures. 54

For Gandhi, to be Hindu means one is committed to the idea that Truth (which is

God) sustains all life.24 An immanent and active force, Truth literally makes life possible—at all times and in all places. Although he frequently calls Truth indescribable and sometimes refers to Truth with the phrase “Neti, neti” (not this, not that), Gandhi also insists that “God is the sum total of all life…to deny God is like committing suicide”

(CWMG vol. 88, 299; HS, 43). Gandhi insists that “nothing is or exists in reality except

Truth” (CWMG vol. 49, 383). In a certain sense, for Gandhi Truth is life. Ahimsa—usually translated as nonviolence—is “truth-force” or Truth moving in the world. Gandhi writes, “Ahimsa and Truth are so intertwined that it is practically impossible to disentangle and separate them. They are like the two sides of a coin, or rather of a smooth unstamped metallic disk” (CWMG vol. 49, 409). Not a mere absence of violence, however, the force of Truth (or the force of love, as he sometimes refers to it) is better understood as something akin to oxygen. “Nonviolence for Gandhi,” Mehta writes, “is not a cognate of peace. It does not refer, as it does in the [liberal philosophical tradition] to a condition of public order secured through the surrounding proximity of fear, punishment, and power” (2010, 346). For Gandhi, it is much more than that; ahimsa or

24 Before 1929, Gandhi frequently described Truth as God (Skaria 2016, 175). Afterwards, he began describing God as Truth. Skaria argues that this shift can be traced to Gandhi’s frustration with the idea of God as a ruler (2016, 176). Rather than trying to convince others that God was not sovereign, Gandhi replaced God with Truth. For clarity’s sake, I use the latter formulation throughout the essay but because Gandhi oscillates between the two terms, God sometimes appears in direct quotations. 55

nonviolence is a generative and active force. If there is life, ahimsa is present. Gandhi writes:

“The force of love is the same as the force of the soul or truth. We have evidence of its working at every step. The universe would disappear without the existence of that force…The fact that there are so many men still alive in the world shows that it is based not on the force of arms but on the force of truth or love. Therefore, the greatest and most unimpeachable evidence of the success of this force is to be found in the fact that, in spite of the wars of the world, it still lives on” (HS, 87).

Himsa or violence, in contrast, is the other pole of Gandhi’s religion. For Gandhi, all that destroys life is evil.25 Living things cannot but partake in some forms of himsa

(violence), of course. For one, eating requires killing. Gandhi writes: “We are helpless mortals caught in the conflagration of himsa (violence). The saying that life lives on life has a deep meaning on it. Man cannot for a moment live without consciously or unconsciously committing outward himsa (violence). The very fact of his living—eating, drinking and moving about—necessarily involves some himsa (violence), destruction of life, be it ever so minute” (AB, 349). Yet for Gandhi, this neither excuses nor justifies himsa (violence). And as we will see, Gandhi categorically rejects any and all attempts to excuse or justify the destruction of life, even when it threatens his own life or the life of his loved ones. To crudely but not inaccurately summarize: ahimsa (nonviolence) is the

25 That said, Parekh points out that Gandhi does not have a full-blown theory of evil: “Gandhi’s view of human life,” Parekh explains, “made it difficult for him to explain and come to terms with evil. For him, good was real, positive, self-subsistent, omnipotent, whereas evil epiphenomenal, negative, parasitic upon and only made possible by the absence of good” (2001, 120). 56

(truth-)force that sustains life whereas himsa (violence) is the cause of death and destruction. The former is Truth moving in the world. The latter is evil or Satanic.

With this general schematic in hand, it is now possible to begin to appreciate

Gandhi’s wholesale rejection of modern politics and what Richard Gregg calls his

“countermodern” alternative (2018). Turning first to the former, modern or Western civilization (he uses the two terms interchangeably) is not only permeated with himsa

(violence), it is predicated on it.26 Mehta deftly explains Gandhi’s logic: “The relationship between these three terms—peace, war, and politics—is indifferent to the issue of violence…[in modern politics] the relationships between peace, war, and violence is strictly conditional. The normative status of each of these terms depends on a political calculation in which the ‘security’ of the political community plays a decisive role”

(2010, 359).27 This point is critical: as we will see, Gandhi has little interest in the security of the individual (or communitarian) self. Consequently, he rejects the norms and institutions designed to protect such subjects. For Gandhi, “the state represents violence

26 Geographically speaking, Parel notes that Gandhi uses “modern civilization” or “Western civilization” as a shorthand for the Western European social-political order that emerged after the Industrial Revolution (HS, 34n51). It also bears noting that modern or Western civilization was relatively new at the time Gandhi was writing: “Let it be remembered that Western Civilization is only a hundred years old, or to be more precise, 50” (HS, 34n51). 27 In modern or Western civilizations, coercive law and the institutions constitutive of it protect individual citizens and their possessions (including natural resources) from “criminals.” The military does the same vis a vis the foreigner beyond its borders. The state uses force to secure “peace”—defined as the physical or material security of its citizens and their possessions—because it must; such is the raison d’état. 57

in a concentrated and organized form…the state is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its existence” (quoted in Mantena 2012b, 535).28

This means that Gandhi traces the problems of modern or Western civilization not to the imperfect implementation of ideal typical institutions but to the conception of the human that it is based upon. In brief, Gandhi believes that modern or Western civilization “make bodily welfare the object of life” (HS, 37). Put otherwise, it serves the individual self—the part of each living thing that must partake in some form of himsa

(violence) to survive. And the scale and reach of modern politics are such that those living in modern or Western civilizations confuse the evil part of themselves with what it means to be human. Violence or the destruction of life becomes the default; the question for modern or Western subjects is not if one should use himsa (violence) when securing one’s bodily needs, but how to legitimately do so. According to Gandhi, the consequences are devastating: “There is no end to the victims destroyed in the fire of civilization. Its deadly effect is that people come under its scorching flames believing it to be all good” (HS, 42).29 For Gandhi, then, the problem with modern or Western civilization is an ontological rather than ethical or institutional one.

28 As Thomas Weber points out, Gandhi’s criticism of modern or Western civilization extends to the economic sphere, as well (2011, 135-153). 29 As such, Gandhi is not surprised by violence that engulfs Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. Indeed, he predicts as much in 1909. “[Modern] civilization,” Gandhi writes, “has taken such a hold on the people in Europe that those who are in it appear to be half mad…This civilization is such that one has only to be patient and it will be self-destroyed” (HS, 37-38). 58

This does not mean that Gandhi rejects everything that modern or Western civilization offers: “Do not for one moment consider that I condemn all that is Western”

(CWMG vol. 32, 352). Gandhi lauds some of modernity’s scientific innovations.30 And he acknowledges that Indians can “utilize the new spirit that is born in us” for their own purposes (HS, 69).31 Yet such praise is never unqualified. After distinguishing between

“all that is Western” and “the predominant character of modern civilization,” Gandhi adds the following: “The predominant character of modern civilization is the exploitation of the weaker races of the earth…I have not hesitated to use the word

‘Satan.’ I have not hesitated to call this system ‘Satanic.’ And I withdraw not one word from it” (CWMG vol. 32, 354).

2.3 Realizing the Atman

The problem for many of Gandhi’s modern interpreters is that Gandhi’s alternative to modern or Western civilization is unappealing to those who do not share

Gandhi’s religious commitments. And perhaps more troublingly, Gandhi insists that the individual self that modern or Western civilization serves must be renounced. Gandhi not only challenges modern or Western civilization, he attacks the conception of the human upon which most contemporary democratic theories are built.

30 In general, his relationship with modern science is quite complex. Contrary to some commentators, he does not reject science. It is more accurate to say he rejects scientism. 31 In a footnote on this passage, Parel calls this “a very important point” (HS, 69n140). Parel continues, “Gandhi does recognize the positive contributions made by colonialism. It made Indians self-critical and creative” (ibid.). 59

Gandhi believes that to be human is to be a vessel through which Truth flows.

When one does so, one literally carries the force, Truth, that sustains all life. It is in channeling Truth that one realizes the atman or Real Self. Critically, the atman is not an agent, much less an autonomous one. It is a machine operated by Truth (Skaria 2016,

241). Gandhi writes, “Once a machine is set in motion, every part in it works automatically. When we have learnt to function like a machine, we shall have gained the true end of human effort” (CWMG vol. 37, 89). Indeed, the realization of the atman requires the renunciation of the individual self that modern or Western civilization is designed to protect and serve. Gandhi writes, “When we thus cease to be masters and reduce ourselves to the rank of servants, humbler than the very dust under our feet, all fears will roll away like mists; we shall attain ineffable peace and see Satyanarayana, the

God of Truth, face to face” (CWMG vol. 50, 21). Being seized by Truth, Gandhi puts it elsewhere, is like a breath of fresh air: “The atman dwelling in a body is imprisoned in it like the air in a jar, and, as that air cannot use its natural power so long as it believes itself unconnected with the air outside, so the atman imprisoned in a body remains cut off from the power of omnipotent God so long as it believes itself the doer of things”

(CWMG vol. 55, 256). “The man who knows the Truth,” Gandhi writes in another letter,

“proceeds on the belief that he himself does nothing” (CWMG vol. 37, 137). Perhaps most alarmingly, Gandhi explains his encounter with Truth as subjugation. “I myself am subjugated,” he writes, “I am never sure what will happen the next moment. My very

freedom seems like bondage to me, while slavery to Satyanarayan [Truth as God] seems like freedom” (CWMG vol. 61, 99). Gandhi asserts that “my position is that there is nothing just now that I am doing of my own accord. He guides me from moment to moment” (CWMG vol. 52, 244).

Unlike the individual self, the atman does not pursue its plan of life as it sees fit.

In fact, it has no plans. It cannot. Gandhi writes, “I really do not know future plans. You will believe me when I say that they are in God’s hands” (CWMG vol. 84, 304). And, according to Gandhi, “one who is a lover of the Gita, i.e., who leaves the results of one’s work to God, should never desire to know the future” (CWMG vol. 50, 2). Gandhi recognizes his views sound absurd to modern ears. “It is the most difficult thing for an intelligent being to be like a machine” (CWMG vol. 39, 54). That said, Gandhi repeatedly claims that the “purpose of life is…realizing God living within every one of us” (HS, 41).

If the atman is a machine operated by Truth, what happens to it? I use the passive voice here intentionally; the atman not a separate subject. Nor, really, is it a subject at all.

It is thrown into a kind of relationality. Although the relations between individuals who have realized the atman cannot be empirically verified, Gandhi contends they are more real than the law of gravity (HS, 61). It is not possible, in fact, to think of the atman apart from any other: “All living creatures are of the same substance as all drops of water in the ocean are the same in substance. I believe that all of us, individual souls, living in the ocean of spirit, are the same with one another with the closest bond ourselves. A drop

that separates soon dries up and any soul that believes itself separate from others is likewise destroyed” (CWMG vol. 14, 157). “The world,” Gandhi puts it elsewhere, “is not separate from us or we from the world. All are connected with another in their inmost essence and the actions of each have effects on all others” (CWMG vol. 55, 256).

The bonds between the atman and every other living thing are ethical. Whereas the individual self destroys other life in order to survive, the atman cannot but engage in social service to the other. Gandhi writes: “Realization of Truth is impossible without a complete merging of oneself in and identification with this limitless ocean of life. Hence, for me, there is no escape from social service; there is no happiness on earth beyond or apart from it. Social service here must be taken to include every department of life. In this scheme there is nothing low, nothing high. For all is one, though we seem to be many” (CWMG vol. 66, 112).

Just as the atman cannot separate itself from other living things, then, it is impossible to think of the atman apart from action.32 It is always already responding to the needs of the concrete and particular other. As noted above, if Truth is life, ahimsa

(nonviolence) is oxygen—that which sustains it. And ahimsa takes the form of social service to the other: “I cannot practice ahimsa without practicing the religion of service, and I cannot find the truth without practicing the religion of ahimsa. And there is no

32 Although “service” carries connotations of Christian charity or volunteerism, Gandhi insists that it is neither passive nor apolitical. I elaborate in more detail in the next section. 62

religion other than Truth” (CWMG vol. 28, 461). To reiterate, the atman is not an individual self; it is a machine powered by Truth and, as result, it is inextricably related to all other living things in social service.

At the same time, however, Gandhi thinks each living thing is caught between the individual self and the atman. Such is simply the condition of existence. Even when one thinks one hears the voice of God (which is Truth), Gandhi says that one “cannot adduce proof for its support” (CWMG vol. 53, 540). “When we say we are listening to

God and getting answers, though we say it truthfully, there is every possibility there of self-deception. I do not know that I am myself altogether free from self-deception.

People sometimes ask me if I may not be mistaken, and I say to them, ‘Yes, very likely, what I say may be just a picture of elongated self before you’…This I know all that glitters is not gold, and also that if a man has really heard the voice of God, there is no sliding back” (AB, 50). Hence Gandhi’s insistence that ahimsa (nonviolence) demands ruthless self-examination. Or as Gandhi sometimes puts it, seekers of Truth are always on the “razor’s edge”—not knowing if they have realized the atman (and become instruments of ahimsa or nonviolence) or remained trapped in the individual self (and perpetuate himsa or violence) (Skaria 2016, 250-251). Put otherwise, one can never know whether is engaged in social service to the other or merely serves oneself in the name of the other.

Even more troublingly, one cannot summon Truth. For Gandhi, it is a gift that one must pray for. Truth, in Skaria’s helpful language, “seizes” one rather than the other way around (2016, 245). One does not choose to be transformed by Truth; Truth transforms. Gandhi often describes this process as waiting to hear the voice of God

(Skaria 2016, 245). And he uses more provocative language elsewhere: “I should not hesitate to plunge into a blazing fire. But such faith cannot come by mechanical means.

One must wait and pray for it” (CWMG vol. 75, 381). This helps explains Gandhi’s insistence on patience as an integral part of political action (Mehta 2010).

2.4 Self-Renunciation and Constructive Nonviolence

In a certain sense, Mehta is right to call Gandhi a deeply “anti-political thinker.”

Gandhi himself frequently said as much. He was principally concerned with realizing the atman. And as I show in this section, the realization of the atman demands self- renunciation. It is not a stretch to say that Gandhi’s primary political opponent is himself. And realizing the atman does not necessarily lead to acts of satyagraha or civil resistance for which Gandhi is famous. Rather, it produces a kind of constructive or anti- political nonviolence from which satyagraha or civil resistance might eventually emerge.

For Gandhi, everything begins in the ashram. Gandhi’s ashram, Skaria notes, is not akin to an Ivory Tower or monastery (Skaria 2002). Unlike these latter two institutions, the ashram is fundamentally social—both in terms of its composition and orientation.

Skaria describes it as a community “constituted…as a set of political practices” (2002,

956). These practices are underpinned by the eleven vows that Gandhi believes are critical to the renunciation of the individual self—a prerequisite of the realization of the atman: Truth, non-violence, brahmacharya or chastity, non-possession, non-violence, control of the palate, fearlessness, removal of untouchability, bread labor, equality of religions, and swadeshi or the development of India’s economic self-sufficiency (Yeravda

Mandir, 2).33 Brahmacharya, for instance, checks one’s desire to possess and consume another person. It also forecloses the possibility of attachments to family over others. For

Gandhi, familial attachments inevitably hinder one’s capacity to become a vessel through which Truth flows (YM, 11). And, more importantly, one often cares for one’s family members not for their sake, but for one’s own. One loves to feel loved in return.

Or one lives vicariously through one’s children. Gandhi sees all this as the anti-thesis of self-renunciation, the condition for the realization of the atman—the only thing that can channel Truth. Similarly, control of palate—another vow—curbs the individual self’s desire to extend itself by possessing and consuming non-human animals (YM, 14). The vow of non-possession inhibits the individual self’s urge to possess and consume

“nature.” The other vows serve parallel purposes. And, because one can never stop possessing and consuming and thus destroying—one can never completely escape the individual self—this process of self-renunciation is ongoing. As a result, no devotee of

33 Hereafter YM. 65

Truth, not even Gandhi, ever graduates from the ashram. This explains Gandhi’s lifelong commitment to it.

Neither self-renunciation nor the ashram that fosters it are “ends,” then. As noted above, they prepare one to be seized by Truth. Recall that renouncing the individual self opens one up to Truth, and through the realization of the atman, social service to the concrete and particular other. But what, exactly, does social service entail? What, in other words, does channeling ahimsa look like, both in the ashram and outside of it?

Mantena’s distinction between what she calls “constructive” and “destructive” nonviolence is a helpful one (2012a, 465-466). Whereas “destructive satyagraha revolves around the tactics of civil disobedience and noncooperation,” Mantena writes,

“…constructive nonviolent action is driven less by an urgency to resist, withdraw, or undo existing political authority than by the need to create political bonds and forms of association on a voluntary and noncoercive basis” (2012a, 465). Put otherwise, the atman is propelled into social service to the concrete and particular other where it already lives.

This entails spinning (the vow of swadeshi); one must do one’s part to secure

India’s economic self-sufficiency—which is, in turn, necessary to end the devastating famines Gandhi thinks are part and parcel of the modern economy. It entails cleaning latrines; even the most powerful must do the jobs of the untouchables to help remove the scourge of untouchability—which, in turn, is an act of social service to the Dalit. It entails cultivating the garden; laboring in the fields helps one avoid the wastefulness

that comes with purchasing things in market—which, in turn, means there is more food for everyone. And so on.

But because not every atman is alike, not everyone does the same sorts of things.

“Right conduct is not like Euclid’s right line,” Gandhi writes, “It is a beautiful tree, not one of whose millions of leaves is like any other” (CWMG vol. 28, 459). As noted earlier,

Gandhi’s religion is not structured like European Christianity. It is neither systematic nor legalistic. Truth cannot be contained or organized by fixed moral precepts, much less political institutions. On the one hand, each atman has different capacities. On the other hand, each “other” that the atman selflessly serves has different needs. As a result, social service to the other cannot be codified. Commenting on Gandhi’s rejection of

Enlightenment morality, Bilgrami writes: “Propositions and principles and doctrines can clash with one another and be inconsistent with one another, and each side, then, can blame the other when that happens. And this is what sets one on the path to the wrong mentality; a mentality of negative attitudes leading up to contempt and even, eventually violence” (2011, 99). Because Truth is not a principle, the atman need not condemn those who hold different principles. It can selflessly serve them, too. How to distinguish between what counts as social service and what does not? In many ways, that is the

wrong question. For Gandhi, the fundamental question is whether one is a machine of

Truth.34 And as noted above, one can never know the answer for certain.

Gandhi’s rejection of systematic or legalistic moral theory helps explain his commitment to caste—a topic that democratic theorists interested in recovering

Gandhi’s political thought often fail to discuss (e.g. Godrej 2006; Mantena 2012a).

Despite relentless criticism, Gandhi insisted that untouchability was a perversion of caste rather than an essential part of it (Bilgrami 2011, 105).35 Why? Gandhi was skeptical of modern notions of equality. He thought they betrayed a deep-seated commitment to homogeneity—a sense of sameness that colonial elites would either impose on non-elites or use to fortify the already existing hierarchy (Bilgrami 2011, 104). And Gandhi also believed that homogeneity undercut pluralism (Bilgrami 2011, 104). For Gandhi, difference is something to be celebrated rather than contained. Although Gandhi acknowledged that untouchability was a scourge, he refused to jettison caste itself. He thought caste recognized and valued the contributions of both the Dalit and the industrialist. As many commentators have pointed out, of course, celebrating difference does not necessarily entail endorsing caste. And Gandhi’s hereditary defense of caste is unpersuasive, to put it mildly. Following Bilgrami, I take Gandhi’s commitment to caste to be evidence of his commitment to Hinduism more generally (2011, 105). Because he

34 Elsewhere, Gandhi describes social service an experiment. Hence the subtitle of Gandhi’s Autobiography: “My Experiments with Truth.” 35 See, especially, the work of one of Gandhi’s chief rivals, B.A. Ambedkar’s “Annihilation of Caste” (2016). Also see Guha (2019, 405-403) for a concise overview of debates between Gandhi and Ambedkar. 68

was unwilling to part with the latter, he could not disavow the former. Whether or not this judgement is the correct one is besides the point, which is the following: for better or worse, Gandhi was a devout Hindu.

Gandhi would eventually consolidate his ideas about constructive nonviolence in the “constructive programme” (Constructive Programme, 1943).36 Developed later in his life, the constructive programme outlined the series of everyday activities, including those mentioned above, that Gandhi believed were part and parcel of becoming a vessel for Truth in the world (1943). Whereas the ashram is vital for renunciation of the individual self, the constructive programme sketches the type of local work constitutive of social service to the concrete and particular other. Whether it be spinning, cleaning latrines, or working in the field, Gandhi believed that each atman had a part to play

(1943, 4-6).

The constructive programme made swaraj or Indian independence a grassroots effort. Because anybody could embody ahimsa or nonviolence wherever they already were, everybody could be a freedom fighter. Gandhi thought that swaraj or independence was impossible without such a broad-based, bottom-up effort. This is why Gandhi contends that the constructive programme is constitutive of “true” politics:

“For me, true politics consists in linking up the constructive programme with swaraj”

(CWMG vol. 77, 394). Put another way, for Gandhi the constructive programme

36 Hereafter CP. 69

establishes the background from which all formal political action, like civil resistance, emerges. As a result, the latter is unthinkable without the former: “For my handling of civil disobedience without the constructive programme will be like a paralyzed hand attempting to lift a spoon” (CP, 36).

Satyagraha (literally holding firm to Truth) or nonviolent resistance has little to do with political moderation. It is something that those who have realized the atman cannot but do. According to Gandhi, the atman is propelled into social service knowing full well that doing so might entail suffering physical harm or even death. But it persists, nonetheless. Indeed, it is fearless, as Livingston astutely notes (2018, 9-14).37 But

Livingston downplays the source of fearlessness, namely that it is the result of being seized by Truth. Gandhi writes: “Fear has no place in our hearts when we have shaken off attachment for wealth, for family, and for the body…Wealth, family, and the body will be there just the same; we have only to change our attitude towards them. All these are not ours, but God’s. Nothing whatever in this world is ours. Even we ourselves are

His. Why then should we entertain any fear” (CWMG vol. 50, 21)? The atman is not

(primarily) concerned with its own well-being. Connected in Truth to every living thing, its well-being cannot be isolated from the well-being of others.’

For the atman, then, social service to the concrete and particular other is a way of life. And as a result, the atman inevitably comes into conflict with the systems and

37 Also see Skaria (2016, 121-146). 70

structures—and the people who support them—that cause harm. Gandhi writes, “I do not divide different activities—political, social, religious, economical—into water-tight compartments. I look upon them all as one indivisible whole each running into the rest and affected by the rest” (CWMG vol. 35, 276). Yet at the same time, the atman cannot intentionally harm those responsible for himsa (violence). The atman is compelled to selflessly serve its enemy, as well. “Our religion is based on ahimsa, which in its active form in nothing but love, love not only to your neighbors, not only to your friends but love even to those who may be your enemies” (CWMG vol. 14, 424). While those seized by Truth ultimately cannot avoid politics in a (modern) world organized around himsa

(violence), their nonviolent political action is never motivated by explicitly political ends or goals. “One must forget the political goal in order to realize it. To think in terms of the political goal in every matter and at every step is to raise unnecessary dust. Why worry one’s head over a thing that is inevitable? Why die before one’s death” (CWMG vol. 68,

123)?

We can now appreciate why Gandhi is better understood as a zealot than a political moderate—and why Orwell is correct to assert that Gandhi’s teachings only

“make sense on the assumption that God exists” (1949, 87). Gandhi’s politics are underpinned by a religious commitment to realizing the atman. To summarize, renunciation of the individual self—aided by the vows of the ashram—is a condition for becoming a vessel, the atman, through which Truth flows. The atman is propelled into

social service to the concrete and particular other. Such service is all-encompassing. It consists mainly of constructive nonviolence like the kind outlined in the constructive programme. But the atman can also be propelled into risky and reckless kind of nonviolent political action. Holding fast to Truth, the atman exceeds the bounds of normal politics as it contests all forms of himsa (violence). Gandhi broke laws, of course.

But he also refused to harm those who harmed him and his supporters. Moreover, by all accounts he was genuinely fearless—unafraid of either the British Empire or the Indian nationalists who eventually killed him—and willing to sacrifice seemingly everything for the promise of nothing.

Indeed, all this helps explain why Gandhi suggested that Jewish people living in

Germany during the rise of Nazi Germany ought to engage in satyagraha or nonviolent resistance.38 In 1938, Gandhi wrote,

“If I were a Jew and born in Germany and earned my livelihood there, I would claim Germany as my home even as the tallest gentile German might, and challenge him to shoot me or cast me in the dungeon; I would refuse to be expelled or to submit to discriminating treatment. And for doing this I should not wait for the fellow Jews to join me in civil resistance, but would have confidence that in the end the rest were bound to follow my example. If one Jew or all the Jews were to accept the prescription here offered, he or they cannot be worse off than now. And suffering voluntarily undergone will bring them an inner strength and joy which no number of resolutions of sympathy passed in the world outside Germany can….if the Jewish mind could be prepared for voluntary suffering, even the massacre I have imagined could be turned

38 This is not his only “controversial” opinion. As an old man, he slept naked next to his two young nieces to prove (to himself, apparently) that he no longer had any sexual desires (Guha 2019, 777-792). 72

into a day of thanksgiving and joy that Jehovah had wrought deliverance of the race even at the hand of the tyrant. For the godfearing, death has no terror. It is a joyful sleep to be followed by a waking that would be all the more refreshing for the long sleep” (CWMG vol. 74, 240-241; emphasis added).

As Mehta notes, many have criticized Gandhi for implicitly accusing German Jewish people of cowardice and/or calling for what basically amounts to mass suicide.39 Orwell takes Gandhi’s views to be a function of his inhuman attitudes (1949, 89). Others have attempted to explain why such comments are not as offensive as they seem (e.g. Mehta

2010). Even Skaria, arguably Gandhi’s most determined contemporary reader, ultimately seems to break with Gandhi here. While Skaria unflinchingly details other aspects of Gandhi’s religiosity, he does not mention Gandhi’s call for nonviolence in

Nazi Germany.40 Perhaps some views are simply indefensible.

I do not disagree. But my contention is that Gandhi’s remarks about nonviolence in Nazi Germany captures his devotion to realizing the atman. Gandhi believed the force that the atman channels is more powerful than Nazi violence. Hence his conclusion that those who responding to the Nazis with nonviolence would have “rendered a service to fellow-Germans,” including the Nazis (CWMG vol 74, 242). No political moderate would make such a claim, of course. And this is precisely my point; Gandhi is not a political moderate. To reiterate, he is a zealot.

39 Including Hannah Arendt, Joan Bondurant, and Martin Buber (Mehta 2010, 366n16). 40 Moreover, as Mehta points out, Skaria’s efforts to recover a Gandhian commitment to unconditional equality are hard to square with Gandhi’s views on caste (2018, 423-428). 73

Ardently devoted to his cause, willing to sacrifice for it and exceed the bounds of normal politics (or morality) in the process, Gandhi attempted to impossible. In contrast with Orwell, I do not think that that means there is not space for Gandhi or relational zealots like him in pluralistic political communities. Unlike other zealots, Gandhi refused to draw ontological distinctions between self and world, saved and damned, or friends and enemies. As a result, Gandhi could not sacrifice any concrete and particular other as he pursued his cause. More generally, circumstances of profound injustice may need relational zealots like Gandhi, no matter how offensive or off-putting their views might be. They are compelled to contest profound injustices while most stay home.

2.5 Limitations and Objections

The reader may worry that I have overstated Gandhi’s religiosity. Sure, Gandhi may have occasionally professed what seems to be rather dogmatic positions on matters of Truth or God. But, the reader might reason, that does not make Gandhi a deeply religious figure, much less a zealot. As noted above, I concede that I have offered a selective reading of Gandhi. Given the volume of his writing, any reading will necessarily be selective. More importantly, however, I have quoted extensively from what are often considered Gandhi’s two key works, Hind Swaraj and An Autobiography.

Once one looks for it, Gandhi’s religiosity is everywhere.

Moreover, given most democratic theorists neglect or sidestep his religious commitments, what I have offered here could be described as an attempt to compensate

for the less religious Gandhi one finds in democratic theory. My claim is not that Gandhi explicitly rejects a different kind of political realism a la Mantena. Nor is it that

Livingston and Mehta are wrong in mobilizing Gandhi for their respective critiques of high liberalism. Rather, it is that Gandhi’s realism is a religious realism, Gandhi’s resistance is zealous, and Gandhi’s everyday politics are a function of his “efforts” to channel Truth in the world.

Relatedly, the reader might wonder about my use of the term “religion” to describe Gandhi’s Hindu commitments. Or to put the objection in stronger terms, why not simply call Gandhi a Hindu as opposed to religious? And given that Hinduism is not a “religion,” but a philosophy or a world view, using Christian concepts—religion, faith, God, etc.—obfuscates more than clarifies. Or worse, it Christianizes or Westernizes ideas that are not Christian or Western. As such, the reader might worry that my use of such Christian or Western concepts is not only mistaken, it is misleading. So much so, the reader may think that my interpretation of Gandhi betrays some of fundamentalist impulse—that Gandhi is being mobilized for a religious cause.

In response, I should point out that I have acknowledged that using the term religion to describe Gandhi is awkward. The same is true, of course, for concepts like

“faith” and “God.” That said, I use these terms and concepts because Gandhi himself uses them—repeatedly and emphatically. Whether he recognizes the awkwardness in doing so is another matter altogether. My suspicion is that he is not as concerned with

consistency or authenticity as some of his more stridently anti-Western or secular followers.41 To repeat what was stated at the beginning of this chapter, I read Gandhi as a border thinker. He draws freely on many sources, including but certainly not limited to Christianity, when contesting profound injustices. Moreover, it must be noted that

Gandhi is a product of his time. Although he helped usher in the post-colonial movement that swept across the globe during the twentieth century, he did not have access to the scholarly critiques of religion that came later. He used the tools that were available to him—and given his distaste of modern or Western materialism, “religion” likely seemed like a viable alternative.

More importantly, I have highlighted how Gandhi’s religion bears little resemblance to European Christianity.42 Although he uses some key concepts from the

European Christian vocabulary when describing his Hindu commitments, in other words, he rejects or alters their meanings. Gandhi’s religion, for instance, is not credal.

He is not interested in conversion, much less salvation. “Faith” seems to be a stand-in for that which is beyond explanation. And “God,” of course, is Truth—an imminent and active force rather than a sovereign ruler or transcendent lawmaker. Moreover, I have taken care to avoid using “religious” terms Gandhi did not, like “belief” or “doctrine.”

41 Again, Mukherjee’s essay on Gandhi’s authorial voice—or lack thereof—is especially helpful here (2010). 42 Assuming, for the moment, that it makes sense to refer to something as diffuse as “Christianity.” 76

All that said, I make no claims to get Gandhi right. Rather, I have attempted to show that Gandhi’s politics—particularly the kind of nonviolent political action that democratic theorists seem to want to salvage from him—cannot be understood apart from his religious or Hindu commitments. I am not interested in reclaiming or recovering religion. Instead, I have tried to show that some zealots can mitigate profound injustice.

Finally, if Gandhi is religious or a Hindu, why call him a zealot? Such a term seems anachronistic, at best, and orientalist, at worst. In response, I repeat what I stated in the Introduction: I do not think zealot is a pejorative term. I use it to capture the fact that Gandhi was ardently devoted to his cause, willing to sacrifice everything for it, and unafraid exceeding the bounds of normal politics in the process. Labeling Gandhi a relational zealot captures the fact that he did something unexpected and altogether novel. And the fact that many ultimately endorse his actions—and re-describe them in their own terms—does not make Gandhi any less zealous.

Perhaps Orwell is right? Perhaps it is better to leave Gandhi behind? Maybe zealots like Gandhi are simply too dangerous to be tolerated, much less embraced?

Again, although I find Orwell’s honesty refreshing, I think he draws the wrong conclusions about Gandhi and figures like him. And I think this is due in part to the fact that Orwell fails to recognize that religion is many things, not one. In Gandhi’s case, his

distinctive and uncompromising commitment to social services to the other—to relationality—generates a kind of relational zealotry.

2.6 Conclusion

I have argued that Gandhian civil resistance—merely one part of a life of social service to the other—is not something one chooses to do. It is first and foremost a function of the realization of the atman, the Real Self that channels Truth in the world.

For Gandhi, to become a vessel for Truth is to catch a glimpse of moksha, sometimes described as nirvana or self-actualization. And Gandhi thinks that those who channel

Truth tap into a force “a million times more intense than that of the sun we see daily with our eyes” (AB, 504). All this means that Gandhi is much more than a moderate realist; the atman risks everything despite the promise of nothing. It cannot but do otherwise. As a machine operated by Truth, it seeks to sustain life everywhere—and contest the structures that destroy life—regardless of the cost or consequence. It is always already engaged in excessive forms of politics. Hence my conclusion that Gandhi is better described as a relational zealot than a moderate realist.

What, the reader might wonder, does this have to do with democratic theory?

Even if Gandhi acted when others would not, the gap between Gandhi’s context and those of us living in twenty-first century liberal democracies seems so wide that it is difficult to see the contemporary relevance of his ideas. Zealotry may have been necessary in colonial India, a political community with a closed, authoritarian regime

that provided few mechanisms for social change. It is not self-evident, however, that the same is true in circumstances where a constitutional order establishes and guarantee other avenues for redressing political wrongs, namely institutions that make possible the politics of debate, negotiation, and compromise. Put more bluntly, although zealotry might be appropriate in patently unjust regimes, even deeply flawed liberal democracies render such politics beyond the pale; zealotry is not necessary in such circumstances. We turn to the ideas of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Freedom Movement to address this important concern.

3. King on the Neighbor, Love, and Civil Disobedience

The allegedly color-blind patriot most Americans celebrate on the third Monday of January each year has little in common with the man who was murdered while organizing Memphis sanitation workers. Although he is often remembered as a dedicated patriot, Martin Luther King Jr. was not an uncritical flag-waver. Near the end of his life, he was determined to overhaul the United States political system and the white supremacist global order he believed it sustained. Philosopher Paul C. Taylor succinctly captures the disconnect between King’s contemporary public image and King himself: “Where the historical King aspired to transform the polis and its inhabitants, the King of ‘MLK Day’ calls citizens, more or less as they stand, to simply to serve the polis, more or less as it stands” (2018, 35). For the most part, democratic theorists appear to have accepted the holiday version of King. As a result, his ideas about political action have been largely overlooked.

The handful of democratic theorists who engage his work tend to treat him as a communicative moderate concerned with correcting a flawed but ultimately good political order. In democratic theory, for instance, most references to King are found in debates about civil disobedience. Tommie Shelby and Brandon Terry forcefully challenge the implicit but overlapping consensus about King’s political thought. I quote at length:

“Despite the current proliferation of interdisciplinary studies of African American political thought by a handful of scholars, many political philosophers cleave to an old idea advanced by the Swedish social scientist Gunnar Myrdal in his enormously influential tome An American 80

Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944). This is the deeply misguided notion that black politics and political thought can be reduced largely to strategic thinking concerning how best to advance black interest by exploiting convictions and sentiments widely held among whites, and the rhetorical identification of black interests with the most deeply cherished American ideals and practices” (2018, 4).

Many of the essays in their edited volume help recover the historical King both from the caricature often lauded on MLK Day and the communicative moderate usually found in democratic theory articles and books. Danielle Allen, for instance, shows how

King’s conception of freedom has more in common with republicanism than the liberal tradition with which he is usually associated (2018, 146-160). Brandon Terry and

Shatema Threadcraft situate King’s use of “manhood” alongside his commitment to love and nonviolence (2018, 205-235). Lawrie Balfour highlights King’s evolving views on reparations and economic inequality (2018, 236-252). More generally, the entire collection elaborates King’s nuanced views on matters that concern democratic theorists, including prisons, Black Power, and self-limiting resistance.

Yet there is still more to be said about King’s political thought. Put bluntly, King was a black Baptist minister with a political theory more than a political philosopher with interesting ideas about justice. He was fond of saying as much: “Before I was a civil rights leader, I was a preacher of the gospel. This was my first calling and it still remains my greatest commitment. You know, actually all that I do in civil rights I do because I consider it a part of my ministry” (2000, 146). Unsurprisingly, theological themes permeate his public speeches and writings, not to mention his sermons. In academic

democratic theory, however, King’s religious commitments are usually ignored1 or hastily translated into secular terms.2 Either way, democratic theorists fail to appreciate what theologian James Cone calls King’s “black faith” (1992, 122). The central argument of this chapter is that is it impossible to understand King’s theory of political action without appreciating his upbringing and lifelong engagement with the black church.3

More importantly, taking King’s “black faith” seriously shows that he is better described as a relational zealot than a communicative moderate. In other words, just as the holiday

King blocks out the historical King, his allegedly secular political philosophy similarly runs the risk of blocking out his zealousness.

This is due in no small part to King himself. Ever a preacher, he invoked the images that would move his listeners. And his published speeches and essays—the

1 Even Tommie Shelby and Brandon Terry, in their superb collection of essays on King’s thought, tend towards compartmentalizing King’s religiosity. In the Introduction, the acknowledge as much: “Because most of the existing scholarship on King, influenced by the important work by scholars of religion, covers his interest in prophetic African American Christianity, Social Gospel liberalism, and Christian personalism, we emphasize instead other important traditions” (2018, 9). There are some notable exceptions, of course, including the work George Shulman (2008) and Vincent Lloyd (2016). In a certain sense, what follows is in attempt to extend their insights into ongoing debates about radical political action—debates that neither engage in a systematic fashion. More importantly, I focus on King’s Christology—his understanding of the person of Jesus Christ—instead of the prophetic (Shulman) or legal (Lloyd) aspects of King’s thought. 2 Perhaps most prominently, John Rawls cites King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” when developing his account of civil disobedience in the immediate aftermath of the Freedom Movement (2009, 320n19). In the essay where Rawls first set out his theory, however, he explains why King’s theological claims are superfluous to the kind of politics King preached: “Being an appeal to the moral basis of public life, civil disobedience is a political and not primarily religious act. It addresses itself to the common principles of justice which men can require one another to follow and not the aspirations of love which they cannot” (1969, 248, emphasis added). 3 That said, writing about King’s black faith is itself problematic. As noted in the Introduction, I have preserved his audience’s responses in passages where I cite a speech or sermon in an attempt to capture the conversation that takes place between a black preacher and his or her congregation (Lischer 1997). That said, the affective aspect of the black faith cannot be replicated here. 82

writings that have received the most attention from democratic theorists—were heavily edited or even ghostwritten before being distributed to a largely white liberal readers, especially during the initial stages of the Freedom Movement (when he was trying to win the support of white Northerners) (Cone 1992, 123).4 To be sure, King may have been interested in something resembling political moderation—politics characterized by flexibility, a commitment to normal politics, and the practical rather than the perfect— early in his career. But several theologians have argued that the post-Dream King is decidedly different from the quasi-Kantian Personalist fresh out of graduate school

(Cone 1992, 2013; Lischer 1997). In what follows, I focus on his late sermons and speeches in order to highlight his black church commitments that were, in a certain sense, always there.

Following Cone, the founder of black liberation theology, I read King as a theologian of the cross (2013, 63-95). Most importantly for our purposes here, a theology of the cross is incompatible with the philosophical anthropology underpinning modern political thought, religious and secular alike. In place of modernity’s separate subject, I argue that King thinks the human in relational terms; he believes that to be human is to

4 And in recent years, his son, Dexter Scott King, has restricted access to King’s unpublished works. In the late 1990s, he described the King estate as moving “towards the ‘Coca Cola’ scenario, if you will, where we create the formula or the syrup and package it so that it can be disseminated [so] that King in Japan looks like King in Seattle. In other words, then continuity and the uniformity is there wherever you are, and the King Center will become more of a resource center in that regard” (cited in Fleming 2018, 387). 83

be related to every concrete and particular other in Jesus Christ—who is love.5 For King,

Jesus’ death and resurrection transforms separate subjects into “neighbors.”6 Thrown into a kind of relationality (characterized by Jesus’ love), neighbors are moved to respond to the concrete and particular other’s needs. In many ways, the other’s needs constitute the neighbor’s own needs. Hence King’s insistence that “other-preservation,” not self-preservation, is the “first law of life” (2010, 190).

The political implications of this seemingly subtle shift are significant. Not a separate subject who does neighborly things, the neighbor is always already responding to the needs of the concrete and particular other. In fact, it is impossible to think herself apart from action on the other’s behalf. This means she does not stand idly by when she encounters someone in need; she acts regardless of personal cost. She is willing to sacrifice. Yet she refuses to reciprocate if harmed. She believes she is inextricably linked in Jesus’ love with her concrete and particular enemy, too. Hence her unconditional commitment to highly disruptive and unconventional forms of nonviolent political action. She exceeds the bounds of normal politics, if necessary. And while she may participate in marches, boycotts, and sit-ins, such highly visible political action is merely the tip of the iceberg. Neighborliness, in other words, infects every part of her daily

5 As I discuss in more detail below, this sets him apart from both other Protestant traditions as well as Catholics. The former tend to emphasize God’s sovereignty will the latter stress God’s natural order. 6 King believed that Jesus’ death and resurrection gave new life to all, even those who killed him. While I briefly discuss how he thinks this “works” below, these theological/philosophical debates are beyond the purview of this chapter. 84

life—including her neighborhood, her work, and, of course, her politics.7 Put otherwise, neighborliness is a way of life rather than a series of practices. If all this strikes the reader as impossibly demanding, King would not disagree. But his “black faith” is founded on a God that made a way out of no way.

The rest of this chapter expands on these claims by proceeding as follows. After situating King’s life and work, I turn to his diagnosis of the problem he attempted to address: white (Christian) supremacy. In the third section, I reconstruct the core of his theory of political action—highlighting his roots in the black church tradition before showing, in the fourth section, how it generates nonviolent political action. In the conclusion, I briefly discuss the implications that King’s thought has for democratic theory.

3.1 Utopia and Realism

As noted above, democratic theorists tend to treat King as a communicative moderate determined to perfect a deeply flawed but fundamentally sound constitutional order. This reception is due, at least in part, to the enormously influential work of John

Rawls. As noted above, Rawls delivered a paper on civil disobedience at the 1966

American Political Science Association Annual Meeting, a revised version of which would appear in A Theory of Justice. In the essay, Rawls attempts to explain why

7 King, however, does not explicitly question modern distinction between public and private. He does not challenge modern conceptions of gender, either. He has been justifiably criticized for these shortcomings, which are all the more disappointing given that his deepest insights would seem to unsettle such categories. See Terry and Threadcraft (2018) for a recent overview of scholarship on the topic. 85

conscientious lawbreaking—civil disobedience—can be a legitimate form of political action in political communities committed to liberal principles. Rawls writes: “Civil disobedience in a democratic society is best understood as an appeal to the principles of justice, the fundamental conditions of willing social cooperation among free men, which in the view of the community as a whole are expressed in the constitution and guide its interpretation” (1969, 248). If, however, liberal principles are not widely shared, Rawls asserts that more “forceful” (presumably violent) forms of politics are justified. For

Rawls, civil disobedience is justified when democratic majorities ignore liberal principles. Its limits are conditional on prevailing social commitments. If liberal principles are widely shared but misinterpreted, then disobedients must remain civil or nonviolent. If not, “forceful resistance” is legitimate.

In A Theory of Justice, Rawls asserts in a footnote that “a statement of a similar view is found in Martin Luther King’s ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail’” (2009, 320n19).

In the same footnote, Rawls reports that he is attempting to “set [King’s] conception into a wider framework” (2009, 320n19). According to Rawls, this is King’s singular contribution to (Rawlsian) democratic theory. Indeed, the footnote referenced above is the only place either King or the Freedom Movement is explicitly mentioned in the entire book. Rawls’ King is what I call a communicative moderate. A flexible political actor more concerned with progress than perfection, he remained faithful to normal politics— the politics of rational argumentation, for Rawls—while addressing the flaws in the

status quo. More specifically, Rawls’ King rationally persuaded a more or less just political community to live up to its professed principles. On this account, King refrained from using force because he believed the white majority was merely asleep at the wheel; civil disobedience functioned as a kind of wake-up call. Once the white majority recognized their mistakes, they rectified them in due time. Nonviolent political action, then, can be described as a loud form a speech (Celikates 2016). As such, it differs in scope rather than kind from the politics of debate, negotiation, and compromise that liberal democratic institutions make possible.

In recent years, democratic theorists have attacked Rawls’ account of civil disobedience on multiple fronts (e.g. Celikates 2016; Delmas 2018; Livingston n.d.;

Scheuerman 2018). Very briefly, they find Rawls’ account of civil disobedience dangerously naïve. And because he engaged in something that seems to resemble

Rawlsian civil disobedience, King appears to have been found naïve by association. A cursory glance at King’s own words seems to make matters worse: King is not only committed to nonviolent political action, he claims to love his enemies, even those who bomb homes and churches.8 If Rawls’ King is naïve, the real King seems downright delusional. For these reasons, among others, most of Rawls’ critics have shown little

8 “Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and, as difficult as it is, we will still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our communities at the midnight hour and drag us out on some wayside road and leave us half-dead as you beat us, and we will still love you. Send your propaganda agents around the country, and make it appear that we are not fit, culturally and otherwise, for integration, and we’ll still love you” (1986, 256-257). I discuss this passage in more detail below. 87

interest in King’s theory of political action. And those that have re-examined it tend to downplay his religious commitments—perhaps because his religion is thought to be the source of his more utopian-sounding claims (e.g. Livingston n.d.; Mantena 2018). I argue that both approaches are mistaken. On the one hand, a brief overview of the kind of hate he encountered shows that King was as familiar with human cruelty than the most pessimistic political realist. On the other, his “black faith” is critical to his theory of politics. I address King’s alleged utopianism in this section and his “black faith” in the next.

King’s experiences in the Jim Crow South, the redlined North, and several former colonies put him face to face with white supremacy’s various masks. Some of his encounters with predominantly (Christian) segregationists in the South are well- documented.9 Millions watched as unarmed and nonviolent demonstrators were savagely attacked by Bull Connor’s dogs in Birmingham. Most students learn about the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church that killed Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia

Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Carol Denise McNair in the same city. Many may have heard of Emmet Till, the fourteen-year-old boy from Chicago who was lynched while visiting family in Mississippi. Till’s alleged, mortal crime: whistling at a white woman.

Cone rightly points out that the scale of violence and threat thereof visited upon King,

9 I include the modifier “Christian” here and throughout this section to remind the reader that most segregationists and white moderates were also church-goers. See Marsh (2008). 88

his colleagues, and the black community more generally during King’s lifetime is unthinkable: “The sufferings of black people during slavery are too deep for words. The suffering did not end with emancipation. The violence and oppression of white supremacy took different forms and employed different means to achieve the same end: the subjugation of black people…At no time was the struggle to keep hope alive more difficult than during the lynching era” (Cone 2013, 2-3).

Born in 1929, King grew up during that era. As a result, he was keenly aware that he might be subject to heinous and arbitrary acts of racialized religious violence.

Although lynching had largely ended by the 1950s, white (Christian) segregationists found new ways to terrorize black people during the fifties and sixties (Stevenson 2018).

As early as 1961, only four years after he became a prominent figure in the Freedom

Movement, King writes, “I have been arrested five time and put in Alabama jails. My home has been bombed twice. A day seldom passes that my family and I are not recipients of threats of death” (1986, 41). By the time he was assassinated in 1968, King had been arrested 30 times and spent months in jail. He was harassed by white segregationists wearing police uniforms, clergy-collars, and regular clothes throughout his travels across the South. The FBI tracked his every move. It is not necessarily

surprising that he preached is own eulogy (several times, in fact); death was a constant companion throughout his adult life (West 2018, 325).10

Yet King believed white (Christian) moderates were little better than Southern segregationists determined to sustain white supremacy by any means necessary. They privately recognized the wrongfulness of extra-legal state-sanctioned violence against black people but publicly called for King and his colleagues contesting Jim Crow to slow down. Eight white Alabama religious leaders succinctly outline the white moderate position in an open letter published in the Birmingham News on April 12, 1963. The chorus these clergy sang is a familiar one. “Outsiders” like King are blamed for stirring up a conflict (the clergy apparently believed that none previously existed prior to King’s appearance) (Carpenter et al. 1963). King and his colleagues, the clergymen write, do not and cannot appreciate the efforts of the broader community to address its various problems: “Responsible citizens have undertaken to work on various problems which cause racial friction and unrest. In Birmingham, recent public events have given indication that we all have opportunity for a new constructive and realistic approach to racial problems” (Carpenter et al. 1963). Because the people in Birmingham are decent folk—“responsible citizens” with a sense of justice—the clergymen state that they “do not believe that these days of new hope are days when extreme measures are justified in

10 While King was certainly subject to more scrutiny than others, his experience was not necessarily unique. The Equal Justice Institute’s report on lynching in America documents 4,084 “racial terror lynchings” in the South between 1877 and 1950, along with more than 300 in the North (Stevenson 2018). There are surely many more, not to mention acts of sexual violence and other acts of terrorism against black people. 90

Birmingham” (Carpenter et al., 1963, emphasis added). After commending “the community as a whole, and the local news media and [Bull Connor-led] law enforcement in particular, on the calm manner in which these demonstrations have been handled,” the clergymen conclude with an “appeal to both our white and Negro citizenry to observe the principles of law and order and common sense” and “withdraw support from these demonstrations” (Carpenter et al., 1963).

King’s response, his famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” captures his problem with the moderate approach to dismantling Jim Crow. Among other things, he notes that the clergymen are far more concerned with order than justice, more taken by optimism than reality (1986, 295). They remained committed to order and optimism throughout the Freedom Movement. As a result, King eventually came to believe that the white moderates were more of a hindrance to dismantling Jim Crow than Southern segregationists (Burrow 2014, 242). There were simply no compromises to be had on Jim

Crow. And given that white segregationists and white moderates dominated normal politics, King was ultimately compelled to engage in excessive kinds of political action.

But before turning to King’s immoderate alternative, a bit more needs to be said about his alleged naivete.

Southern segregationists and white moderates are often portrayed as posing the biggest obstacle to the Freedom Movement. The former engaged in brutal and systemic violence—the scope of which remains grossly underappreciated. The latter called for

“law and order and common sense” when the victims of lynching and bombings—not to mention decades of segregation and centuries of slavery—would not negotiate on (legal) racism. Northern white liberals, religious and secular alike, condemned both. Less well- known are King’s criticisms of northern white liberalism.11

As the Freedom Movement turned northward after the passage of the 1965

Voting Rights Act, King would soon be as disgusted with the hypocrisy of the vast majority of white liberals as he was with segregationists’ open hatred of black people and white moderates’ self-serving commitment to their court system. Most northern white liberals supported the Freedom Movement in the South while ignoring calls for integration in northern cities segregated by slightly more subtle policies.12 In a 1967 interview in Harper’s Weekly, King states: “Why this Mayor Locher here in Cleveland, he’s damning me now and calling me an extremist, and three years ago he gave me the key to the city and said I was the greatest man of the century. That was as long as I was safe from him down in the South. It’s about the same with (Richard) Daley and (Sam)

Yorty too” (Halberstam 1967, 42). Echoing Malcolm X, King called them on their equivocation: “The purpose of the slum is to confine those who have no power and perpetuate their powerlessness…The slum is little more than a domestic colony which leaves its inhabitants dominated politically, exploited economically, segregated and

11 Following King, I use the term liberal to describe those we might call “Progressives” today. These liberals must be distinguished from “realists” like Niebuhr. As I discuss in more detail below, Progressives tend to believe in the innate goodness of humans, the power of reason, and the telos of History. Realists did not. 12 See Rothstein (2017). 92

humiliated at every turn” (cited in Cone 1992, 223).13 And in a speech in Mississippi shortly before he was assassinated, King was particularly blunt: “One thing about the brother down here [in Mississippi], he doesn’t like us, and lets us know it…It’s out in the open…At least you know how to deal with it. I’ve been up North, you don’t know how to deal with it, you know you can’t quite get your target. He’ll sit there and smile in your face. You go down to see the office, and they’ll serve you cookies and tea, and shake your hand and pose for a picture with you. And at the same time, keeping Negroes in ghettos and slums” (cited in Cone 1992, 257).14 Theologian Rufus Burrow reports that

King began using the labels moderate and liberal interchangeably late in his life “as if he no longer recognized a significant difference between them, especially in terms of commitment to full racial equality” (2014, 242).

Finally, it must be noted that King goes beyond blaming individual racists for the plight of African Americans. Anticipating Stokely Carmichael’s analysis of institutional racism, King was acutely aware that white supremacy was woven into the very fabric of the American political project. “However difficult it is to hear, however shocking it is to hear, we’ve got to face the fact that America is a racist country. We have got to face the

13 Malcolm X, familiar with white liberal hypocrisy in a way that King initially was not, had long been saying as much but in blunter terms: “I’d rather walk among rattlesnakes, whose constant rattle warns me where they are, than among those norther snakes who grin and make you forget you’re in a snake pit” (cited in Cone 1992, 96). Although King never publicly endorsed Malcolm X’s scathing criticism of northern white liberals, Cone notes that “King did not hesitate to concede the truth of Malcolm’s analysis” (Cone 1992, 256). 14 Also see Burrow (2014, 230). 93

fact that racism still occupies the throne of our nation” (cited in Burrow 2014, 243).

Elsewhere, King refers to racism as the “sickness of America” (cited in Cone 1992, 234).

If nothing else, King was intimately familiar with human cruelty. His first-hand experience of Southern (Christian) segregationists’ rabid racism, white (Christian) moderates’ quietism, most northern white liberals’ hypocrisy meant that he knew better than anyone that real-world politics were not for the faint of heart. The fact that King admired the most prominent political realist of his time, Reinhold Niebuhr, should not come as a surprise. A well-known public intellectual and political theologian, Niebuhr’s work informed the late King’s views about white liberals (as well as white segregationists and white moderates) (2013). King reported that “Niebuhr’s great contribution to contemporary theology is that he has refuted the false optimism characteristic of a great segment of Protestant liberalism” (cited in Cone 1992, 30). By

1965, if not before then, King had little faith in the democratic majority’s reasoning capacities. He had been burned time and again by the politics of debate, negotiation, and compromise. Normal politics would simply not work. King is nothing if not a realist.

Yet unlike most realists, Niebuhr included, King refused to be resigned to an unjust but relatively stable status quo. He engaged in risky or even reckless political action knowing full well that the democracy majority was not amendable to moral suasion. He also knew that contesting the existing order would be costly—and that the costs would be borne by the same people who had long been struggling to survive in a

white supremacist world. Why, then, did King engage in something that looks, at least on the surface, quite a bit like Rawlsian civil disobedience? Why risk his life, and call on others to do the same, nonviolently challenging profound injustice?

3.2 A Theologian of the Cross

The answer is relatively straightforward: faith. Nobody doubts that King was a

Christian. There is some debate, however, regarding both how much faith informed

King’s political views and what faith traditions he draws on. Because this latter debate has bearings on the former, I must briefly sketch its contours. King is often associated with the “Personalist” tradition he was introduced to by Edgar Brightman and Harold

DeWolf during his doctoral studies at Boston University. Stressing human individuality, the Boston Personalists hoped to make religion more reasonable. Theologian Richard

Lischer writes, “In America, the personalists answered the challenges of Darwinian evolutionism and modern society by locating moral value exclusively in human personality…The human being occupied a privileged realm of spirit that scientific naturalism could not touch…The personalists argued that humanity is essentially free to make ethical choices that transcend the constraints of the situation. This is possible only because at the core of each person is the inextinguishable flame of spirit” (1997, 59).

Readers familiar with Kant’s essays on religion will note the resemblance between the noumena and the Personalists’ conception of human personality. Indeed, Boston

Personalism can be traced to nineteenth-century German idealists like Albrecht Ritschl,

Adolf von Harnack, and Friedrich Schleiermacher (Lischer 1997, 58).15 Personalists also uncritically accepted an Enlightenment human anthropology. Along with most strands of white liberal Protestantism, they understood the human as a separate subject; freedom as action in accordance with God’s law; and time as linear and progressive.

Although King eventually distanced himself from liberal Protestantism, he continued to stress the importance of human personality the rest of his life.

Democratic theorists who take King’s religious commitments seriously usually treat him as an uncritical follower of the liberal theology he was taught at predominantly white institutions like Crozer Seminary and Boston University (e.g.

Taylor 2018; Patterson 2018).16 To be sure, King’s thought was undoubtedly shaped by

Boston Personalism and the Social Gospel movement of which it was a part.17 Moreover,

King never disavowed either tradition in his published essays and speeches; this is due, at least in part, to the fact that they were both prepared and edited with white liberal audiences in mind (Cone 1992, 122).18 It is also worth noting that the theology King learned as a graduate student was most pronounced in his earlier writings and sermons

15 It is worth noting that Personalists, including King, were also influenced by Hegel. Theologian James Cone reports that “Hegel provided King with a dialectical method that enabled him to resolve conflicts in ideas by moving from two opposites (thesis and antithesis) to a higher synthesis” (1992, 30). 16 This is not to say that white theologians were the only ones who developed liberal Protestantism. Benjamin Mays, the President of Morehouse College when King was a student there, held similar views. As I comment on in more detail below, however, black theologians tended to practice a form of liberal Protestantism that was distinct from their white counterparts. 17 See Dorrien (2018) for a detailed account of both traditions. 18 I am not arguing that King never held such views. The point here is that his “black faith” has been overlooked. 96

(e.g. 1955-1963).19 Democratic theorists who hear their views confirmed in these texts— or are familiar with their quasi-Kantian language—will be satisfied with the King they reveal; this King is relatively easy to translate into “secular” terms.20

Cone, among others, has forcefully argued that there is another side to King (e.g.

Cone 1992, 2013; West 1993, 2018; Lischer 1997). Cone writes: “The faith of black experience began to shape King’s idea of God during his childhood, and it remained central to his perspective throughout his life…Without denying other important influences—liberal

Protestantism, Gandhi, Niebuhr, among others—we still must emphasize that no tradition or thinker influenced King’s perspective as much as the faith which blacks created in their fight for dignity and justice” (1992, 121). The son, grandson, and great- grandson of Baptist preachers, King literally grew up in the black church. Moreover, he never grew out of it; he was an active clergyperson in black congregations (first in

Montgomery, then back at Ebenezer in Atlanta) his entire adult life. In the remainder of this section, I draw on Cone’s work to highlight some key differences between black

19 Given King was still working on his dissertation when he was appointed to lead the Montgomery Bus Boycott, this should not be all that surprising. Nor should it surprise us that these words are most frequently celebrated on the national holiday commemorating him. As we shall see, it is much more difficult for many Americans to celebrate his later work. 20 One replaces revelation with reason, sovereign God with nature, and divine commands with moral laws. So, although Locke, for example, may have believed that equality among citizens was a biproduct of being a child of God, the framework he constructs to secure political equality can be neatly extracted from its Christian background. Reason allows each (“civilized”) self to derive positive (moral) law from God’s law; the rest of Locke’s artifice remains intact. As a result, Lockeans need not be religious. More generally, Locke can and often is read as political philosopher with religious beliefs rather than a religious political philosopher. Rawls makes a similar move with King. 97

Christianity and white liberal Protestantism.21 More specifically, I elaborate the part of

King’s theology that democratic theorists have overlooked to show that King is not the quasi-Kantian liberal democratic theorists think. Then I show how King’s “black faith” means he is more accurately described as a zealot than a communicative moderate.

Cone argues that King’s “black faith” is cross-centered. And in the black church,

Cone continues, the cross cannot be understood apart from the “lynching tree.” This distinguishes King’s faith from white liberal Protestantism—including Boston

Personalism—in at least two ways. First and foremost, the cross and the lynching tree represent unthinkable hatred. More than harsh reminders of the lengths to which people will go to preserve the existing order, they demonstrate humans’ capacity for cruelty. In theological terms, they show the depths human depravity.

Seen next to the lynching tree, the cross becomes a tragic symbol. The sense of tragedy at the core of King’s faith is at odds with white liberal Protestantism’s commitment to morality, optimism, or reason. Whereas white liberal Protestants emphasized Jesus’ virtues—they attempted to moralize the cross (be good like Jesus) while ignoring the lynching tree—black Christians viewed Jesus’ morally perfect life through the lens of his brutal death, “the inevitable fate of those who stand up to the

21 For more on the black church and black theology, see especially Cannon (2006), Cone (2010), West (2002), Williams (2013), among many others. While Cone is certainly an authority on the black church tradition, it is obviously not the case that something as diffuse as the black church can be defined, much less by one person. In what follows, then, I draw on Cone to elaborate on a few of the points of divergence between King’s “black faith” and white liberal Protestantism. I have chosen to focus on matters that are especially germane to King’s political theory. 98

forces of hatred” (Cone 2013, 88). Whereas white liberal Protestants were inclined to believe in the inevitability of Progress—they historicized the cross (look how far “we” have come) while ignoring the lynching tree—black Christians had suffered too much to harbor such illusions (Cone 2013, 91). Whereas white liberal Protestants accentuated the underlying goodness of men—they sanitized the cross (the Jews who killed Jesus were especially evil) while ignoring the lynching tree—black Christians were too familiar with the unthinkable cruelty of “civilized” people to believe in the innate innocence of humankind (Cone 2013, 88).22 Lischer argues that King’s roots in the black church meant

King could never fully adopt white liberal Protestantism, despite his embrace of

Personalism, because it had no place for the tragic. “King could not be a liberal because liberalism’s Enlightenment vision of the harmony of humanity, nature, and God skips a step that is essential to the development of black identity. It has little experience of the evil and suffering borne by enslaved and segregated people in America. Liberalism is ignorant—even innocent—of matters African-American children understand before their seventh birthday” (Lischer 1997, 53).23

King’s “black faith” also prevented him from being resigned to an unjust but stable status quo. For King the cross signals that God knows suffering and can overcome

22 The perceptive reader will note that this theo-logic links Progress and anti-Semitism. I discuss Protestantism’s anti-Semitism in more detail in the last chapter. 23 The cross, Cone adds, even makes the white “Christian realist” critics of theological liberalism, including Niebuhr, appear naïve. Comparing King and Niebuhr, Cone writes, “King believed that the cross was the defining heart of the Christian faith. Unlike Niebuhr, his understanding of the cross was inflected by his awareness of the lynching tree, and this was a significant difference” (2013, 70). 99

the most horrible forms of hatred. Put otherwise, because those who crucified God do not have the last word, neither does the lynch mob. As King often preached, along with most black ministers, on the cross God “made a way out of no way” (Cone 1992, 126).

King believed Jesus did the impossible; he literally defeated death. This insight, Cone argues, is at the core of “black faith” in America. And it marks the second critical difference between the black church tradition and white liberal Protestantism and, by extension, democratic theorists who confuse white liberal Protestantism with religion writ large. For King, Jesus is a revolutionary figure—he turned the world upside down.

And he did not do so with the technologies of modernity—morality, history, or optimism—but with love.

King recognizes that love is a fraught term. On the one hand, everyone thinks they know what it is. In a sermon titled “Levels of Love,” King preached: “Certainly, there is no word in the English language more familiar than the word ‘love’” (2007, 438).

On the other hand, it is often confused with other things. “In spite of our familiarity with the word, it is one of the most misunderstood words” (2007, 438). This is particularly problematic for King because Jesus’ love is different from human love. These latter forms of love are ultimately self-centered whereas Jesus’ is not. King goes to great lengths to distinguish “utilitarian,” “philial,” “romantic,” and “humanitarian” love from

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Jesus’ agape.24 Agape love is unconditional—it is an unmerited “gift” that extends to all creation (2007, 438). King explains:

“Utilitarian love is motivated by a quality in the object, namely the object’s usefulness to him. Romantic love is motivated by some quality in the object, maybe the beauty of the object or the quality that moves the individual…move on up to friendship, it is motivated by that quality of friendliness and that quality of concern that is mutual. Go on up to humanity, humanitarian love, it is motivated by something within the object, namely a divine spark, namely something sacred about human personality. But when we rise to agape, to Christian love, it is higher than all of this…The greatness of it is that you love every man, not for your sake but for his sake. And you love every man because God loves him. And so in becomes all inclusive…It comes to the point that you even love the enemy. Christian love does something that no other love can do. It says that you love every man. You hate the deed that he does if he’s your enemy and he’s evil, but you love the person who does the evil deed” (2007, 442).

Agape love is fundamentally oriented to the needs of the concrete and particular other—or as King puts it, “every man.” It is also unconditional and unceasing. And as I discuss in more detail below, agape love is not non-confrontational. King invokes

Nietzsche to elaborate the power of Jesus’ love: “One of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites, polar opposites, so that love is identified with a resignation of power, and power with a denial of love. It was this misinterpretation that caused the philosopher Nietzsche, who was a philosopher of the will to power, to reject the Christian concept of love. It was this same misinterpretation which induced Christian theologians to reject Nietzsche's philosophy

24 It is worth nothing here that agape is not a sentiment or emotion. 101

of the will to power in the name of the Christian idea of love. Now, we got to get this right…Power at its best is love” (1986, 247).

For King, Jesus’ love is not only powerful, it has changed everything for all time.

Most importantly for our purposes here, it changes what it means to be human. Jesus’s death and resurrection redeemed fallen creation. And a redeemed creation is founded on and sustained by agape love. More specifically, Jesus resurrection shows that agape love is already here. The fact that Jesus did not stay on the cross, in other words, reveals that agape love is alive and at work in the world. And, more importantly, that that love has given birth to a new kind of human. No longer a separate subject, the neighbor is thrown into relationality.25 The neighbor, in other words, is now inextricably linked in

Jesus’ love to the concrete and particular other.

3.3 Neighborly Ethics

As noted in the Introduction, Sylvia Wynter, among others, has persuasively argued that the idea of human separateness remains largely unquestioned in normative democratic theory (2003). To be sure, this does not necessarily mean that Western political philosophy’s self is isolated and alone; a variety of technologies (e.g. natural law, sentiment, moral law, shared values, the general will, custom, Absolute Spirit, etc.)

25 In a certain sense, I break from Cone here. While Cone highlights how King’s “black faith” differs from white liberal Protestantism, he also seems to replace whiteness with blackness, especially in his early work. See Carter for a more detailed discussion of Cone’s theology (2008, 157-194). The upshot: Cone appears to overlook King’s commitment to relationality. 102

re-link it with other (self-enclosed) subjects. Yet, at the foundation, the subject is primordially separate. It exists before it engages others.

For King, in contrast, each human is constituted by Jesus, who is love, and through Jesus everyone else. Against the current of much of modern political thought,

King believes that to be human is to respond to the needs of the concrete and particular other.26 And this, King often preached, is simply the fact of the matter; it is the way that

“God structured reality.” King’s oft-cited invocation of the “interrelatedness” of life only makes sense once one recognizes that King rejects Western philosophical anthropology in favor of a relational understanding of the human. “It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are caught up in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. We are made to live together because of the interrelated structure of reality” (1986, 254).

Elsewhere, he elaborates: “As long as there is poverty in this world, no man can be totally rich even if he has a billion dollars. As long as diseases are rampant and millions of people cannot expect to live more than twenty or thirty years, no man can be totally healthy, even if he just got a clean bill of health from the finest clinic in America.

Strangely enough, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be.

26 Importantly, this relation cannot be codified. In other words, neither moral law nor natural theology can fully capture it. For King, efforts to systematize Jesus’ love were viewed with skepticism; it was thought to be another trojan horse for some hierarchy where white people would inevitably rule. Hence King’s emphasis on love over law or Catholic teleology. Relational creatures, then, are not primarily concerned with allegedly unchanging laws or virtues. Instead, they attempt to live into the relation that prefigures their existence. Although see Lloyd (2016) for a defense of King as a natural law theorist. 103

You can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be” (cited in Cone

1992, 80). His challenges to the separateness of subjects is especially direct in a late sermon: “From time immemorial men have lived by the principle that ‘self-preservation is the first law of life.’ But this is a false assumption. I would say that other-preservation is the first law of life. It is the first law of precisely because we cannot preserve self without being concerned about preserving other selves. The universe is so structured that things go awry if men are not diligent in their cultivation of the other-regarding dimension. ‘I’ cannot reach fulfillment without ‘thou’” (2010, 190; emphasis added). To reiterate, I contend that King must understood as a theologian of relationality. To be human is to care for the “thou,” to “preserve other selves,” or, to return to language used in previous chapters, to be ardently devoted to the concrete and particular other’s needs.

Although though King did not speak the language of academic philosophy, he deftly articulated the difference between neighbors and modernity’s separate subjects using the biblical parable of the Good Samaritan.27 Recall that the parable begins with

Jesus telling the story of a man lying injured in a ditch along a dark road known to be patrolled by robbers and thieves. “You remember that a Levite (Sure) and a priest passed by on the other side; they didn't stop to help [the man who lay in the ditch on the side of the road]. Finally, a man of another race came by. (Yes sir) He got down from his beast,

27 He draws on the Good Samaritan in many different sermons. In what follows, I rely mainly on the unpublished text of the sermon titled “Who is My Neighbor?” he preached at his home church, Ebenezer Baptist, less than two months before he was assassinated (n.d.b.). 104

decided not to be compassionate by proxy. But he got down with him, administered first aid, and helped the man in need” (King 1986, 284). Why did the Samaritan, the ultimate

“outsider,” stop when the priest and Levite kept going?

King considers several plausible explanations. Perhaps, he suggests, they are afraid that they will get hurt trying to help: “In the days of Jesus [the road to Jericho] came to be known as the ‘Bloody Pass.’ And you know, it’s possible that the priest and the Levite looked over that man on the ground and wondered if the robbers were still around. (Go ahead) Or it’s possible that they felt the man on the ground was merely faking (Yeah), and he was acting like he had been robbed and hurt in order to seize them over there, lure them there for a quick and easy seizure. (Oh yeah) And so the first question that the priest asked, the first question that the Levite asked was, ‘If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me’” (1986, 284)? Because their own safety cannot be guaranteed, the priest and the Levite do not stop. In King’s telling, the priest and the

Levite are reasonable people. In other versions of the same sermon, King explicitly identifies with them—and admits that he also often passes by those in ditches out of fear for his personal well-being. As noted above, I call such individuals liberal subjects; they do not help the man in the ditch because their safety cannot be guaranteed. Nor are they sure that they can provide the help the man in the ditch needs. Liberal principles explain why their actions are justifiable. The liberal subjects caused the man in the ditch no harm. Sure, they could be praised for helping him. But they are not morally obligated to

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assist him given they are not responsible for the man’s plight, especially when doing so jeopardizes one’s personal safety.

By contrast, those who understand themselves in collectivist terms, call them collective subjects, are more willing to put themselves in harm’s way than liberals. Yet, such actions are only obligatory provided they further the greater good. King implies, however, that those concerned with the abstract good are unlikely to be bothered by particular problems, much less minor ones—like an anonymous man lying in a ditch on the side of a dangerous road. Moreover, the priest and the Levite are important figures.

As King tells the story, they are community leaders headed to a meeting on road safety:

“Maybe,” King preached, “they were going down to Jerusalem, or down to Jericho, rather, to organize a Jericho Road Improvement Association. (Laughter). That’s a possibility. Maybe they felt it was better to deal with the problem from the causal root, rather than to get bogged down with an individual effect” (1986, 284). King seems to be suggesting that they were too important to endanger their well-being for the sake of an unknown man whom they may or may not be able to assist. Better to keep going—while lamentable, such a decision better serves the collective interest in the long-run.

Finally, communitarian subjects might also be willing to risk their personal safety to assist a member of their community. Unlike liberal or collective subjects, they may understand their well-being to be deeply intertwined with some concrete and particular others. In King’s version of the parable, however, the injured man is not one of priest

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and Levite’s own kind (1986, 286). The injured man is marked by racial difference (1986,

284). As a result, communitarian subjects do not stop either. Although they take care of members of their group—even at great personal cost—they are not obligated to do the same for outsiders, like the man in the ditch.

The Samaritan stops. Why? Is he a moral saint—willing to go above and beyond the (liberal) call of duty? Or perhaps he endorses a different kind of collectivism, one that precludes him from prioritizing the general over the particular? Or maybe the

Samaritan is a confused communitarian—a cosmopolitan even? King suggests another alternative: “Finally, a man of another race came by. (Yes sir) He got down from his beast, decided not to be compassionate by proxy. But he got down with him, administered first aid, and helped the man in need. Jesus ended up saying this was the good man, this was the great man because he had the capacity to project the ‘I’ into the ‘thou,’ and to be concerned about his brother” (1986, 284; emphasis added).28 Call the Samaritan a relational zealot (King calls him a “neighbor”). Understanding himself to be entangled with every concrete and particular other he encounters, the Samaritan is ardently devoted to the man in the ditch. This is true regardless of the fact that Samaritan might be harmed when helping him, regardless of the fact that assisting the man in the ditch may not advance the Samaritan’s ideological cause, and regardless the fact that the man

28 King is referring to Martin Buber’s famous essay of the same name, here. See Buber (2010). King quoted Buber frequently. 107

in the ditch is not a Samaritan. The Samaritan is willing to sacrifice himself to try to help meet the needs of the man in the ditch.

According to King, the Samaritan’s sense of relationality—grounded in Jesus, who is love—compelled him to reverse the priest and Levite’s initial question: instead of asking what would happen to him if the Samaritan stopped to help the man in the ditch, the Samaritan asked, “If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him” (1986,

284; emphasis added)? Taken together, the Samaritan does not act, but lives into the always already existing relationship he has—through Jesus—with the man in the ditch.

Constituted by Jesus’ love, the Samaritan does what he cannot but do, regardless of potential costs. His action is constitutive of his identity, which is grounded in his (black) faith; he is inextricably linked in Jesus’ love with every concrete and particular other. Or in King’s preferred terminology, the Samaritan is simply a neighbor. “His goodness was found not in the fact that his moral pilgrimage had reached its destination point, but in the fact that he made the love ethic a reality as he journeyed life’s highway. He was good because he was a good neighbor” (n.d.b.).

Neighbors not only stop for the man in the ditch. They are willing to be stopped in whatever they do, including their work. King often preached about the importance of work, stressing that one could and should be a neighbor in one’s professional life. This holds for both “‘No Ds’ and “Ph.D.’s,” “streetsweepers and surgeons,” he often said

(2000, 93). For King, neighborliness includes something akin to what Harry Boyte has

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called “public work” (2011). Public work, Boyte argues, is work done in public, with the public, and for public purposes; it refers to the ongoing efforts of workers that build and sustain their shared social world both in and beyond their professions. Rather than simply earn a paycheck, the public worker considers how her work affects the concrete and particular other. She sees her work and part and parcel of her call to neighborliness.

Although less glamorous than grand rallies, public work is just as radical, if not more so.

It demands that the entire economic sphere be transformed by the workers themselves.

Neighbors also make churches, often the “community centers” of African

American communities, go. Not “social clubs with a thin veneer of religiosity,” King believes that the church is another site of neighborliness (2000, 106). The “constructive church” is one in which congregants are always already responding to the needs of the concrete and particular other in their midst. King preached: “It seems I can hear the God of the universe smiling and speaking to this church, saying, ‘You are a great church

(Glory to God) because I was hungry and ye fed me. You are a great church because I was naked and ye clothed me. You are a great church because I was sick and ye visited me.

You are a great church because I was in prison and ye gave me consolation by visiting me’” (2000, 114-115).

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In sum, neighbors do not segment their lives into the distinct spheres that tend to characterize the modern world.29 They are always already responding to the needs of the concrete and particular to whom they are inextricably linked in Jesus’ love. Most commonly, neighborliness manifests itself in an “outward concern for the welfare of others” in one’s daily life—at work, at church, and on the road.

3.4 Neighborly Politics

That said, neighborliness consists of more than the critically important rather ordinary actions catalogued above. In short, King’s commitment to relationality does not allow him to separate ethics and politics. In “A Time to Break the Silence,” his sermon at

Riverside where he first spoke out against the Vietnam War, King preached, “One day the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be beaten and robbed as they make their journey through life. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar, it understands that an edifice which produces beggars, needs restructuring” (1986, 241). And just as he had done countless times before, King urged his audience in Memphis the night before he was assassinated to be “dangerously unselfish,” to recognize that each of their fates were inextricably linked with sanitation workers struggling for a decent wage (1986, 284). “That’s the question before you tonight. (Yes) Not, ‘If I stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to my job?’

29 As noted above, however, King largely avoids challenging the separation between public and private spheres. 110

Not, ‘If I stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to all of the hours that I usually spend in my office every day and every week as a pastor?’ (Yes). The question is not, ‘If I stop to help this man in need, what will happen to me?’ The question is, ‘If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?’ That’s the question”

(1986, 285). Neighbors cannot but exceed the bounds of normal politics.

For King, this takes the form of an ongoing and sustained struggle against white supremacy. In his Massey lectures, King describes the next stage of the movement, the

Poor People’s Campaign, in more detail: “The dispossessed of this nation — the poor, both white and Negro — live in a cruelly unjust society. They must organize a revolution against the injustice, not against the lives of the persons who are their fellow citizens, but against the structures through which the society is refusing to take means which have been called for, and which are at hand, to lift the load of poverty” (2010, 61-

62). Although the immediate goals of the struggle shifted, the same sense of relationality and concomitant dangerous unselfishness it generates remained. King referred to the members of the Campaign as “nonviolent army of the poor, a freedom church of the poor” (2010, 62; emphasis added).30

This raises a critical and controversial point: King engaged in risky or even reckless political action—he even called for a revolution. But he refused to reciprocate

30 And that freedom church eventually occupied the Washington Mall for six weeks after King’s assassination. Three thousand poor people from across the country literally live outside Congress until their demands were met (Cave and Eveleigh 2017). 111

when white Americans harmed or killed his colleagues. This is not because he liked white people, of course.31 Like is conditional. One likes those who like oneself. King states the obvious: “I can’t like anybody who would bomb my home. I can’t like anybody who would exploit me. I can’t like anybody who would trample over me with injustices. I can’t like them” (1986, 256). Rather, he was a neighbor to them; he believed that he was inextricably linked to them in Jesus’ love. “Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and, as difficult as it is, we will still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our communities at the midnight hour and drag us out on some wayside road and leave us half-dead as you beat us, and we will still love you.

Send your propaganda agents around the country, and make it appear that we are not fit, culturally and otherwise, for integration, and we’ll still love you” (1986, 256-257).

King acknowledged that such love did not have human origins. But he believed that he was called to channel Jesus’ love in the world: “So this is what we have before us as

Christians. This is what God has left for us. He’s left us a love. And He loved us, so let us love the brother” (1967, 438). For King, loving a brother was incompatible with intentionally harming him.

Malcolm X was fond of pointing out how foolish—indeed, offensive—this was.

On the one hand, he noted that white Christians had little apparent use for the love King preached. Speaking to black Christians, Malcolm X said: “You think you are a Christian

31 Although he never put it in these terms, it is also safe to say he did not “like” the United States. 112

and yet you see your so-called white Christian brother hanging black Christians on trees…The white man has everything while he is living and he tells you to be a good slave and when you die you will have more than he has up in Beulah’s Land” (cited in

Cone 1992, 173). On the other hand, he accused black preachers like King of being traitors. “If the Negro preacher is going to disarm the oppressed black masses with a doctrine of cowardice disguised as ‘Christian love,’ who is going to teach the white man to love his enemies, turn the other cheek, and peaceful suffering…or is the Negro clergy being paid to disarm our people with the slave master’s one-side religion” (cited in Cone

1992, 176)?32

Malcolm X understood something about King that democratic theorists interested in King’s theory of civil disobedience seem to have missed: King’s commitment to nonviolence was an act of (black) faith. King he did not engage in nonviolent political action merely because he thought it notified the democratic majority of the gap between constitutional principles and existing realities. Nor did King remain nonviolent because he thought nonviolence “worked.”33 King did not believe in

32 Contrary to popular belief, Malcolm X did not preach hate (he too was a preacher, after all). Instead, he wanted separation. In his view, Christianity was nothing more than a vehicle for “white nationalism” (Cone 1991, 176). Drawing on a long tradition of black separatism, Malcom X concluded that black freedom was impossible in white America (Cone 1992, 176). 33 This is Karuna Mantena’s position (2018). She contends that King was “animated by violence’s futility—its dangerous and perverse consequences in politics” (2018, 84). “This, in turn,” Mantena continues, “oriented [him] toward practical alternatives to violence” (2018, 84). “The prime attraction of nonviolence [for King],” Mantena concludes, “was that it offered a model of action that could affect political and social change in what seemed like a new and powerful way” (2018, 84). In a thoughtful and detailed essay on King’s late thought, Alexander Livingston outlines a related set of claims. After 1965, Livingston argues, for King “the 113

morality, history, or human goodness; he believed in a God that could make a way out of no way. And, most importantly, King did not know if God would use King to redeem white people. But King was committed to nonviolence anyway. Recall his Frogmore speech: “They stood before the king and said, ‘We know that the god that we worship is able to deliver us, but if not, we will not bow. We know that he is able to deliver us from the fiery furnace, but if not, we will not bow” (n.d.a., 11; emphasis in original). Calling for civil disobedience—and the sustained nonviolent struggle of which it was merely one small part—in conditions of profound injustice was scandalous. Hence my conclusion that King is a relational zealot. Thrown into relationality, he was ardently devoted to the needs of his neighbor, willing to sacrifice everything to meet them, and exceeded the bounds of normal politics in the process. In his response to the

Birmingham clergymen, he explicitly embraced the extremist label. The passage is worth quoting in full:

“Now [my] approach is being dismissed as extremist. I must admit that I was initially disappointed in being so categorized. But as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a bit of satisfaction from being considered an extremist. Was not Jesus an extremist in love—‘Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, pray for them that despitefully use you.’ Was not Amos an extremist for justice—‘Let justice roll down like

case for mass civil disobedience…became a matter not of moral philosophy but a matter of outlining a viable alternative tactic to rioting” (n.d., 18). Livingston rightly points out that by that time King realized that the vast majority of white people would not voluntarily acknowledge, much less address, white supremacy (n.d., 31-32). Livingston concludes that King’s “nonviolence is not a principled power to melt the stony heart, as Gandhi would put it, but rather a pragmatic principle of self-defense” (n.d., 32). 114

waters and righteousness like a might stream.’ Was not Paul an extremist for the gospel of Jesus Christ—‘I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.’ Was not Martin Luther an extremist—‘Here I stand; I can do no other so help me God’…So, after all, maybe the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists” (1986, 297-298).

He concluded with the following: “The question is not whether we will be extremist but what kind of extremist we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or will be extremists for love” (1986, 298)?

As Cornell West points out, King’s extremism is often forgotten because he did not condone or engage in acts of violence (2012, 125-126).34 This is unfortunate. For King, violence was not radical enough. His commitment to relationality meant that he believed violence was self-defeating: “The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind…it destroys community and makes brotherhood impossible. It leaves society in monologue rather than dialogue. Violence ends by defeating itself” (1964). For King, the network of mutuality cannot be circumscribed; to do so denies the loving relation to the concrete and particular other that King finds in Jesus’ death and ultimate resurrection.

King was not naïve and was certainly not optimistic. He knew that he would encounter fierce resistance. “Christ came to show us the way. Men love darkness rather than the light, and they crucified Him, there on Good Friday…” (cited in Cone 2013, 91).

He concludes a sermon he preached months before he died with the following words,

34 Importantly, King did not condemn rioting. Indeed, he understood the riots that broke out in cities during the 1960s as eminently reasonable, if not justifiable. It should also be noted that rioting is only “violent” if one adopts a Lockean view of property. But he also thought they were counterproductive (2010, 21-22). 115

“And I don’t mind telling you this morning that sometimes I feel discouraged…Living every day under the threat of death, I feel discouraged sometimes. Living every day under extensive criticisms, even from Negroes, I feel discouraged sometimes. Yes sometimes I feel discouraged and feel my work’s in vain. But then the holy spirit revives my soul again. ‘There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole. There is a balm in Gilead to heal the sin-sick soul’” (2000, 164). West succinctly sums up King’s commitments: “King, like Thucydides, gives up on hope as the sole comforter in the face of catastrophe. Yet he remains a Christian who chooses to be a hope” (West 2018, 336).

Taken together, King is not a communicative moderate determined to fix a deeply flawed but good constitutional order. He was not committed to nonviolence because he believed in normal politics. He did not think that the white majority would debate, negotiation, or compromise in good faith. And he did not engage in civil disobedience merely because he thought it was strategically effective, either in the short- or long-term. He unconditionally embraced nonviolent political action because he thought that it is was part and parcel of the neighbor’s divine call to love the concrete and particular other, including the “sick white brother.”

3.5 Limitations and Objections

Some may object to the reading of King proposed here on the grounds that King is more of a strategist than I have given him credit for. Very briefly, I acknowledge

King’s strategic ingenuity. He was especially adept at using the media spotlight to his

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advantage. More generally, he and his colleagues adopted and implemented many of

Gandhi’s insights in a different context. In that sense, Mantena’s analysis is especially astute (2012a, 2018). Moreover, Livingston draws attention to King’s innovative and original efforts to fuse love and power in order to mobilize “liberating acts of taking power without undercutting the possibility of transformative integration through sharing power” (n.d., 3-4). It is worth noting, however, that Livingston concludes his essay by asking his readers to consider whether it is “too late for love” (n.d., 33). My claim here is not that Mantena and Livingston’s accounts are incorrect. Both raise pressing questions while highlighting the more militant parts of King’s thought an earlier generation of scholars ignored. That said, Mantena and Livingston’s reconstructions of King are incomplete. If he was only a strategist, he would have stayed home. A fuller, although by no means comprehensive, account of King’s views about nonviolent political action must acknowledge the importance of his “black faith.” More specifically, as a theologian who sees the cross alongside the lynching tree, for King love is both always and never too late.

Others have argued that King’s emphasis on the cross provides a theological justification for sacrifice (Cannon 2006). For King, to suffer is to be Christ-like. On the one hand, this means that King is less worried with mitigating the pain of those who bear the brunt of white violence: black women. On the other hand, a celebration of black suffering only perpetuates the system of white supremacy King wants to dismantle

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(Warren 2015). Calvin Warren, for instance, rejects traditional forms of political resistance, including civil disobedience, on the grounds that nonviolent political actors do not recognize that white supremacy is an ontological rather than economic, social, or political problem (2015). As a result, regardless of their tactics, black leaders like King are eventually killed. And their deaths represent another unnecessary and ultimately inconsequential sacrifice at the altar of white supremacy. Warren writes: “The ‘point’…is that political hope is pointless. Black suffering is an essential part of the world, and placing hope in the very structure that sustains metaphysical violence, the Political, will never resolve anything” (2015, 244). I do not necessarily disagree. Yet I think King also embraces a kind of spiritual hope—a melancholic hope that Joseph Winters describes as one “draped in black” (2016)—that Warren is more sympathetic to. I acknowledge, however, that there are times King invokes the sort of cheap political hope that Warren rightly criticizes.

3.6 Conclusion

I have argued that Martin Luther King Jr. is more than a communicative moderate. Rather, he is more accurately described as a relational zealot. His views were powered by a religious commitment to relationality—to be human, he believed, was to respond to the needs of the concrete and particular other through Jesus’ love. As a result, he was compelled to exceed the bounds of normal politics when contesting profound injustices, even when doing so carried enormous costs and even if the

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likelihood of success was minimal, at best. Yet, crucially, he believed himself to be related not only to subjects of injustice, but to perpetrators, as well. This explains his embrace of nonviolent political action; he refuses to harm those who harm him.

Democratic theorists have failed to appreciate King’s zealotry because they have neglected his “black faith.” Perhaps this is because King’s cross-centered (black) faith is more difficult to translate than quasi-Kantian white liberal Protestantism. Cone writes:

“It made no rational or even spiritual sense to say that hope came out of a ‘place called

Golgotha…a place of the skull’” (2013, 2). King himself, invoking the apostle Paul, acknowledges “there are some who still find the cross a stumbling block, and others who consider it foolishness” (1986, 42). Or, perhaps its focus on the cross is too tragic for a field more inclined to theorize ideals than profound injustices.

More generally, King demonstrates that the relationship between zealotry and real-world liberal democracies is more difficult to dismiss than one might first think. As compared with non-democratic regimes, liberal democratic political communities provide more space to engage in normal politics—the politics of debate, negotiation, and compromise. Normal politics require some semblance of background equality. And without it, King shows that more excessive forms of politics may be needed, even in liberal democracies.

Both relational zealots I have discussed thus far have been “religious.” Although each was innovative, Gandhi and King identified as members of the Hindu and

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Christian traditions, respectively. The reader might wonder whether relational zealotry is necessarily a religious phenomenon. And if so, where does that leave predominantly secular political communities plagued by profound injustice? To answer these important questions, we turn to the life and work of Czech dissident Václav Havel. Havel shows that there are many kinds of relational zealots—and not all of them are grounded in traditional religious doctrines.

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4. Havel on the “Dissident,” Radical Responsibility, and Anti-Political Politics

1989 was a year of dramatic political change. Poland, Hungary, East Germany,

Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania regained their independence after almost a half- century of Soviet domination. Almost immediately, scholars from a variety of academic disciplines began theorizing these seemingly sudden events. Some historically minded commentators attributed them to philosophical necessity; communism fell because it had to (e.g. Ash 1999; Fukuyama 2006). Many empirical social scientists viewed the events of 1989 as demonstrating the power of social movements (e.g. Tilly and Tarrow

2015). In the popular press, credit was given often given to leading “dissidents;” individuals like Michnik, Walesa, Havel were deified for courageously leading the struggle against communism. Although commentators disagree about the precise causal mechanism, few question the underlying motive: the expansion of liberal democracy.

In many ways, democratic theorists’ silence about the revolutions of 1989 is not all that strange.1 Read as world-historical figures, leaders of social movements, or simply brave individuals, 1989’s leading figures did not have much to add to then-prominent disputes between liberals and communitarians.2 Nor did they contribute to theories of

1 Six years after the fact, Jeffrey Isaac noted that “American political theory responded to these events with a deafening silence” (Isaac 1995). The piece was titled “The Strange Silence of Political Theory” (1995). 2 Although the Velvet Revolution is sometimes cited as an instance of “populism” or “grassroots politics,” few political theorists have systematically evaluated Havel’s political thought. On the one hand, democratic theorists interested in popular politics tend to focus almost exclusively on the American context (e.g. Boyte 121

multiculturalism or deliberative democracy that followed soon thereafter. In short, 1989 may have been important to those who lacked liberal democracy, but it meant little to those who already had it. Moreover, it confirmed what most Anglo-American observers seem to have suspected: liberal democracy marked the End of History (Fukuyama 2006).

This academic consensus remains largely intact. And it still informs the reception of many of 1989’s leading figures, especially Czech playwright Václav Havel. Like others associated with 1989, Havel is mostly overlooked by democratic theorists.3 While some scholars argue about what kind of liberal democracy he endorses, he is most often treated as what I call a progressive moderate. Flexible but courageous, he did what was needed to institutionalize the politics of debate, negotiation, and compromise in his long-suffering homeland. Celebrated for refusing to match the revolutionary fervor of his Marxist adversaries, Havel demonstrated that normal politics can be secured without recourse to forceful forms of resistance.4

Yet I argue that there is more to Havel than historically motivated political moderation. Most importantly, Havel is less interested in liberal democratic government than many political moderates. Indeed, Havel is averse to all forms of what might be

2010; Grattan 2016; Stout 2011; Warren 2001). See Bretherton’s (2014) study of community organizing in London for an important exception. 3 There are, of course, important exceptions. See, for instance, Isaacs (1995) and Kirshner (2014). 4 It is not surprising, then, that Marxian thinkers are uninterested with Havel’s ideas about political action. See, for example, Slavoj Žižek’s essay on Havel (1999). 122

called “end-state” political thinking.5 By end-state political thinking, I mean to capture the type of systemic political theorizing favored by theorists who believe in an institutional solution to the problem of politics. As such, Havel rejects the East-West binary common to the Cold War-era; Havel thinks Western liberal democracies and the type of politics that pass for normal there are afflicted by many of the same ailments as post-Stalinist communist regimes. Although the symptoms in liberal democracies are subtler (at least for those who benefit from the existing order), both patients end up with a similar condition: demoralization for insiders, exploitation (or worse) for those who do not or cannot belong. For Havel, liberal democracy guarantees freedom in the same way that “actually existing socialism” secures the unification of the workers of the world: in propaganda only.6 Havel’s pessimism about normal politics echoes the claims of political realists. But Havel parts ways with realists when it comes to political action.7

Havel is not resigned to an unjust but stable status quo; indeed, the central claim of this chapter is that Havel is better described as a relational zealot than a progressive moderate.8

5 I use the terms “end-state,” “statist,” and “programmatic” interchangeably through. 6 After Stalin’s death, Soviet officials began describing their regimes as achieving “actually existing socialism” or “real socialism.” An acknowledgement that economic conditions were still far from those envisioned by Lenin, actually existing socialism denoted a more realistic but also transitional state. 7 See Geuss (2008) and Galston (2010) for overviews of the “realist” school of political thought. 8 Hence the scare quotes he always uses around the term. Following, Havel, I use them throughout the essay. 123

Although not quite as famous as Gandhi or King—and certainly less discussed by democratic theorists—there are several reasons why I think Havel merits more attention from scholars interested in resistance in the real world. Like Gandhi and King,

Havel helped mitigate profound injustices without causing significant bloodshed. And

Havel shows that relational zealots come in all shapes and sizes. They need not be formally religious. Nor need they be martyrs. Havel insists that “dissidents,” his term for those whom I argue are better described as relational zealots, can be found on every street corner.

Reading him alongside Emmanuel Levinas—the French philosopher whose work

Havel once called “magnificent, almost like a revelation”—I contend Havel’s ideas about politics are underpinned by an uncompromising commitment to a kind of relationality

(1990, 311).9 To be human, for Havel, is to be thrown into responsibility to the concrete and particular other. Responsibility “exists,” Havel writes, “as it were, before the ‘I’ itself: first I find myself in it, and only then…do I constitute myself as the person I am”

(1990, 323).10 For Havel, this is simply the “truth” of the matter: “Responsibility for others is something primal and vitally important…something we are thrown into and by virtue of which we transcend ourselves from the beginning…this sense of responsibility precedes our freedom, our will, our capacity to choose and the aims we set for

9 Havel also notes that reading Levinas “stirred up the thoughts of a prison who then had to rethink many of the things he’d always thought about, and who thus became—perhaps—slightly better than he was” (1990, 331). 10 See Levinas (1969). 124

ourselves” (1990, 322-323). Instead of rejecting or attempting to outsource the existential sense of radical responsibility, “dissidents” are those who embrace it as the defining characteristic of their existence. They “live within the truth” (of existential responsibility) regardless of cost or consequence.

This means that “dissidents” are ordinary people—non-elites and elites alike— who both acknowledge and attempt to respond to the needs of the concrete and particular other in their daily life. They do not remain on the sidelines when some are harmed by state or state-sanctioned power; “dissidents” cannot separate their well-being from the well-being of the other. They are even willing to sacrifice in their efforts to respond to the concrete and particular other’s needs. But because their responsibility extends to every other without qualification, “dissidents” refuse to reciprocate when they or their compatriots are harmed. As a result, “dissidents” reject forceful forms of resistance. Largely uninterested in the politics of debate, negotiation, and compromise,

“dissidents” engage a different kind of politics, what Havel sometimes calls “anti- political politics” (1992, 269). Such politics exceed the bounds of normal politics. They consist, Havel writes, of “service to the truth, as essentially human and humanly measured care for our fellow humans” (1992, 269). Or as Havel puts it elsewhere,

“dissidents” do the kind of “small-scale work” needed to create a “more human life.”

Although such work is often invisible and may appear to be (politically)

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inconsequential, when enough live within the truth, small-scale work may have a large- scale impact.

Havel’s reconfiguration of identity as radical responsibility renders “dissent” a way of life rather than a moderate means to achieve the inevitable: liberal democratic government and the kinds of normal politics that such institutions guarantee. Hence my conclusion that Havel’s uncompromising commitment to existence as radical responsibility means he is better categorized as a relational zealot than a progressive moderate. Havel is ardently devoted to his cause (radical responsibility to the concrete and particular other), willing to sacrifice for it, and unafraid to exceed the bounds of normal politics in the process.

The remainder of this chapter elaborates these claims by proceeding as follows.

First, I outline Havel’s concerns with end-state political thinking. Next, I lay out his conception of “truth” and the theory of radical responsibility that flows from it. The final section considers some objections before explaining what makes his theory of political action zealous.

4.1 The Limitations of Normal Politics

Although he often associated with the end of history, Havel is adamant that

“dissent” is not merely a way to secure some future end-state that institutionalizes the

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politics of debate, negotiation, and compromise.11 In fact, Havel rejects all kinds of end- state political reasoning. Havel takes end-state thinking to be a dead-end. It either results in demoralization (because no end-state can solve the problem of politics) or risks causing more harm than good. In order to understand Havel’s ideas about “dissent,” then, it is first necessary to examine what he opposes—namely, the idea that “dissent” is to tool to be used to realize liberal democratic government.

“Power of the Powerless” famously begins with a description of life in a post-

Stalin communist regime. Situated among the onions and carrots, a sign in a Czech greengrocer’s store window reads, “Workers of the World, Unite!” Havel tells his readers that the sign was sent to the greengrocer from “headquarters.” It does not necessarily express the greengrocer’s views. But the greengrocer puts it up nonetheless

“simply because it has been done that way for years, because everyone does it, and because that is the way it has to be” (1992, 132). To be sure, the sign protects the greengrocer from informants and the police. “If he were to refuse, there could be trouble” (Havel 1992, 132). Yet Havel is clear that the threat of retribution is different in his “post-totalitarian” context than “classical dictatorships.” The former, of which the post-1968 Czech regime was emblematic, lacks the vigor and energy of the latter.

“Whereas under mature Stalinism ideology imbued life in a monopolistic manner,

11 This is the central claim of most scholars of civil resistance. See, for example, Sharp (1973), Chenoweth and Stephan (2011), Schock (2015). 127

forcing the individual to participate in collective rituals of ‘revolutionary excitement, heroism, dedication and boisterous violence,’ in the post-totalitarian order the dominant structures seem to be exhausted” (cited in Popescu 2012, 41). Classical dictatorships are founded on fear; power relations between the state and the citizen are unmediated. The post-totalitarian political system, on the other hand, needs something more to sustain itself. More than merely a single piece of propaganda, Havel thinks the sign in the greengrocer’s store window constitutes part of the broader apparatus that the post- totalitarian political system cannot do without.

What purpose does the sign serve? And how does it sustain the post-totalitarian state? Most importantly, what does the sign have to do “dissent”? Taking a closer look at the life of Havel’s greengrocer can help sketch the beginnings of an answer to these questions. In post-totalitarian Czechoslovakia, the greengrocer believes he helps the workers by doing what the state asks of him. This may entail keeping his store organized and well-stocked. It might also require hosting a party meeting or reporting suspicious behavior in his shop. Regardless, the greengrocer need only follow the dictates he receives from headquarters. By serving the state, he serves the broader cause—the unification of the workers of the world. His work is a means to that end. The greengrocer contributes to something greater than himself by doing what the post- totalitarian state asks. This is an example of what I call end-state (ideological is Havel’s preferred term) political thinking. An internally consistent set of beliefs that motivate

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and justify a course of action, a distant end-state motivates and justifies the greengrocer’s continued support of the regime by allowing him to describe his daily work in elevated terms. Yet Havel insists that the Czech state does not help liberate the workers. Havel does not think any end-state can. But the idea that some future array of institutions might do so is seductive.

Havel thinks this is precisely what makes end-state political thinking so pernicious. As I demonstrate in more detail below, it capitalizes on a widely shared desire to avoid the needs of the concrete and particular other. Havel writes: “In everyone there is some willingness to merge with the anonymous crowd and to flow comfortably along with it down the river of pseudo-life” (1992, 145). Such thinking, Havel writes elsewhere, provides an “excuse everyone can use, from the greengrocer, who conceals his fear of losing his job behind an alleged interest in the unification of the workers of the world, to the highest functionary, whose interest in staying in power can be cloaked in phrases about service to the working class” (1992, 134). Although the greengrocer does not admit it, Havel thinks the greengrocer ultimately serves the state not because it serves the workers, but because it serves himself. Because the state does not ask for all that much, it allows the greengrocer to turn inward, to focus on himself and his own.

The result? The greengrocer, Havel writes, “has no sense of responsibility for anything higher than his personal survival” (1992, 153). He “is a demoralized person” (1992, 153).

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Havel acknowledges key differences between post-totalitarian communism and

Western liberal democracy. Unlike post-totalitarian political communities, Western liberal democracies are not dominated by a monolithic and all-encompassing state.

Those living in liberal democracies, for instance, need not help the workers unite. They can pursue their plan of life as they see fit—meaning, of course, that they can help the workers, the owners, or simply themselves. Although a variety of ideas about how to organize the state compete for public support in liberal democracies, Havel does not think that the truth inevitably emerges from the marketplace of political competition. In fact, he is convinced the opposite happens: “The more room there is in the Western democracies (compared to our world) for the genuine aims of life, the better the crisis is hidden from people and the more deeply do they become immersed in it” (1992, 207-

208).12

Indeed, Havel believes that liberal democratic citizens often end up as demoralized as their post-totalitarian counterparts. On the one hand, freed from any pseudo-concern about the workers, some direct their attention towards purely private pursuits—concerned with little more than their “personal survival.” For Havel, this is the pinnacle of demoralization. On the other hand, some liberal democrats subscribe to an alternative end-state—say democratic socialism or libertarianism. But regardless of

12 We might add that the impulse to “merge with the anonymous crowd and to flow comfortably along with it down the river of pseudo-life” means the least demanding political program will often be the most popular. 130

their preferred system, they can always blame the opposition when injustices continue to plague political communities. They are also trapped by the logic of end-state thinking.

Committed to the idea that justice is the product of some set of political institutions— and has little to do with their individual existence (beyond participating in elections)— they end up in the same place as the greengrocer. They serve some end-state that allegedly serves their cause. In reality, however, their preferred system usually serves themselves. They, too, are demoralized. “In a democracy,” Havel writes, “human beings may enjoy many personal freedoms and securities that are unknown to us, but in the end they do them no good, for they too are ultimately victims of the same automatism, and are incapable of defending their concerns about their own identity or preventing their superficialization or transcending concerns about their own personal survival”

(1992, 208).

Here Havel’s realism is most pronounced. Critical of attempts to engineer and implement institutional solutions to political problems, Havel does not think that liberal democratic institutions should be the primary focus of those concerned with injustice.

Not only is the status quo more intransigent than one might think, Havel believes that champions of end-state political thinking do not recognize the limits of their rational capacities nor the complexity of the problems they seek to solve. Anticipating the effects of what James Scott (1998) calls a “high-modernist ideology,” Havel writes, “Modern rationalism and modern science, though the work of people that, as all human works,

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developed within our natural world, now systematically leave it behind, deny it, degrade and defame it—and, of course, at the same time colonize it” (1992, 252). More importantly, Havel thinks end-state political thinking misidentifies the underlying cause of the worker’s plight. “To oppose [the current system] merely by establishing a different political line and then striving for a change in government would not only be unrealistic, it would be utterly inadequate, for it would never come near to touching the root of the matter. For some time now, the problem has no longer resided in a political line or program: it is a problem of life itself” (1992, 180).

But before turning to the problem of life itself, it is worth noting that not all members of either post-totalitarian or liberal democratic regimes are demoralized. Many are more engaged than the greengrocer, the privatist, or the partisan. That said, Havel seems to suggest that activists are often seduced by the same sort of end-state political thinking as the aforementioned figures. More specifically, they too think about political action as a means to some future end. And for Havel, this inevitably results in disillusionment when their plan does not deliver the hoped-for results: in the real-world, at least, no end-state can be fully implemented, and even if it could, Havel does not think it would produce justice. Sooner or later, Havel believes most activists eventually recognize this. As noted above, Havel argues that “‘dissent is an all-or-nothing gamble, and it is difficult to imagine a reasonable person embarking on such a course merely because he reckons that sacrifice today will bring rewards tomorrow” (1992, 153).

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Resigned to the fact of injustice, Havel thinks the activist directs his attention towards himself and his own. He, too, ends up demoralized.

Havel acknowledges that a few activists may persist. While Havel appears to admire their courage, he worries that their cure might be worse than the disease (1992,

159-160). Instead of institutionalizing justice, their end-state often turns out to be a product of the designer’s desire to create the world in his own image. More specifically,

Havel is concerned that all those who do not yield to the activists’ plans are at risk. “Life is something unfathomable, ever-changing, mysterious, and every attempt to confine it within an artificial, abstract structure inevitably ends up homogenizing, regimenting, standardizing and destroying life. What is a concentration camp, after all, but an attempt by utopians to dispose of those elements which don’t fit in” (Havel 1987, 82)? More committed to their preferred end-state than anything else, activists are left with only prudential reasons to refrain from harming those who they believe impede the realization of justice.

In sum, Havel believes that even the most well-intentioned and persistent efforts to institutionalize justice fail. In the real-world, most activists end up as demoralized as the greengrocer. Why sacrifice today when tomorrow’s rewards are far from guaranteed? Why continue resisting when one’s actions have little effect? End-state activists that persist, in contrast, risk doing more harm than good. Not only is their system unlikely to do what they hope, but significant collateral damage is likely to be

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incurred should they actually succeed in implementing it. Taken together, then, Havel understands “systemic change as something superficial, something secondary, something that in itself can generate nothing” (1992, 184).

It is worth noting here that Havel is neither an anarchist nor a conservative.

Regarding the former, he repeatedly stresses the importance of the rule of law and the set of institutions needed to sustain it. “The principle of legality, which provides both the point of departure and the framework for [‘dissident’] activities, is common to all

‘dissident’ groups in the Soviet bloc, even though individual groups have never worked out any formal agreement on that point” (1992, 182). Yet while the law can help sustain political life, “it is only one of several imperfect and more or less external ways of defending what is better in life against what is worse” (1992, 191). Havel insists that law is not a solution. “By itself, the law can never create anything better. Its purpose is to render a service and its meaning does not lie in the law itself. Establishing respect for the law does not automatically ensure a better life for that, after all, is a job for people and not for laws and institutions” (1992, 191). Regarding the latter, although conservatives might endorse Havel’s critique of end-state thinking and share his skepticism about the rational capacities of human beings, Havel neither celebrates nor endorses the status quo. And he does not seek piecemeal institutional reform. Conservatives are unlikely to follow him as he ardently pursues his cause, sacrifices for it, and exceeds the bounds of normal politics in the process.

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4.2 Identity as Radical Responsibility

Several scholars have traced Havel’s criticisms of what I have called end-state political thinking to the influence of his mentor and friend Jan Patočka, a student of the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl and contemporary of Martin Heidegger (e.g. Findlay

1999; Karfíková 2018; Krapfl 2018; Tucker 2000).13 They disagree, however, about Havel’s alternative approach to political action—his theory of “dissent.” In an erudite survey of the philosophy of twentieth century Czech dissidence, for instance, Tucker shows that

Havel offers an innovative and cutting critique of post-totalitarianism. But Tucker ultimately argues that Havel’s criticisms of liberal democratic politics miss their mark

(2000). Because Tucker is more sanguine about the salutary effects of political competition, he thinks liberal democratic institutions can do more than Havel appreciates. As a result, Tucker contends that Havel’s claims about “dissent” are idiosyncratic to his post-totalitarian context (2000, 169). Elshtain (1995), Lawler (1997), and Pontuso (2004) take Havel’s concerns about end-state thinking more seriously.

Reading him as a dogged defender of individuality, they suggest Havel believes the problems afflicting modern political communities can be overcome by a sort of

“dissident” virtue ethics.14 In other words, Havel seems to show the innate power of an individual determined to topple statism of all kinds. For these thinkers, Havel is

13 Havel himself was also a careful reader of Heidegger (Tucker 2000). 14 They disagree, however, about the content of the virtues they think Havel endorses. Elshtain sees Havel as a theorist of individual responsibility. Lawler understands him to be a Christian. Pontuso, a purveyor of “common sense” morality. 135

celebrated for supplying the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Popescu, in contrast, argues Havel is a theorist of “political freedom.” Putting him in conversation with

Hannah Arendt, Popescu contends that “Havel’s philosophical backbone is the fulfillment of political freedom through an ethical grounding in individual action” (2012, xiii).

Most democratic theorists, therefore, assume Havel’s theory of “dissent” is centrally concerned with individual freedom, if not some form of autonomy.15 This is certainly an important piece of the puzzle. But scholars have paid less attention to

Havel’s claims about what it means to be human, despite the fact that Havel himself suggests that the “theme of human identity” motivates much of his work: “All my plays, as I have said several times already, deal in one way or another with the theme of human identity and the state of crisis in which it finds itself” (1990, 92). I contend these claims are central to Havel’s theory of “dissent,” as well. In particular, I argue that Havel understands identity in broadly relational terms. Reading Havel’s ideas about radical responsibility through the rubric of relationality, I suggest that he is not as concerned with individual freedom, much less liberal democratic government, as scholars seem to think. Indeed, his commitment to radical responsibility generates a zealous approach to politics—one that exceeds the bounds of normal politics.

15 Popescu is an important exception. Although she recognizes the importance of an Arendtian kind of political freedom, she does not link responsibility with relationality. In a certain sense, what follows can be construed as an extension of Popescu’s analysis. 136

Havel is a theorist of “truth.” At first, truth appears to be no more than a negation of post-totalitarian ideology. One day, Havel tells his readers, the greengrocer takes the sign out of his store window. He refuses to vote in engineered elections. He stops playing the game. “In this revolt the greengrocer steps out of living within the lie.

He rejects the ritual” (1992, 146). Doing so, however, is disorienting. By publicly withdrawing his support for the “workers of the world,” he no longer has access to the overarching framework that justified (albeit tacitly) both his everyday work and his political activities. If he is not advancing the workers’ cause, why does he do what he does? More importantly, what should he do moving forward? Havel rejects the questions, at least initially. Instead of articulating the greengrocer’s new end-state, Havel insists on reconsidering his identity. Havel contends one must reflect on what it means to be human before considering what must be done. Hence Havel’s repeated calls for an

“existential revolution” (1992, 212).

Although he does not use the term, I take Havel to be committed to relationality.16 On the one hand, Havel thinks that to be human is to be vulnerable, to be in need: “[The] dramatic exposure of another, void of all obfuscating detail and all

‘appearances,’ reveals and presents to man his own primordial and half-forgotten

16 Drawing on the insights of his mentor Jan Patočka, a student of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, I contend Havel replaces Heidegger’s negative (and amoral) Daesin with radical responsibility to the concrete and particular other (1990, 310-311). Karfíková makes a similar claim, although she describes Havel’s break with Heidegger is slightly different terms: “In contrast to Heidegger in his old age, Havel emphasizes the importance of an individual’s moral conversion or ‘turn’ (2018, 274). In a certain sense, then, Karfíková also thinks of Havel in individualistic terms. 137

vulnerability, throws him back into it, and abruptly reminds him that he, too, stands alone and isolated, helpless and unprotected, and that it is an image of his own basic situation, that is, a situation we all share, a common isolation, the isolation of humanity thrown into the world” (1990, 323). On the other hand, just as each has needs, each also has capacities. And with those capacities come responsibilities. Embracing such responsibility is what it means to be human. This may sound familiar to readers of

Levinas.17 Indeed, the passages quoted here were inspired by one of Levinas’ essays on ethics that a friend of Havel sent him while he was in prison. As noted above, Havel reported finding Levinas’ work “magnificent, almost like a revelation” (1990, 311).

Havel elaborates: “[Levinas’] idea that…responsibility establishes an asymmetrical ethical situation, and that it cannot preached, but merely borne, corresponds exactly to my experience and my opinion” (1990, 305). Later, he adds, “We have an identity because we are responsible, wherein we find ourselves in a state of responsibility before having decided it, before we could choose to be responsible at all” (1990, 312). This is simply the truth of the matter.18

If to be human is to be radically responsible, what is one responsible to? Although

Havel sometimes refers to being responsible to the “whole” or “Being,” in his prison letters he emphasizes the concreteness and particularity of radical responsibility: “Even

17 Matuštík has ably highlighted some parallels between the two (2013, 190-193). 18 As I discuss in more detail below, Havel offers no defense for this claim. 138

the very absolute horizon of our relating is not something abstract that floats high above the heads of our neighbors, but something we approach through the medium of their disturbing existences…another person, in short, is the only entity capable of opening the human heart” (1990, 371). A short while later, he elaborates: “A better outlook for human communality—and thus for the world—does not, therefore, lie in new ideas, projects, programs, or organizations as such, but only in a renaissance of elementary human relationships…the acceptance of concrete responsibility for those close to one”

(1990, 371). Responsibility, Havel states elsewhere, is always already mediated or informed by the needs of the concrete and particular other: “It is only through a

‘you’…that the ‘I’ can genuinely become itself” (1990, 370). “

Steger and Relogle state that “[Havel’s] figuration of identity as responsibility sits at the core of his conception of a self connected to other selves and world, thus providing a counter-conception to the modern disengaged self” (Steger and Replogle

2005, 263). They note that Havel’s understanding of identity resembles the Buddhist notion of “interbeing.”19 Others have called him of a “pantheist” (Lawler 1997, 33).

Regardless of the label, Havel’s notion of identity as radical responsibility to the concrete and particular other is hard to square with liberal conceptions of selfhood. The

“dissident” does not choose her plan of life and pursue it as she sees fit. She is always

19 They argue that “Havel’s ontological insights coincide with the heart of Buddhist teaching: everything in the universe is connected and even the tiniest speck of existence is related to all other phenomena” (Steger and Replogle 2005, 263). 139

already radically responsible. And as we have seen, such responsibility cannot be outsourced to some end-state, liberal democratic or not. The same is true for the moral law or an allegedly universal set of virtues. Although the latter are ostensibly designed to meet the needs of others, they often function as an excuse to either ignore or neglect them. Or worse, they justify imposing one’s preferred laws or virtues in the name of justice or morality.

The implications of this shift in identity are significant. According to Havel, it sparks “a radical renewal of the relationship of human beings to what I have called the

‘human order,’ which no political order can replace” (1992, 209-210). It results, he continues, in “a renewed rootedness in the universe, a newly grasped sense of ‘higher responsibility,’ a new-found inner relationship to other people and to the human community” (1992, 210). In another prison letter, Havel says that those who recognize the truth about identity have a “new experience of being,” one of “interexistentiality,” and argues that it catalyzes “a radical and profound change in the relationship of the ‘I’ to the ‘you’ and thus, a newly meaningful substance to human communality” (1990,

371).

In “Politics and Conscience,” a speech Havel wrote but was not allowed to deliver, one can hear echoes the kind of interconnectedness that Gandhi and King famously defended. Recalling his response to a Western intellectual who wants to help him in his struggle against the Czech regime, Havel asks: “Is it not something that

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concerns us all equally? Are not my dim prospects, or conversely, my hopes his dim prospects and hopes as well? Was not my arrest an attack on him and the deceptions to which he is subjected an attack on me as well? Is not the suppression of human beings in

Prague a suppression of all human beings” (1992, 262)? Elsewhere, Havel uses the image of a river in attempt to capture life for those who live within the truth, recognizing that they have been thrown into radical responsibility: “By perceiving ourselves as part of the river, we accept responsibility for the river as a whole (which is folly in the eyes of all proprietors of dams)” (1990, 301). Because they embrace a different conception of what it means to be a human—for Havel, the truth about identity—“dissidents” cannot distance themselves from the needs of the concrete and particular other. There is no inner sanctum to which they can retreat. As Hugh Miller puts it in an essay on Levinas, one’s “home, as it turns out, is already occupied, by the homeless, by the Guatemalan refugee, by the Jewish refugee” (1995, 57).

4.3 “Living Within the Truth” as Small-Scale Work

Havel’s conception of radical responsibility may sound impossibly demanding, on the one hand, and hopelessly vague, on the other. Why assume responsibility in the first place? And if not attempting to secure some future end-state, what kind of action do “dissidents” partake in? Turning first to the former, Havel (a playwright, it is worth reiterating) relies on a local narrative, the Czech concept of “truth” to articulate his

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claims (Szuelecki 2018, 321).20 Truth has a long history in the Czech imaginary; it can be traced back to fifteenth century Bohemian theologian Jan Hus. Critical of many of the late medieval practices of the Roman Catholic elites, Hus was excommunicated for his attempts to reform the Church. He refused to recant, claiming he ultimately had to profess what his conscience dictated regardless of the costs. The costs were high; Hus was burned at the stake in Konstanz in 1414. Philosopher and “President-liberator” of modern Czechoslovakia, Thomas Masaryk, frequently invoked the image of Hus as he rose to power in the late nineteenth century. Although not necessarily a Hussite,

Masaryk stressed the importance of truth and conscience when attempting to spur the

Czechs to overthrow the Hapsburgs. The motto of the new Czech nation he helped found was “Truth prevails.” Truth also figured heavily in the thought of Patočka,

Havel’s mentor and a well-known twentieth century Czech philosopher. While Patočka preferred the truth of the Greeks over that of the Hussites, the concept figured prominently in his work and his late political activity. Coining the phrase “solidarity of the shaken,” Patočka eventually died during a lengthy police interrogation following his authorship of the letter produced by the Charta 77 “dissident” group (Tucker 2000).

Truth has always had social and political connotations in the Czech context. Hus was a friend of the Czech peasantry. His critique of the Roman Catholic Church was a

20 This section is also inspired by Capps’ (1997) similar yet distinct effort to contextualize Havel’s work. See also Pynsent (2018, 345) and Holy (1996). 142

challenge to the political and ecclesiastical elites of his day. Masaryk tried to empower ordinary Czechs long dominated and diminished by Hapsburg rule (Havel 1992, 172).

Patočka challenged the ruling regime on behalf of the “shaken” (Havel 1992, 157). While confrontational, Czech truth is not characterized by military might. It operates on a different register. For Hus, truth is sacrificial; the ultimate-truth teller is Jesus on the cross. For Masaryk, truth is morality; he, too, lifts up Jesus—but for his perfect life rather than his death. For Patočka, truth is dogged questioning; Socrates is the ideal type.

Although Havel is attuned to the history of truth, he does not recapitulate his predecessors’ ideas. As noted above, for him truth entails embracing radical responsibility. The “dissident” is Havel’s model.

The “dissident” attempts to live within the truth because that is simply what

Czechs must do. But what, exactly, does the “dissident” do? First and foremost, Havel is adamant that “dissidents” are not necessarily heroes or even political activists. Rather than attempt secure some future end-state, “dissidents” are ordinary people who

“carry” their responsibility with them wherever they go (Havel 1992, 195). Havel writes,

“The term ‘dissident’ frequently implies a special profession, as if, along with the more normal vocations, there was another special one—grumbling about the state of things. In fact, a ‘dissident’ is simply a physicist, a sociologist, a worker, a poet, individuals who are doing what they feel they must” (1992, 169).

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Havel tells another story—less well-known than the tale of the greengrocer but perhaps more important—to elaborate the more mundane aspects of “dissent.” It is the story of Š, a brewmaster in the brewery where Havel was assigned to work in the 1970s.

Š, Havel writes, took his job seriously. “He was proud of his profession and he wanted our brewery to brew good beer” (1992, 173). The brewmaster cared about the concerns of his compatriots—and he knew that they liked to enjoy a Czech pint. He worked hard, even incessantly, to ensure that the brewery produced quality beer. Good beer was a product of the brewmaster’s embrace of radical responsibility. According to Havel, Š was doing “small-scale work.” The concept, revitalized in the nineteenth century by

Masaryk as the everyday analogue to living within the truth, attempts to capture the importance of “honest and responsible work in widely different areas of life” (1992, 172).

Masaryk thought small-scale work would stimulate “creativity and national self- confidence” after years of Hapsburg domination (Havel 1992, 172). Masaryk, Havel reports, hoped such work might empower ordinary Czechs and Slovaks to “create the conditions for a more human life” (1992, 172).

Š’s brewery, however, was severely mismanaged. Politically influential superiors

“were bringing the brewery to ruin” (1992, 173). Unsurprisingly, this concerned him.

“Eventually,” Havel reports, “the situation became so bad that Š felt compelled to write a lengthy letter to the manager’s superior, in which he attempted to analyze the brewery’s difficulties” (1992, 174). When the manager’s superiors received Š’s letter, the

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brewer “was described as a ‘political saboteur.’ He was thrown out of the brewery and shifted to another one where he was given a job requiring no skill” (1992, 174). Š was fired for small-scale work—living his everyday life within the truth. Always already radically responsible, he attempted to provide his fellow Czechs good beer. As a result,

“he had become the ‘dissident’ of the Eastern Bohemian Brewery” (1992, 174). Š’s story,

Havel argues, is not unique. “I think this is a model case which, from another point of view, illustrates what I have said…you do not become a ‘dissident’ just because you decide one day to take up this most unusual career. You are thrown into it by your personal sense of responsibility...today, if we are not to be snobbish about it, we must admit that ‘dissidents’ can be found on every street corner” (1992, 175). “Once I begin,”

Havel writes elsewhere of radical responsibility, “…that is, once I try…here and now, right where I am, not excusing myself by saying that things would be easier elsewhere, without grand speeches and ostentatious gestures, but all the more persistently…as soon as I begin that, I suddenly discover, to my surprise, that I am neither the only one, nor the first, nor the most important one to have set out upon that road” (1990, 369).

Such examples show that Havel thinks that radical responsibility generates a different approach to everyday life. Ordinary people who live within the truth always keep the needs of the concrete and particular other in mind. Š brews good beer. But

“dissidents” are not just good brewers. They are, Havel notes, “writers who write as they wish without regard for censorship or official demands…they may be

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philosophers, historians, sociologists, and all those who practice independent scholarship…they may be teachers who privately teach young people things that are kept from them in state schools; clergymen who either in office or, if they are deprived of their charges, outside it, try to carry on a free religious life…the list could go on”

(1992, 178). Like Gandhi’s atman and King’s neighbor, Havel’s “dissidents” are first and foremost ordinary people concerned with “creating the conditions for a more human life” where they already are.

Consequently, “dissidents” are always in action, even when such action is likely to be costly and even though it is unlikely to bring about some better future.

“Dissidents” act, Havel writes, “regardless of the virtual certainty of sanctions and the uncertainty of any tangible results in the immediate future” (1992, 157). Havel speaks of living within the truth as the “one fundamental task from which all else should follow”

(1992, 269). And “the task,” Havel explains, “is one of resisting vigilantly, thoughtfully, and attentively, but at the same time with total dedication, at every step and everywhere” (1992, 269). Havel paid dearly for this, spending years in prison even though his efforts to live within the truth appeared to have no obvious effect whatsoever. Such is the fate of “anyone who resists too much, or despairs too much, or insists too much an having something…that exceeds the norm, or who tries to escape the standardized nothingness…in other words, anyone who sets himself apart is already on his way to place where he will no longer disrupt the prescribed forms of social life: to

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jail” (1992, 340-341). Ardently devoted to the needs of the concrete and particular other, he was willing to sacrifice his freedom of movement in order to live within the truth of radical responsibility.

4.4 Parallel Polis

“Dissidents” also engage in excessive kinds of politics.21 Insofar as the concrete and particular other is harmed by the existing order, those who embrace radical responsibility build what Havel calls “parallel structures” (1992, 192).22 This means that

“dissidents’” radical responsibility eventually compels them to exceed the bounds of normal politics. Yet Havel insists the kinds of political action that emerge—including the construction of alternative schools, theaters, churches, community centers, etc.—are the product of, not the motivating force behind, embracing one’s identity as radical responsibility. “Parallel structures,” Havel insists, “do not grow a priori out of a theoretical vision of systemic changes (there are no political sects involved), but from the aims of life and the authentic needs of real people” (1992, 194). Put otherwise, these parallel structures are the effect of ordinary people living within the truth, not an attempt to institutionalize radical responsibility. As these structures grow, a “parallel polis” emerges. The parallel polis, Havel writes, is “an area where a different life can be

21 Nor are they necessarily involved in the formal economy. Anyone can do small-scale work.. 22 As Havel notes, this is Czech philosopher Vaclav Brenda’s term. It names the public spheres that grow alongside the official post-totalitarian sphere. 147

lived, a life that is in harmony with its own aims and which in turn structures itself in harmony with those aims” (1992, 194).

Importantly, the parallel polis is open to all. Solidarity or universality, terms

Havel often uses, are not to be confused with uniformity.23 This should not necessarily be surprising given Havel refuses to identify the concrete and particular other whom one is responsible to. For Havel, I am always already responsible. “I agree with

Levinas,” Havel writes in a prison letter, “one cannot preach responsibility, one can only bear it, thus one cannot begin anywhere else but oneself. It sounds comical, but it is so: I must begin” (1990, 369). This means that living within the truth is incompatible with any form of tribalistic or exclusive politics: “It would be quite wrong to understand the parallel structures and the parallel polis as a retreat into a ghetto and as an act of isolation, addressing itself only to the welfare of those who had decided on such a course, and who are indifferent to the rest…such a concept would, form the start, alienate the notion of living with the truth from its proper point of departure, which is concern for others” (1992, 195). For Havel “the most interesting thing about

23 A brief detour into Czech history may help explain Havel’s rejection of various types of tribalism. Never home to a colonial power, people living in modern day Czech territory have been subjugated to a variety of European empires. Each attempted to impose its preferred social order on the inhabitants of Czech land. The Catholics (both during the late Roman empire and the Hapsburg monarchy) crushed religious difference. The Germans attempted to eradicate the Czech language while exterminating Czech Jews. The Russians tried to erase Czech history. Havel experienced the evils of German nationalism and Russian totalitarianism first-hand. His parents grew up under Habsburg absolutism. He knew the harms of homogenous politics quite well. None of this means that Czech history determined Havel’s commitment to a pluralism. But he was acutely aware of the problems with the alternative. So too were other Czechs (e.g. Hus, Masaryk, Patočka) who invoked truth when theorizing politics in conditions characterized by entrenched injustice. 148

responsibility is that we carry it with us everywhere…we cannot lie our way out of it by moving somewhere else” (1992, 195). Havel, then, is not a communitarian. Attempts to establish who is in and who is out cuts against one’s radical responsibility to every concrete and particular other. It places an abstract characteristic or future end-state in place of the other’s needs.

The parallel polis is also where excessive political action—stemming from

“dissidents” acting together to meet the needs of concrete and particular others—take shape. Ardently devoted to radical responsibility, “dissidents” are willing to sacrifice as they respond to the needs of the concrete and particular other. And doing so may entail engaging in novel and disruptive forms of extra-institutional politics. Such action begins with the greengrocer’s act of refusal or the brewer’s attempt to produce good beer. That said, when a refusal to put up a sign a store window turns into thousands of people refusing to leave Wenceslas Square in Prague, the former is forgotten. When what begins with a single letter to a manager becomes a mass strike, only the latter receives widespread attention. Indeed, the press may express awe at the seemingly sudden emergence of such excessive actions. Social scientists might describe it in strategic terms while normative theorists search for the historical significance of dissent. As Havel notes, “The more one is trapped in the world of appearances, the more surprising it is when something…happens” (1992, 158).

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Yet such excessive action need not be a mystery. It is merely the tip of the iceberg: “What will later be referred to as ‘citizens’ initiatives,’ ‘dissident movements,’ or even ‘oppositions,’ emerge, like the proverbial one tenth of the iceberg visible above the water” (Havel 1992, 177). And Havel insists that the tip of the iceberg—the march, mass strike, or popular movement—cannot be detached from the part that remains submerged. “It is not possible to think of [‘dissent’] separated from the whole background out of which it develops, of which it is an integral part, and from which it draws all its vital strength…the extent to which it is a real political force is due exclusively to its pre-political context” (1992, 177). Such politics, I argue, it is part and parcel of a life lived within the truth of radical responsibility. Ardently devoted to their cause, willing to sacrifice for it, and exceed the bounds of normal politics in the process,

“dissidents” are relational zealots. There are times Havel seems to suggest as much.

Better to be a “suicidal maniac” than conform in political communities permeated by profound injustices (1992, 374).24

Though perhaps a “suicidal maniac,” Havel is not interested in political violence.

He will suffer to live within the truth, but he cannot sacrifice the concrete and particular

24 Havel says as much in an essay written during the beginning of the uprisings across Central and Eastern Europe that would culminate in the revolutions of 1989. Expressing surprise at the outpouring of public support he was suddenly receiving, he writes: “People involved in the independent initiatives (of which the oldest and best known is Charter 77), who are prepared to express themselves freely regardless of the personal consequences, are no longer an isolated handful of suicidal maniacs” (1992, 374; emphasis added). That said, he also explicitly distances himself from the kind of zealotry I discuss in more detail in the last chapter (1990, 359). 150

other who’s needs prefigure his own. “Dissidents” are radically responsible even to those who perpetuate injustice. The “dissident,” then, refuses to harm or kill when responding to the needs of the concrete and particular other because she must also consider the needs of the other she would harm or kill. In other words, Havel’s

“dissident” cannot excise the worst parts of the body politic when attempting to mitigate injustice. She, too, would ultimately be “fatally stigmatized” in the process (Havel 1992,

184). Doing so places an abstract idea—the health of body politic, in this scenario— where the needs of the concrete and particular other must be. The “dissident,” Havel writes, “is and must be fundamentally hostile towards the notion of violent change as such to the system…simply because it places its faith in violence” (Havel 1992, 184).

Later, he adds: “As I have already mentioned, ‘dissidents’ tend to be skeptical about political thought based on the faith that profound social changes can only be achieved by bringing about (regardless of the method) changes in the system or the government, and the belief that such changes—because they are considered ‘fundamental’—justify the sacrifice of ‘less fundamental’ things, in other words, human lives…‘Dissident movements,’ as I have tried to indicate, share exactly the opposite view” (Havel 1992,

184). And in “Politics and Conscience,” he writes, “Even the most promising project of

‘general well-being’ convicts itself of inhumanity the moment it demands a single involuntary death” (Havel 1992, 266).

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That said, like Gandhi and King, Havel is not attempting to strike a balance between resignation and outright revolution. “The ‘dissident movements’”, Havel writes, “do not shy away from the idea of violent political overthrow because the idea seems too radical, but on the contrary, because it does not seem radical enough” (1992,

184). Havel is not a progressive moderate. He is a relational zealot; ardently devoted to radical responsibility, he is willing to sacrifice and exceed the bounds of normal politics as he responds to the needs of the concrete and particular other no matter the risks entailed in doing so.

4.5 Limitations and Objections

I am not arguing that Havel’s theory of “dissent” should be used as a model for political action. In fact, Havel does not either. “Dissent” begins with a recognition of one’s radical responsibility to the concrete and particular other. And recall that such responsibility, Havel writes, “cannot be preached, but only borne” (1990, 369).

That said, even if one bears it, Havel seems too sanguine about his ability to understand what radical responsibility entails. Because he often views the needs of the other as self-evident, Havel’s theory of “dissent” is not all that political. As decolonial theorists have pointed out, this masks power relations, paving the way for some to dominate concrete and particular others under the banner of responsibility (e.g. Fanon

2008; Ciccariello-Maher 2014). Put more bluntly, Havel has a problem with paternalism.

Havel might respond by arguing that the Czech concept of truth illuminates power

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imbalances. In other words, living within the truth might involve not just responding to the needs of the concrete and particular other, but prioritizing the demands coming from “below.” Yet much more would have to be said on this point to persuade readers that his ideas travel to political communities divided among racial, ethnic, or religious lines.

Moreover, there are times when Havel seems to slide into the mode of end-state thinking he claims to reject. More specifically, his invocation of abstract “Being” and his description of political action as a function of Being makes his account vulnerable to the same criticisms he levels against greengrocer.25 Put otherwise, Havel sometimes seems more interested in Being than the needs of the concrete and particular other.

Others might object to my labeling Havel a zealot. Such an objection is not without merit; Havel himself condemned fanaticism in a prison letter (1990, 362-363).

Why use the term zealot to describe him, then? Such a move may seem misleading, at best. As I discuss in the last chapter, Havel disavows the kind of zealotry I do: one underpinned by ontological exceptionalism. Havel does not, however, reject ardent devotion, sacrifice, or excessive politics in impossible circumstances. He embraces or even embodies such characteristics. Havel, however, does not have a name for his alternative. As noted above, he is uncomfortable with the “dissident” label. My claim here is Havel endorses a different kind of zealotry.

25 See, for instance, his lengthy reflections on Being in his last series of prison letters (1990, 317-376). 153

Finally, Havel’s claims about living within the truth are somewhat idiosyncratic.

Havel does not bother to defend his claims about identity as radical responsibility. As

Tucker notes, one either takes this or leaves it (2000, 169). In his prison letters, Havel explicitly admits as much (1990, 359). Speaking of the grounds of radical responsibility,

Havel writes: “There is here an undeniable intimation not only that ‘there is something behind it all,’ but also that there is somewhere in the fathomless depths (i.e. fathomless to me) of everything that exists there are no more ‘beyonds’” (1990, 359). This is not necessary a weakness as much as a limitation. Havel seems to be appealing to a sensibility or intuition that he believes is shared. It is worth noting again that Havel is a playwright—and that he repeatedly stated that he did not consider himself to be a philosopher.

4.6 Conclusion

I have argued that Havel draws on a relational account of the human to theorize a different kind of “dissent.” Those who live within the truth, as Havel puts it, recognize they are thrown into radical responsibility. The effects of this shift, grounded in Czech tradition, are profound. No longer only the domain of activists or experts, politics becomes the purview of small-scale workers attempting to meet the constantly evolving needs of others in their daily life. “Dissent,” then, is not a moderate means to a liberal democratic end. It is a function of Havel’s uncompromising commitment to relationality.

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I am not recovering Havel’s theory of “dissent” to suggest a new model of political action. But democratic theorists can learn something from relational zealots like

Havel. In its best form, Havel provides another reason to rethink the role of zealotry in pluralistic political communities. It is to this task that we now turn.

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5. Conclusion

On April 13, 1919, a regiment of British Indian soldiers led by Colonel Reginald

Dyer opened fire on several thousand unarmed Indians who had gathered in the

Jallianwala Bagh, Amritsar to celebrate Baisakhi, an annual festival celebrated by several faith traditions. According to official reports, 379 Indians were killed and over 1,100 more were injured. Some reports estimate more than 1,000 were murdered and over

4,000 were wounded for unwittingly disobeying an order stating that Indians could not hold public meetings (Wagner 2019). Colonel Dyer was never prosecuted for the massacre. He was even initially celebrated for putting down a “rebellion” (Wagner

2019).

This was not the first time a large group of innocent Indians died at the hands of the British empire. Although British methods were usually subtler, the results were often exponentially more devasting. Forced by English landlords to cultivate cash crops,

Indian farmers were often unable to survive droughts. Death totals remain unknown to this day, but millions of Indians succumbed to starvation in the last quarter of the nineteenth century (Sen 1982). While famines were less frequent in the twentieth century, two million more Indians died in the Bengal Famine of 1943 (Sen 1982).1 The

1 The British government of Bengal did little to counteract the famine because it stated that it did not detect a food shortage. 156

English typically did little to alleviate famines they caused in their colony; these events were attributed to providence or “nature” (Wagner 2019).

As if systematic shootings and eminently avoidable starvations were not enough to let native-born Indians know that their lives did not matter, the English also sustained a strict social hierarchy in India. Englishmen held all the most powerful political posts

(Sen 1982). The East India Company had a monopoly on economic trade. And even the most prominent Indians could never achieve the same social status as an Englishman.

Those that survived English colonialism were keenly aware that in the eyes of the political authorities they were not fully human.

The situation was not all that different halfway across the globe. In post- reconstruction United States, the murder of black Americans was carried out by armed mobs rather than federal generals (Cone 2013, 8-11). But the results were similar.

Militias, the police, and their civilian supporters sustained a campaign of racial terror across the country by lynching over 5,000 black people in the first half of the twentieth century (Stevenson 2018). Unlike the Amritsar massacre, most of the perpetrators of these murders were never named. That does not mean they were not known; notices about lynchings were frequently published in local newspapers well in advance (Cone

2013, 9). Lynchings were well attended, as horrific photographic evidence confirms. In fact, postcards depicting these awful affairs were popular during the lynching era (Cone

2013, 9).

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Beyond these unthinkable acts of violence, African Americans also suffered from extreme destitution. Fewer died of famine, but most were trapped in conditions of abject poverty—both in cities and rural areas. Barred from unions, the vast majority of black folks that secured employment were forced to toil in jobs that paid next to nothing. And if they somehow managed to accumulate enough money to escape urban slums or the sharecropping system, they could not relocate to more prosperous places. Formal and informal institutions greatly restricted economic mobility not only in the South, but across the United States (Rothstein 2017).

Like native-born Indians, black Americans knew that the ruling elites and the white majority that supported them believed black peoples were lesser beings. Jim Crow laws in the American South codified this sentiment. In the North, slightly subtler policies conveyed the same message. Even black people who avoided the spontaneous acts of white violence or the slower suffering imposed by a racist socio-economic order could not escape the fact that in the eyes of the ruling elites they were seen, at best, as second-class citizens.

Life for Czechs living in a Soviet satellite state was less precarious. But Czechs had witnessed Stalin’s purges as well as the Soviet response to uprisings in Hungary in

1956. Up to five thousand Hungarians were killed as the Soviet Union re-asserted control over its colony (BBC 2006). And Soviet tanks had rolled into Prague and other

Czech cities in response to the 1968 Prague Spring. Nobody lost their life, but the threat

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of repression cast a cloud over Czechs. Havel called the years following the Soviet’s 1968 crackdown the Prague Winter (1992). Although dissent was usually met with imprisonment rather than death, and although nobody starved, Czechs lived in the shadow of state or state-sanctioned violence.2

In sum, the political communities of Gandhi, King, and Havel were saturated by state or state-sanctioned violence. While violence may be an essentially contested concept, I use it here to capture types of harm including but certainly not limited to the

“physical blow” (Butler 2020, 1-25). More specifically, I contend that Gandhi, King, and

Havel were caught in what Judith Butler describes as a “force field of violence” (2020, 7).

Along with the very real threat of the physical blow, each was a member of a group that suffered the violence of famine, poverty, unjust imprisonment, etc. Gandhi and King, of course, were eventually assassinated. Both anticipated such an outcome.

As such, I believe Gandhi, King, and Havel each had good reason to engage in uncivil or forceful forms of resistance as they challenged the sources of state or state- sanctioned violence. Such resistance could have been justified either on the logic of reciprocity or self-defense (Butler 2020, 8). As noted above, Candice Delmas argues that such circumstances demand that liberal democratic citizens resist, perhaps uncivilly or

2 Imprisonment, of course, sometimes led to death. As noted earlier, the eminent Czech philosopher Jan Patočka died in mysterious circumstances shortly after a lengthy police interrogation. 159

forcefully (2018, 64-71).3 All this means that the use of force was a legitimate option for

Gandhi, King, and Havel. So too, it is worth noting, was staying home. None of the three could have been blamed for foregoing any form of political action in an attempt to protect themselves and their loved ones from harm. An uncompromising commitment to nonviolent political action in such circumstances, however, seems inexplicable.

From a certain perspective, it is. A brief review of their claims illustrates. Recall that for Gandhi nonviolent political action is what happens to the individual self that has reduced itself to a zero. Becoming a cipher, it waits for Truth to propel it into social service, including but certainly not limited to acts of civil resistance, regardless of cost or consequence. A performative contradiction constitutes the core of King’s “black faith;”

King believes in a God that made, makes, and is making a way out of no way (with love). King embodies Jesus’ love in the world even though he thought that if he did so, he would be killed. Havel’s claims are less traditionally religious. Yet his existential sense of responsibility is remarkably demanding. So demanding, in fact, that Havel’s ideas about “dissent” are impossible to justify to those who, unlike Havel, do not think that to be human is to be thrown into radical responsibility. Why gamble everything for the promise of nothing? Even more disconcerting, all three acknowledge the necessity of suffering on behalf of the concrete and particular other.

3 Precisely what kind of force figures like Gandhi, King, and Havel might have legitimately employed is another matter—and one that is beyond the purview of this project. See Pasternak (2018) for a discussion of such debates. 160

Most recent scholarship on Gandhi, King, and Havel neglects these parts of their theories of nonviolent political action. Often associated with the moderate political tradition, Gandhi, King, and Havel’s respective commitments to nonviolence are taken to be a function of their flexibility, dedication to normal politics, and preference for the practical rather than the perfect. I have argued that Gandhi, King, and Havel are not political moderates. If they were, they would have stayed home. More importantly, mistakenly linking Gandhi, King, and Havel with political moderation comes with costs. On the one hand, lifting up nonviolent political action as a middle way between resignation and revolt risks masking the background conditions of incivility or violence that justify or even call for an uncivil or forceful response. On the other hand, the moderate reading of

Gandhi, King, and Havel downplays the kind of sacrifices that nonviolent political action often seems to entail. And as Juliet Hooker demonstrates, the burdens of sacrifice are not evenly distributed, especially in the United States (2016). Hooker raises an important question that any defender of moderate nonviolence would do well to address: “What is the economy of suffering that requires protesters or victims of…violence to suffer more in order to merit care and concern on the part of their fellow citizens, when their lives are already shaped by violence” (2016, 461)? Attempts to recover a moderate kind nonviolent political action puts the theorist in the rather uncomfortable position of telling those harmed by state or state-sanctioned force that their suffering is not in vain when, in fact, it may be.

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Setting aside the pernicious if unintended consequences of linking political moderation and nonviolence, I have also argued that attempts to derive a theory of moderate nonviolent political action from figures like Gandhi, King, and Havel are analytically inadequate. They do not capture the broader thrust of Gandhi, King, and

Havel’s views. Taking them on their own terms reveals that they are not really resistors, disobedients, or “dissidents.” Their struggles against the ruling regime are only one part of their broader attempt to respond to the concrete and particular other’s needs. Or, to return to Havel’s preferred metaphor, “dissent” is merely the tip of the iceberg. As noted above, Havel is adamant that the tip of the iceberg—the march, mass strike, or popular movement—cannot be detached from the part that remains submerged, namely the

“dissident’s” (or social servant’s or neighbor’s) uncompromising commitment to relationality. As such, Havel thinks “dissidents” are more accurately described as small- scale workers—ordinary people who embrace the radical responsibility that constitutes their existence. Gandhi and King make similar claims. For each, nonviolence is a way of life rather than a tactic, a form of communication, or a way to turn the wheels of history.

This helps explain why normal politics and the kinds of political institutions that enable the politics of debate, negotiation, and compromise are not central to their theories of nonviolent political action. Whereas political moderates seem most concerned with protecting or building a more or less just order, the atman, the neighbor, and the “dissident” each aim to birth new forms of sociality. By foregrounding their

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ideas about resistance, disobedience, or “dissent,” democratic theorists overlook the fact that Gandhi, King, and Havel were more interested in re-existence than resistance.4

Gandhi wanted to establish an ashram, a place for servants dedicated to realizing the atman could channel the force of Truth in the broader world. King envisioned a beloved community of neighbors determined to dismantle white supremacy. Havel’s anti- political politics celebrated the small-scale worker and her efforts to build a parallel polis as part and parcel of her radical responsibility. To be sure, these efforts may require confronting the existing political institutions. But again, Gandhi, King, and Havel were not primarily against anything.

That the constructive parts of Gandhi, King, and Havel’s ideas have been neglected makes some sense given the distinct yet related myths about secularization and liberal democracy. Gandhi and King’s religious ideas about other ways of engaging in politics offer little promise in an increasingly secular world whereas Havel’s rather mystical musings about anti-political politics are less than fashionable for those convinced that liberal democratic government marks the end of history. Yet in a time when both secularization and liberal democracy have come under increased scrutiny, not just by reactionaries but also by radicals, these three figures offer interesting alternatives. Although I have some affinities for Gandhi, King, and Havel’s attempts to articulate different kinds of politics, I am not interested in providing a systematic

4 I borrow this phrase from Mignolo and Walsh (2018). 163

defense of their constructive ideas here. Rather, the point I am trying to make is that

Gandhi, King, and Havel’s ideas about nonviolent political action cannot be neatly extracted from the parts of their thought that democratic theorists are less interested in recovering. For better or worse, Gandhi, King, and Havel are not political moderates; they are zealots.

5.1 Making Sense of Zealots

Real-world political communities, formally democratic or not, continue to be plagued by intransigent injustices.5 So intransigent are such injustices that most political moderates are unlikely to engage in the kind of political action that seems necessary to mitigate them. The costs are too high, and the likelihood of success is too low. For zealots like Gandhi, King, and Havel, however, such calculations are unimportant.

Again, ardently devoted to relationality, they are willing to sacrifice everything for the promise of nothing as they attempt to respond to the cry of the concrete and particular other. Maybe they succeed. Maybe they do not. Either way, they seem to have a part to play in pluralistic political communities.

Yet they are also unafraid of exceeding the bounds of normal politics. Not only did these three figures engage in boycotts, sit-ins, and other highly disruptive and often illegal forms of extra-institutional political action, they did so because of their

5 In the American context, these include mass incarceration, cruel immigration policies, environmental degradation, etc. 164

commitments to Truth, God, and radical responsibility, respectively. Moreover, it is only in hindsight that the injustices they contested were, in fact, recognized as injustices. By definition, zealous political actors are willing to exceed the bounds of normal politics as they ardently pursue a cause. Yet many turn out to introduce, entrench, or exacerbate injustice. How to evaluate zealotry in political communities characterized by deep disagreement about (in)justice?

For the reasons mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, a blanket prohibition on violence is unsatisfying. In a violent world, some forms of uncivil or forceful resistance may be necessary (Delmas 2018). The two leading contemporary theorists of zealotry, Joel Olson and Alberto Toscano, seem to anticipate Delmas’ powerful argument. As a result, Olson and Toscano have both offered different ways to theorize zealotry. Aiming to rescue zealotry from religious fundamentalism, Olson argues that

“the principle issue regarding zealotry today is how it relates to democratic institutions and practices” (2007, 696).6 For Olson, one must determine whether “the zealous activity enhance[s] or undermine[s] democracy” (2007, 696). Olson, however, does not explain what kind of democracy he has in mind. Nor was he able to complete the manuscript where he promised to articulate his theory of zealotry in greater detail, including,

6 Olson, for instance, uncritically cites a study suggesting that “abolitionist zealotry actually led to secularization rather than fundamentalism” (2007, 695). More generally, Olson has relatively little to say about the religious commitments of the abolitionist zealots he admires. 165

presumably, clarifying what constitutes democratic zealotry and what does not.7

Furthermore, Olson’s commitment to Carl Schmitt’s conception of the political overdetermines his account of zealotry; not all democratic zealots are as committed to

Schmitt’s friend/enemy distinction as Olson seems to be. Relatedly, Olson’s superficial treatment of religion means he overlooks strains of zealotry that merit greater attention, like Gandhi and King’s.

Toscano also rejects Olson’s attempt to analytically link political Manicheanism and zealotry, albeit for different reasons (2017, 9n22). Understanding “fanaticism” as a

“boundless drive to the universal,” Toscano defends fanatics or zealots who are unwilling to compromise on equality (2017, xii). More generally, Toscano “mine[s] a set of theoretical debates and controversies around fanaticism so as to reconstitute a political vocabulary capable of accommodating both enthusiasm and abstraction as inextricable elements of any politics of emancipation” (2017, xxvi). Toscano endeavors to show a commitment to universalist egalitarianism—for him, the source of emancipatory politics—is often dismissed as fanatical or zealous. For Toscano, it seems, a “fanatic” is little more than an epithet for Marxists. Toscano’s historical project is an extraordinary resource for those interested in past and present debates between liberals and Marxists.

But because he does not say as much about non-Marxist fanatics, Toscano’s work is less helpful for making sense of relational zealots like Gandhi, King, and Havel.

7 Olson died suddenly and tragically in 2012 (Ciccariello-Maher 2014). 166

Although he does not explicitly address zealotry, John Rawls tried to create space for some excessive political action in pluralistic political communities. In his efforts to move beyond modus vivendi or prudential liberalism, Rawls developed an account of public reason to adjudicate disputes about what kind of political action can be legitimate

(2005, 212-254). Very briefly, public reasons are justifications for actions of public import that are accessible to all (reasonable) people (2005, 217). Jürgen Habermas offers a distinct yet ultimately converging account of political legitimacy (2015, 287-328).8 Most importantly for our purposes here, both endorse a version of what Jacob Levy calls the

“liberal rationalist” approach to legitimacy (2017, 1). Political action that exceeds the bounds of normal politics can be justified provided it accords with the demands of

(universal) reason.

Setting Havel aside for the moment, the reading of Gandhi and King I have advanced here poses a problem for rationalists like Rawls and Habermas. 9 Gandhi and

King’s uncompromising commitment to relationality not only challenges the separateness of persons, their zealous and highly disruptive political actions are grounded in what Rawls calls a controversial “comprehensive doctrine” (2005, 212-

8 More concerned with procedure than Rawls (who did not require public reasoning as a condition of political legitimacy), Habermas contends that democratic norms are those that would emerge from ideal speech conditions. There are many important differences between Rawls’ and Habermas’ respective accounts of public justification. And in recent years, both accounts have been updated in interesting and unexpected ways, especially Habermas’ (2008). 9 I do not discuss Havel here not because I think his claims are publicly justifiable but because his “comprehensive doctrine” is not as obviously inaccessible as Gandhi and King’s. And if the public reason standard cannot account for Gandhi and King, it is inadequate regardless of whether it accounts for someone like Havel (again, I do not think it does). 167

254).10 According to the standards of public reason, Gandhi and King are unreasonable.

By unreasonable, I mean to capture the fact that their political actions cannot be justified to those who do not hold similar views about Truth or God; as such, Gandhi and King did not act “in accordance with a constitution the essentials of which all citizens may reasonably be expected to endorse in the light of principles and ideals acceptable to them as reasonable and rational” (Rawls, 2005, 217). Again, Gandhi was propelled into action by Truth and King embodied the kind of love that made a way out of no way.

Most problematically for defenders of the public reason approach to legitimacy, Gandhi and King each asked their followers to make significant sacrifices as they engaged in excessive political action. “Dangerous unselfishness,” to return to King’s phrase, is not something that can be explained “in terms each could reasonably expect that others might endorse as consistent with their freedom and equality” (Rawls 2005, 218).

This leaves democratic theorists committed to universal accessibility in the horns of a dilemma: Gandhi and King cannot be both unreasonable and politically legitimate.

Consequently, most democratic theorists tend to overlook or downplay their religiosity

10 They are incompatible with even more flexible accounts of public reason (e.g. Gaus 2012). Although there is not space to engage this debate in any detail, my claim is that none of Gandhi, King, and Havel’s justifications for nonviolent political action fit the overlapping consensus of acceptable reasons nor a set of established norms in their respective political communities. They were outliers. Others may have had different reasons for endorsing something that, at first glance, appeared to resemble the kind of political action Gandhi, King, and Havel endorsed. Yet the argument I have advanced here is that Gandhi, King, and Havel’s dedication to nonviolent political action is part and parcel for their fundamental commitments. The nonviolent moderate, then, is simply doing something different than the relational zealot. Moderate nonviolence can be publicly justified, of course. But if the nonviolent moderate fails to recognize that not all who are nonviolent are political moderates, she will also fail to recognize that the relational zealot’s actions are publicly unjustifiable. 168

and, as a result, the conception of the human embedded in their comprehensive doctrines. As we have seen, Gandhi becomes a moderate realist and King a communicative moderate (Habermas 1985; Mantena 2012b; Rawls 2009).

Consequentialist or communicative justifications of nonviolent political action make sense, it is worth noting—they can be publicly justified. Yet I have shown that the moderate reading of Gandhi and King is inadequate. Both are unreasonable zealots.

They are ardently devoted to a cause, willing to sacrifice everything for the promise of nothing, and exceed the bounds of normal politics in the process.11

I am not the first one to point out the pitfalls of liberal rationalism, of course.

Many have leveled similar criticisms against Rawls, Habermas, and their many followers.12 Defending a “liberal pluralist” position, Levy carves out space for groups organized “according to the rules and values” of their members, including rules and

11 As a quick aside, it is worth noting that none of the three is primarily or principally interested in reciprocity, much less mutual reason-giving. As noted above, each lived in circumstances where reciprocity demanded force or violence. And because they rejected the latter (violence), they were not nearly as committed to the former (reciprocity) as democratic theorists who assume more or less just background conditions. Indeed, contesting profound injustices seems to require a fundamentally different approach than the kinds of politics needed to sustain the more or less just basic structure in a realistic utopia. 12 Radical democrats like Chantal Mouffe also attack the rationalist tradition (2000, 17-35). I am broadly sympathetic to the radical democratic project, especially its critique of high liberalism. But given they have less to say about excessive political action, what follows is an attempt to buttress radical democratic theories of democracy. Wolin’s important essay on fugitive democracy is especially instructive here (1994). While clearly appreciating the importance of extra-institutional political action, Wolin seems almost resigned to the fact that there is no way to distinguish between groups that exceed the bounds of normal politics. “Democracy,” Wolin writes, “is a rebellious moment that may assume revolutionary, destructive proportions, or may not” (1994, 23). My claim is that these rebellious moments can be theorized by taking ontology seriously. 169

values rationalists find offensive (2017, 1).13 Although Levy acknowledges that some intermediate groups might be harmful, he contends that the tension between

“rationalism and pluralism within liberal thought is longstanding…[and] also that it is to a large degree irresolvable” (2017, 3). He ultimately favors the pluralist tradition while attempting to retain the tension between it and liberal rationalism. Levy’s explicit acknowledgement of the limits of liberal pluralism is admirable. Moreover, he offers a helpful corrective to the dominant rationalist tradition. Yet Levy has less to say about political action that exceeds the bounds of normal politics. If rationalists are overly concerned with universal accessibility, pluralists like Levy have failed to appreciate that not all excessive political action introduces, entrenches, or exacerbates injustice.14

How, then, to theorize zealotry? A prohibition on uncivil or forceful resistance is unsatisfactory. Democracy is too vague a standard and the universal egalitarian approach is too Euro-centric. Public reason is too restrictive; it throws the baby out with the bathwater. But the pluralist approach has little to say about political action that exceeds the bounds of normal politics, some types of which seem necessary to mitigate intransigent injustices. Some such action, of course, seems to have the opposite effect. Is there any systematic way to parse the claims of zealots? And if so, can there be space for

13 Also see, for example, Shklar (1989). 14 See Kirshner (2014) for an example of how liberal pluralists can address the threats of extremism. In a certain sense, what follows is an attempt to extend Kirshner’s insights. 170

zealots like Gandhi, King, and Havel in pluralistic political communities without embracing all zealots?

5.2 Ontology and Political Legitimacy

Ontology, I suggest, can help democratic theorists answer these important questions. Traditionally defined as the science of being, I am principally interested in the subject of the recent “ontological turn” in political theory: human being or social ontology

(White 2000, 3; Widder 2012, 1). What, theorists of this turn have asked, does it mean to be human? Is one a sovereign subject? An autonomous agent? A preference maximizer?

A manifestation of existing power relations? A biological organism? A member of a community? Something else altogether? Moreover, how, if at all, does one’s answer to these ontological questions inform one’s approach to politics?15

Nathan Widder points out that most democratic theorists appear to believe that the political effects of ontology are negligible (2012, 1).16 Following the lead of Isaiah

Berlin and Rawls, democratic theorists seem to think either a) their political theories are neutral regarding ontology or b) build on an overlapping consensus about human being

15 It is worth noting here that these questions are related to but distinct from metaphysical questions. The latter involve claims about the matters that transcend the physical world, like “the relationship between spirit and matter, the nature of eternal truths and highest goods, the existence of free will versus determinism,” etc. (Widder 2012, 2). While one’s metaphysical commitments certainly influence one’s conception of human being, ontology cannot be reduced to metaphysics. To reiterate: the latter, metaphysics, makes claims about reality writ large while the former, ontology, theorizes the nature of actually existing entities. 16 Most postmodern and post-structural political theorists, on the other hand, have dismissed ontology as something to be deconstructed. 171

(Widder 2012, 2-5).17 Neither strategy is convincing. On the one hand, there is no neutral or empirical position on ontology. On the other hand, there is no overlapping consensus about what it means to be human. Although there is not space to summarize the criticisms that feminists, critical race theorists, queer theorists, post-colonial theorists, and many others have leveled against both thinkers, suffice to say Berlin and Rawls have unreflectively universalized the ontology of a select group of Anglo-American academics.18 To be human, on these accounts, is to be a self—a separate subject of one type or another.19

The point is not that Berlin and Rawls’ ontologies are wrong, but that ontology is more contested than most democratic theorists typically assume. And this dispute is not merely academic. Tracing conceptions of the human from pre-Enlightenment Europe to the present, Sylvia Wynter shows that some ontologies are deadly. More specifically, she demonstrates how ontological claims underpinned the efforts of the European zealots who went to the “New World” during the so-called Age of Discovery (2003, 262-263).20

17 White makes a similar argument (2000). 18 See, for example, Butler (2011), Chakrabarty (2007), Fanon (2008), Foucault (1982), Lorde (2012), Maldonado-Torres (2007), Mills (2014), Wynter (2003), among many others. More troublingly, because the experiences of those who suffer from gender, racial, sexual, and colonial injustices are not represented in Rawls’ account, his theory of justice says little about how one might mitigate them. 19 I discuss the various forms that selfhood takes in more detail below. Suffice to say that I am not attempting to defend a kind of communitarianism. 20 Wynter uses Fanon’s term “sociogeny” rather than ontology in her analysis. For Fanon, sociogeny captures the contingency of categories that assumed to be ontological—e.g. race (2008). I use ontology here not because I think that race is an ontological category—it clearly is not—but because white supremacists think it is. Moreover, Gandhi, King, and Havel understood their relatedness to others in ontological rather 172

Ardently devoted to their cause(s), these zealots exceeded the bounds of normal politics as they risked everything for the promise of nothing.21 And they were unafraid of sacrificing anyone or anything that stood between them and salvation and/or progress.

Wynter’s genealogy of the Western subject—what she refers to as the history of Man— both shows that ontology merits the attention of democratic theorists and, as I discuss in the next section, helps theorists distinguish between zealots.

Wynter details how (metaphysical) natural law arguments placed the first

Portuguese and Spanish explorers—again, zealots in their own right—higher on the

Great Chain of Being than the indigenous peoples they encountered (2003, 291-300).

Because they were not Christians, indigenous peoples were deemed ontologically inferior to the Portuguese and Spanish. Not only did this preclude them from political power in newly established colonies, their lesser status meant they were subject to the whims of those above them in God’s ordained order; Portuguese and Spanish zealots who believed imperial expansion to be a divine mandate did not hesitate to destroy the lesser beings who resisted their efforts (2003, 293). Protestant colonists from England

than sociogentic terms. My principal concern here is not to convince white supremacists that race is a social construct, but to help democratic theorists distinguish between zealots. 21 Christopher Columbus, for instance, understood himself to be on a religious crusade (Delany 2006; 2011). In a diary entry shortly after landing in the Caribbean, Columbus “says that he wanted to find enough gold and almost equally valuable spices ‘in such quantity that the sovereigns…will understand and prepare to go conquer the Holy Sepulcher; for thus I urged Your Highness to spend all the profits of this my enterprise on the conquest of Jerusalem’” (cited in Delany 2006, 261). 173

had slightly different metaphysical commitments: they believed they were God’s elect.

And this belief in election—evidenced by their alleged (economic) virtues— underpinned Protestant ontology. The unelected, again, were lesser beings. Indeed, those outside God’s covenant—the damned—were treated as tools to be used to improve the land that God had granted his chosen people (2003, 306). This legitimized the murder of indigenous peoples as well as the system of chattel slavery Protestant zealots introduced to the world.

Critically, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, these ontologies were racialized and thus race became a permanent feature of Christian political theology

(Wynter 2003, 300). “White” Europeans were either atop the Great Chain of Being (in the

Catholic tradition) or constituted the core of God’s elect (in the Protestant tradition). J.

Kameron Carter argues that this is not an accident of history (2008). Christian theology has been proto-racist since early Christian theologians attempted to purge Jesus of his

Jewishness. In more technical terms, Carter contends that the supersessionist impulse at the heart of Christianity fostered a racial imaginary long before Christians adopted modern conceptions of racial difference (2008, 79-121). During the Enlightenment, Carter argues, allegedly “pure” Christians tried to cleanse their tradition of its Jewish roots while guarding against invasion from the Muslim beyond city walls (2008, 87-89). For white Christians in the New World, black people replaced members of Judaism and indigenous peoples slotted into the figure of the medieval Muslim. Both black and

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indigenous people were understood to be lesser beings, outside of the elected community.

During the European Enlightenment, white Christian theology mutated again.

Rationality replaced God’s election. Instead of being God’s chosen people, white

Europeans’ ontological status was justified due to their allegedly superior reasoning abilities (Wynter 2003, 264). Wynter argues that white supremacy was naturalized in the nineteenth when phrenologists sought to establish the scientific basis of Europe’s racial hierarchy (2003, 303-311). As the concept of “God” became increasingly untenable, white

European zealots turned first to racialized accounts of rationality and then to race science to justify the continued expropriation of non-European peoples’ resources as well as the destruction of all indigenous people who stood between them and their cause. Wynter shows how metaphysical sources of white supremacy changed even though the ontology underpinning it did not: to be fully human was to be white—defined as the absence of the non-white other (2003, 264-265). This insight is critically important and bears repeating: the ontological status of white European zealots remained constant despite the fact that the metaphysical justifications for that status—God, reason, science—were continually revised. Hence Wynter’s conclusion those who conquered and colonized the New World were driven by ontology as well as moral principles and political institutions (2003).

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More generally, I contend that white supremacy is a paradigmatic case of

“ontological exceptionalism.” According to the ontology of white supremacy, white subjects—whether Christian Man, rational Man, or biological Man—represent the essence of what it means to be fully human. All other ways of being human—and by extension, all other living things—are not only lesser, they exist in various states of non- being or to use John Stuart Mill’s preferred term, “nonage” (1991, 69).

In a certain sense, this is low-hanging fruit. But I think there are broader implications for recognizing the ontological dimension of white supremacy. For one, it shows why white supremacy continues to structure political life decades after racism has been morally condemned and formal political equality has been extended to most black and indigenous people in Western liberal democracies (Warren 2018). The ontological turn, in other words, helps illuminate slavery’s “afterlives,” to use Saidiya

Hartman’s felicitous term (1997). Scholars like Carter (2019), Christina Sharpe (2016),

Calvin Warren (2015, 2018), and many others have written persuasively and extensively on the ontology of white supremacy. I have little to add to their analysis. But I want to extend their insights to show that the kind ontological exceptionalism underpinning

European conquistadors and colonists can help democratic theorists theorize zealotry as well as other political phenomena.

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5.3 A Negative Standard of Ontological Exceptionalism

Most importantly for our purposes here, I contend that Wynter’s insights point to a key difference between zealots.22 Like Gandhi, King, and Havel, many conquistadors and colonists were ardently devoted to their cause, willing to sacrifice for it, and exceeded the bounds of normal politics in the process. But unlike the former, the latter’s views were underpinned by a kind of ontological exceptionalism. Conquistadors and colonists understood themselves to be ontologically superior to indigenous or African peoples (as well as Muslim and Jewish peoples) they encountered. For white European zealots, the lives of indigenous and African peoples were ungrievable, to invoke Butler’s term (Butler 2020). At best, then, ontological exceptionalism offers an explanation for the material inequalities that continue to plague the ontologically “unexceptional” long after moral principles change and/or political institutions become more inclusive. At worst, the unexceptional are subject to the violence of ontologically exceptional zealots. As noted above, such zealots do not hesitate to sacrifice the unexceptional as they ardently pursue their cause outside the bounds of normal politics.

22 I am not concerned with ontologically exceptional political moderates here. As long as they stick to the normal politics, such political actors seem relatively harmless. The question of whether they inevitably exceed the bounds of normal politics—or manipulate the rules of normal politics—to “defend” themselves against those who are not fully human, however, is an interesting and important one. In the Americas, white supremacist zealots seem to recede after white Christianity was institutionalized. But when status of the ontologically exceptional theological-political community was challenged, like during Reconstruction and Civil Rights eras in the United States, zealous groups like the Ku Klux Klan seem to resurface. Perhaps zealots do not disappear as much as retreat. A more detailed discussion of such matters is beyond the purview of this project. 177

Gandhi, King, and Havel, in contrast, reject ontological exceptionalism. As noted above, Gandhi, King, and Havel are always already (ethically) related to every concrete and particular other they encounter. They are thrown into relationality. As a result, the needs of the concrete and particular other prefigure their own. Not only are they not superior to any concrete and particular other, they are always already attempt to serve her. In a certain sense, they are the concrete and particular other’s inferior.23 This does not mean Gandhi, King, and Havel refused to acknowledge that some were, in fact, their moral and political enemies. Nor does it mean that they ignored power differentials between themselves and the concrete and particular other.24 And, of course, they did not pretend that there would be no conflict or disagreement about defining the needs of the concrete and particular other.

It does mean, however, that sacrificing—or outright destroying—the concrete and particular other is not an option. In a certain sense, zealots’ views on sacrifice functions as a heuristic; ontologically exceptional zealots—conquistadors and colonists, for example—sacrifice those without the same ontological status as they ardently pursue

23 The risk of paternalism is ever-present, of course. But as I discuss in more detail below, that risk is inherent to all forms of moral and political action. 24 Yet, as noted above, each was criticized for misunderstanding the needs of some. Gandhi was criticized for his patronizing attitude towards the untouchables, King has been criticized for ignoring the needs of women, and Havel has also been accused of paternalism. These criticisms are all well-founded. 178

their cause outside the bounds of normal politics. Relational zealots like Gandhi, King, and Havel can do no such thing. They are only willing to sacrifice themselves.25

All this suggests that ontological exceptionalism can be a negative standard for democratic theorists to employ when evaluating the excessive political action of zealots.26 Zealots committed to some form of ontological exceptionalism—those that draw (explicitly or not) ontological distinctions between self and world, saved and damned, or friends and enemies—threaten violence as they ardently pursue their cause outside the bounds of normal politics. Those that do not draw such distinctions are compatible with pluralistic forms of politics even if the cause they ardently pursue is not democratic, universalistic, or universally accessible. A negative standard of ontological exceptionalism, in other words, enables democratic theorists to make room for the excessive political action of zealots like Gandhi, King, and Havel without embracing all forms of zealotry.

Along with making space for figures like Gandhi, King, and Havel in pluralistic political communities, a negative standard of ontological exceptionalism also has at least two other side-benefits. First, it offers a new way to theorize religions in our (post-) secular age. Second, it picks out the principle problem with so-called “populist” groups:

25 Political moderates, it is worth noting, are not likely to engage in political action that requires significant personal sacrifice. And, to be clear, such an abstention is not morally blameworthy. 26 The standard is a negative one because I am much less confident about and interested in identifying “good” zealots than I am identifying harmful forms of zealotry, namely, zealotry underpinned by a kind of ontologically exceptionalism. Put another way, the views of the relational zealots I have described surely do not exhaust the category of what might be clumsily called “ontologically unexceptional zealots.” 179

their employment of sovereignty, an ontologically exceptionalist concept. There is not space to fully defend these claims here. But I briefly elaborate them in the remainder of this chapter.

First, a standard of ontological exceptionalism sheds new light on long-standing debates about the role of religions, especially religious zealotry, in (post-) secular political communities. Originally articulated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the secularization thesis posits that reason and science will eventually replace myth and superstition as sources of authority (Casanova 2011, 54-74). Or, in Weber’s famous formulation, it posits that the modern world is a disenchanted one. This means that institutions built on myth and superstition, like the church, inevitably lose their legitimacy both in Western Europe—where secularization originated—and beyond. If the thesis is correct, of course, there is little reason for normative (as opposed to historical) democratic theorists to take religions seriously. Why examine ideas soon to be swept into the dustbin of history? At most, democratic theorists should translate Gandhi and King’s religious claims into language more accessible to modern (secular) audiences. Or, perhaps it is better to altogether ignore their religious commitments.

Either way, religions quickly fade from view.

The problem with both approaches, however, is that several scholars have shown that the secularization thesis is deeply flawed, if not altogether mistaken (Asad 1993,

2003; Casanova 1994, 2011; Mahmood 2011, 2015; Taylor 2007, 2011). A critical analysis

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of secularization reveals it to be a primarily Western European phenomenon, an intramural dispute between Enlightenment philosophers and social scientists and their orthodox Christian adversaries (Asad 2003, 1-20). The former more or less defeated the latter, at least in the academy. Yet this has relatively little bearing on non-Christians. On the one hand, many non-Westerners first encountered the secular during the colonial era

(Casanova 2011, 64). As a result, they tend to be less sanguine about the liberating potential of reason and science than their colonizers (Asad 2003, 6-7).27 On the other hand, non-Christian “religions” do not necessarily have an analog to the sacred sphere that the secular displaced in European Christianity. The effects of secularization are most pronounced in Western Europe because the secular is a European Christian concept.28

27 As Jose Casanova puts it: “Non-Western and non-Christian societies, which did not undergo a similar process of historical development and always confronted Western secular modernity from its first encounter with European (Christian) colonialism as ‘the other,’ are more likely to recognize the European process of secularization for what it truly was, namely, a particular Christian and post-Christian historical process, and not, as Europeans like to think, a general or universal process of human or societal development” (2011, 64). 28 A genealogy of the term shows that it originated in Latin Christendom. In the medieval period, the secular was used to describe all that which had to do with “profane time—and it was contrasted with what related to the eternal, or to sacred time” (Taylor 2011, 32). The secular marked a time that would eventually come to close—a stage of history that would eventually be transcended. It was also used to describe matters of less import; secular affairs were transient and ultimately fleeting whereas sacred or eternal things were permanent and real. During the Enlightenment, these categories were more or less inverted. The secular realm was understood as permanent and real. Sacred or religious affairs, in contrast, were thought to be transient and fleeting—a historical stage not quite fully transcended. As Casanova puts it, “The secular has come to encompass increasingly the whole of reality, in a sense replacing the religious. Consequently, the secular has come to be increasingly perceived as a natural reality devoid of religion, as the natural social and anthropological substratum that remains when the religious is lifted or disappears” (2011, 55). This, of course, is the direct inverse of the medieval Christian configuration. 181

Taken together, is unsurprising that religions are not withering away (Sherwood

2018). They appear to be a fact of political life both now and for the foreseeable future.

At the very least, democratic theorists interested in real-world politics should not ignore them. How, then, to theorize religions? In recent years, Habermas has reconsidered the role of religions in pluralistic political communities. Rejecting secularism, Habermas contends that the claims of religious groups cannot be dismissed as easily as many political philosophers—himself included—once thought (2008, 114-119). Such claims often contain “normative truth-contents,” Habermas writes, that purely secular views do not (2008, 131).29 As such, Habermas argues religious and secular citizens must engage in a mutual learning process before and during public deliberations (2008, 138-139).

Moreover, Habermas contends that secular citizens should “understand their non- agreement with religious conceptions as a disagreement that it is reasonable to expect”

(2008, 139). “The narrow secularist mindset,” Habermas states bluntly, must be

“overcome” (2008, 140).

To my knowledge, Habermas has not revisited his account of excessive political action since he overcame the narrow secularist mindset. Perhaps that it is because he thinks law-breaking cannot be justified on religious grounds. Habermas continues to maintain that secular reasons are the only kind of reasons allowed in formal legal

29 Habermas writes: “Secular citizens or those of other religious persuasions can also learn something from religious contributions under certain circumstances, for example, when they recognize buried intuitions of their own in the normative truth contents of a religious utterance. Religious traditions have a special power to articulate moral intuitions, especially with regard to vulnerable forms of communal life” (2008, 131). 182

matters (2008, 139). Despite his novel and thoughtful attempts to rethink religions, in other words, Habermas remains wedded to a communicative-rationalist account of political legitimacy: “The exercise of power that cannot be justified in an impartial manner is illegitimate because it reflects the fact that one party is forcing its will on another” (2008, 122). This would seem to render the illegal actions of zealots like Gandhi and King beyond the pale of legitimate politics. Gandhi and King exceeded the bounds of normal politics while exercising political power and, if what I have argued here is correct, they did not and could not offer an impartial justification for doing so.

Cecile Laborde argues that liberal theorists should do away with the concept of

“religion” altogether (2017). Conceding criticisms of secularization outlined above, she contends that religions should be treated as many things, not one. Disaggregating religions, she continues, “allows [her] to specify that religion is not uniquely special: nonreligious ideologies and practices can be inaccessible, divisive, and comprehensive, too…This also means that the state need not be separate from religion when religion is not divisive, inaccessible, or comprehensive” (2017, 8). Religious groups, in other words, must be subject to the same standards as any other group in a liberal political community. Like Habermas, Laborde pushes the debate about religions in interesting and important directions. In the end, however, her unwillingness to give up on universal accessibility as the criterion for political legitimacy renders her account

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unsatisfying. On Laborde’s framework, there is no room for relational zealots like

Gandhi and King in pluralistic political communities.

The standard of ontological exceptionalism sketched here pushes the discussion of religions and politics beyond the universal accessibility impasse. Gandhi and King show that not all untranslatable religions are normatively problematic for pluralistic political communities. Rather, it is ontologically exceptional religions that are cause for concern. In other words, accessibility matters less than the conception of the human embedded in the “comprehensive doctrine” of a particular religious group.

Second, a standard of ontological exceptionalism helps democratic theorists clarify the problems with some “populist” groups without condemning grassroots politics outright. Someone like Victor Orban, for instance, distinguishes between “real

Hungarians” and everyone else—with the claim being that the former deserves special concern while the latter threaten to undermine or displace the true Hungarian people

(Krekó and Zsolt 2018). Hungarianess is an ontologically exceptional category for Orban; to be fully human is to be Hungarian. Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders, among many others, have made similar ethno-nationalist claims.30 But ontological exceptionalism is not only a feature of right-wing reactionaries. Some left-wing

“populists” reify the working class, seemingly assigning some groups a lesser or even

30 See Müller (2016) for a concise overview. 184

sub-human status (Cohen 2019).31 This should not necessarily be surprising given that prominent theorists of left populism employ a broadly Schmittian framework (e.g.

Mouffe 2000; 2018). While Schmitt claimed that the friend/enemy distinction was always provisional and never ontological, his Nazism suggests otherwise.

There is a common thread that binds ontologically exceptional “populists” together: the invocation of popular sovereignty. A Christian concept meant to denote the fact that the Christian God—rather than other gods—created and ruled the world without interference, sovereignty was redeployed in and after the European

Enlightenment in a variety of ways (Elshtain 2008, 91-135). Most importantly for our purposes here, “the people” became sovereign in various European revolutions during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Elshtain 2008, 137-141). Following the original meaning of the term, the sovereign people were God-like masters. As a result, they not only possessed the authority to create the laws according to which they might live, they had no moral duties or obligations to other peoples. They could, of course, decide to tolerate outsiders, including elaborating terms of naturalization. But they did not need to; the sovereign people are set apart from or even defined against “the foreigner.” Not only does this ontologically exceptionalist logic lead to discriminatory practices inside the political community, it paves the way for the destruction of those lacking full ontological status—as understood or defined by the sovereign people.

31 Like, for example, Hugo Chavez (Weyland 2013). 185

A negative standard of ontological excpetionalism, then, isolates the underlying problem with so called “populists:” sovereignty is an ontologically exceptionalist concept. And if I am correct about the dangers of ontological exceptionalism, populists who invoke popular sovereignty threaten pluralistic kinds of politics. Focusing on other aspects of populism, like its anti-elitism, illiberalism, and/or reliance on myth, both distracts from the principal problem of populism—ontological exceptionalism—while also ceding racist and xenophobic nationalists the (powerful) populist platform.32

5.4 Limitations and Objections

At this point, the reader may raise the following objection: Gandhi, King, and

Havel are just cosmopolitans. Their ontological commitments, in other words, are superfluous to what really matters; each believes in the inviolable dignity of each human. This explains why King and Havel are known for advocating for universal human rights. A long and tedious detour into zealotry and ontology is not needed in order to appreciate their cosmopolitanism, the critic might reason. Worse yet, none of the three addresses the most pressing issues that cosmopolitan theorists face: institutional design and democratization of a fragmented global community. Gandhi,

32 See, for instance, Mudde (2017). For Mudde, populism is grounded in a “‘thin’ or ‘thin-centered’ ideology. Thin or thin-centered ideologies do not possess the same level of intellectual refinement and consistency as ‘thick’ or ‘full’ ideologies, such as socialism or liberalism” (2017, 4). I contend that a thin or thin-centered ideology is a roundabout way of describing a local tradition. Müller adopts a slightly different definition (2016). But he is also overly concerned with liberalism. 186

King, and Havel almost seem to be regressive or unsophisticated cosmopolitans; each tends to think locally rather than globally.

In brief, this objection collapses the distinction between non-sectarian and cosmopolitan political theories. Not all who reject some form of exclusive political community, in other words, necessarily embrace cosmopolitanism. On the one hand, none of the three thinks primarily in terms of political institutions, a key plank in the cosmopolitan platform. On the other hand, Gandhi, King, and Havel seem committed to local communities and local traditions. This is not to say Gandhi, King, and Havel are anti-cosmopolitan. Rather, they are simply not as interested in the project of world citizenship or global democracy as they are in mitigating the injustices that plague their particular political communities. Most importantly, they understand themselves to be thrown into relationality with every concrete and particular other instead acting in accord with an abstraction like humanity. All three, then, think from a second-person perspective, not some Archimedean Point.

One might press a related objection by arguing that I have smuggled in a distinctly Christian universalism under the guise of relationality. King obviously belongs to the Christian tradition. Havel seems to be heavily influenced by Christian thought. And, one could argue, I have highlighted the Christian aspects of Gandhi’s thought—emphasizing the Tolstoy influence at the expense of his Hindu and Jain commitments. Put more forcefully, are not the preceding pages just another form of

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Christian imperialism—an attempt to re-describe three canonical political actors in

Christian (e.g. universalist) terms? I cannot pretend, of course, that my views are not influenced by the context in which I write. While I have no interest in recovering

Christianity, I acknowledge that my secular Western training is undoubtedly shaped by the Christian tradition in a variety of ways. That said, there are at least two reasons why this objection is ultimately misplaced. On the one hand, I have not claimed that Gandhi,

King, or Havel are universalists. As noted above, they tend to reject such abstractions, favoring a second-person perspective on politics and ethics. On the other hand, the objection puts the cart before the horse. Christianity is not a monolithic tradition (that endorses universalism). Nor is it the case that all other religious traditions embrace some form of sectarianism. Gandhi’s Jain commitments seem to drive his disavowal of ontological exceptionalism far more than his rather superficial encounter with

Christianity. More generally, this critique betrays more than a hint of secularism; religions, including but certainly not limited to Christianity, are many things rather than one. And the idea that a religion as old and diffuse as Christianity generates clearly defined political principles, much less a relatively unpopular one like universalism, is far-fetched.

Alternatively, one might object on the grounds that I have merely recapitulated the (tired) liberal-communitarian debates of the 1980s and 1990s: Gandhi, King, and

Havel are simply communitarians—and as Rawls demonstrated in Political Liberalism,

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communitarianism is perfectly compatible with non-metaphysical versions of liberalism.

Democratic theorists do not need to make from for (some) zealots in pluralistic political communities. They simply need to recognize that someone like King is more difficult to translate than previously thought.

This objection conflates communitarian conceptions of human being with non- individualist ontologies more generally. Gandhi, King, and Havel hold categorically different views about what it means to be human than communitarians like Michael

Sandel and Alastair MacIntyre. While there are significant differences between Sandel and MacIntyre, both point out that Rawls’ veil of ignorance smuggled in a Kantian conception of human being. Sandel argues that to be human is to participate in a community with shared values and traditions (1998, 172-174). For MacIntyre, a universal telos—which he eventually comes to call God—organizes or grounds human being

(2016, 309-315). Sandel does not offer a definitive account of the human beyond criticizing Rawls’ conception for being too thin. MacIntyre’s ontology is derived from his

(metaphysical) belief in natural law and his Thomist commitments about human flourishing (2016, 206-219). Because MacIntyre rejects Rawls’ neo-Kantian approach, he also rejects the theory of justice Rawls develops to secure the individual freedom of separate, autonomous subjects (2013, 244-255). MacIntyre’s political principles are

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organized to enable people to realize their natural telos—a telos that entails living a well-ordered life with others instead of pursuing one’s plan as one sees fit.33

Liberals like Rawls and communitarians like Sandel and MacIntyre have more in common than it might first appear. In particular, I contend that they believe to be human is to act in accordance with the law. In other words, they hold similar views about human being or ontology. They disagree, however, about the (metaphysical) source of the law. For the early Rawls, it is rationality. For the late Rawls, an overlapping consensus. For Sandel, the law is embedded in a set of shared values. And for

MacIntyre, it is the product of a natural telos. Their conflicts are metaphysical (about the source of the law) rather than ontological (what it means to be human). The late Rawls recognized as much. Hence his move to a political as opposed to a metaphysical theory of justice (2005, 133-157). He did not bother to engage ontology because he rightly saw that communitarians did not endorse a substantively different conception of human being.34

Gandhi, King, and Havel, in contrast, embrace different metaphysics and different ontologies—different both from Rawls and his communitarian critics. For

33 As White points out, this does not mean that politics can be reduced to geometry for someone like McIntyre: “Some proponents [of strong ontologies] do not, of course, assume that political principles or decisions can be strictly derived from their ontology; for example, there may be substantial discretionary space for the exercise of judgement” (2000, 6-7). 34 More generally, the liberal-communitarian debates might help explain why contemporary political theorists continue to conflate metaphysics and ontology; in much of Western political theory, most debates involve the former rather than the latter. 190

Gandhi, King, and Havel, to be human is not to act according to the law, but to be thrown into relationality. It is to respond to the needs concrete and particular other to whom one is inextricably linked. Crucially, these constantly changing relations cannot be codified. Codification has the effect of closing oneself; one is principally concerned with one’s duties rather than the evolving needs of the concrete and particular other.

Because Gandhi, King, and Havel do not think legalistically, their claims are not translatable into liberal or communitarian terms. Their conceptions of the human places them outside both the overlapping consensus and Sandel’s shared values or MacIntyre’s

Thomist community.

Finally, perhaps the negative standard of ontological exceptionalism outlined above is too restrictive. All politics involves sovereignty and, relatedly, friends and enemies, one might worry. And any normative standard that renders almost all zealots illegitimate is ultimately worthless. In a certain sense, this is a feature of my account, not a bug. Given the dangers of ontological exceptionalism, I am willing to condemn all forms of it—even if that means condemning most current political movements. My hope is that the negative standard offered here helps provide some analytical clarity about the precise problems with contemporary zealots, namely, that the ongoing competition for sovereignty is ultimately self-defeating.

At the same time, however, I think the objection is also somewhat overstated; there are many zealots who do not draw ontological distinctions between self and

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world, saved and damned, or friends and enemies. These figures are simply less prominent than others. This is due in no small part to the fact that the kind of anti- political politics they embrace is not as exhilarating as a struggle for state power. Put more bluntly, defeating one’s enemies is much more exciting than responding to the needs of the concrete and particular other. While there are always zealots committed to the latter, the former inevitably garners more attention.

5.5 Conclusion

To conclude, I must state what I hope to be obvious: I am not arguing that liberal democracy itself must be jettisoned. That said, real-world politics are much messier than the idealizations favored by many democratic theorist. And in the real world, profound injustices will continue to plague political communities, formally democratic or not.

Mitigating such injustices, I have argued, may demand a different set of political attitudes and practices than those endorsed by democratic theorists more interested in realistic utopias than the more dystopian aspects of actual politics. Put more bluntly,

Gandhi, King, and Havel show that mitigating profound injustices might require more than political moderation. Taking on intransigent injustice seems to demand a kind of zealotry. And, I have argued, zealots are willing to risk everything for the promise of nothing while most stay home.

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Biography

Isak Tranvik is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Political Science at Duke

University specializing in Political Theory with a secondary specialization in Law and

Politics. His dissertation, situated at the intersection of political philosophy, religious studies, and comparative political theory, intervenes in ongoing debates about civil resistance and social and political pluralism. His other research and teaching interests include modern and contemporary political theory, religion(s) and politics, post-colonial political theory, and civic education. His work has been published in Perspectives on

Politics and Comparative Political Studies. He also co-authored a chapter in an edited volume on popular education, Awakening Democracy Through Public Work: Pedagogies of

Empowerment. His graduate studies have been generously supported by the Ottis Green

Foundation, the Charlotte Newcombe Foundation, and the Kenan Institute for Ethics.

Prior to arriving at Duke, Isak completed his B.A. in Philosophy and Political

Science at St. Olaf College. Before enrolling at St. Olaf, he spent a couple years pursuing a career in ice hockey–in the United States Hockey League and at Quinnipiac University.

After graduating, he taught middle school math for three years in both St. Louis and

Ecuador. While teaching middle school he finished a M.Ed. in Secondary Education from the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

213