Work · Life & Existential Philosophy
The Kingdom of God Is Within You
Christian nonviolence as anarchism.
Introduction
Tolstoy wrote the book in the early 1890s in response to the reactions to his earlier What I Believe; banned by the Russian censor, it first appeared abroad. The title quotes Luke 17:21. Tolstoy surveys earlier Christian advocates of non-resistance, among them the Americans William Lloyd Garrison and Adin Ballou, and then attacks churches, governments and military conscription as incompatible with the Sermon on the Mount. Patriotism and the state rest on violence, he argues, and a Christian must refuse to take part in it, whatever the cost. Gandhi read the book in South Africa in 1894 and later wrote in his autobiography that it had overwhelmed him; the two corresponded in the last year of Tolstoy’s life.
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Connections
Taken up in
- Hind Swaraj1909 · Mohandas K. Gandhi
Criticized in
- Three Conversations1900 · Vladimir Solovyov
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