Fidelity to Truth: Gandhi and the Genealogy of Civil Disobedience

• DOI: 10.1177/0090591717727275
• Published date: 01 August 2018
• Date: 01 August 2018
• Author: Alexander Livingston
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591717727275

Political Theory

2018, Vol. 46(4) 511 –536

© The Author(s) 2017

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DOI: 10.1177/0090591717727275

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Article

Fidelity to Truth:

Gandhi and the

Genealogy of Civil

Disobedience

Alexander Livingston1

Abstract

Mohandas Gandhi is civil disobedience’s most original theorist and most

influential mythmaker. As a newspaper editor in South Africa, he chronicled

his experiments with satyagraha by drawing parallels to ennobling historical

precedents. Most enduring of these were Socrates and Henry David Thoreau.

The genealogy Gandhi invented in these years has become a cornerstone

of contemporary liberal narratives of civil disobedience as a continuous

tradition of conscientious appeal ranging from Socrates to King to Rawls.

One consequence of this contemporary canonization of Gandhi’s narrative,

however, has been to obscure the radical critique of violence that originally

motivated it. This essay draws on Edward Said’s account of travelling theory

to unsettle the myth of doctrine that has formed around civil disobedience.

By placing Gandhi’s genealogy in the context of his critique of modern

civilization, as well as his formative but often-overlooked encounter with the

British women’s suffrage movement, it reconstructs Gandhi’s paradoxical

notion that sacrificial political action is the fullest expression of self-rule.

For Gandhi, Socrates and Thoreau exemplify civil disobedience as a fearless

practice of fidelity to truth profoundly at odds with liberal conceptions of

disobedience as fidelity to law.

1Department of Government, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA

Corresponding Author:

Alexander Livingston, Department of Government, Cornell University, 215 White Hall,

Ithaca, NY 14853, USA.

Email: alexander.livingston@cornell.edu

727275PTXXXX10.1177/0090591717727275Political TheoryLivingston

research-article2017

512 Political Theory 46(4)

Keywords

Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand; civil disobedience; non-violence; passive

resistance; traveling theory

Mohandas Gandhi is civil disobedience’s most original theorist and most

influential mythmaker. As a young activist at the helm of the campaign

against Asiatic registration in the Transvaal colony, he reinvented the theory

and practice of non-violent resistance. As a newspaper editor, he chronicled

his experiments with satyagraha by drawing parallels to both contemporary

global struggles and ennobling historical precedents. Most enduring of these

comparisons were Socrates’s trial in Athens and Henry David Thoreau’s

refusal to pay his poll tax. Gandhi’s Indian Opinion published excerpts of

Plato’s Apology and Thoreau’s “On Civil Disobedience,” translated into

Gujarati, as inspirational exemplars for the Transvaal Indians’ spiritual war

against registration. Classical exemplars that mirror the present can ennoble

and dignify political struggles by representing the present in terms of a

heroic past. But they can also depoliticize the present by abstracting from

the particularities of political struggles.1 Gandhi’s now-canonical history of

civil disobedience illustrates both the promises and perils of political

mythologization.

As promise, the appeal to Greek and American precedents universalized

the Transvaal struggle by traversing the colonial dichotomy of Western and

Eastern civilizations. Gandhi enlisted Socrates and Thoreau as partners in his

own capacious vision of global counter-modernity that inverted the imperial

imaginary to depict the colonized, rather than the colonizers, as the true rep-

resentatives of civilization.2 The afterlife of this anti-colonial narrative

exceeded Gandhi’s purposes, however. Mid-century American activists in the

civil rights and anti-war movements who claimed the mantle of Gandhian

non-violence reiterated this genealogy and cemented the notion of a continu-

ous intellectual tradition of civil disobedience running from classical Athens

to post-war Alabama. This narrative was deepened and disseminated through

an explosion of scholarly literature in the late 1960s on the definition and

moral justification of civil disobedience. Socrates and Thoreau became “the

joy of jurists,” Hannah Arendt observes, for illustrating how disobedience to

positive law is fidelity to higher law.3 One early volume on the theory of civil

disobedience invokes “a definite path” leading straight from Thoreau’s night

in a Concord jail to Martin Luther King Jr.’s cell in Birmingham.4 Another

popular book from the period introduces civil disobedience as a “2400 year

old tradition” connecting contemporary America to the ancient world.5 What

Quentin Skinner calls a “myth of doctrine” developed around civil