Creon: Must I rule the land by someone else's judgment rather than my own?
Haemon: There is no city possessed by one man only.
Creon: Is not the city thought to be the ruler's?
Haemon: You would be a fine dictator of a desert.
Sophocles, AntigoneBefore an audience of liberal German students, in the midst of the German Revolution and in the wake of Germany's defeat in World War I, Max Weber gave his influential lecture “Politics as a Vocation.” Drawing upon Machiavelli, his by-now widely recognized work on modern bureaucratic states, and his extensive knowledge of Hindu, Muslim, and Christian religious traditions, Weber argued that the “decisive means for politics is violence.”Footnote 1 Against the prominent German pacifist and Great War opponent F. W. Förster, he claimed: “[It] is not true that good can follow only from good and evil only from evil, but that often the opposite is true. Anyone who fails to see this is, indeed, a political infant.”Footnote 2 Politics, said Weber, is a field apart, where taking responsibility for the results of one's actions means using methods that would not be legitimate in other realms of life. Moreover, anyone interested in saving their soul “should not seek it along the avenue of politics, for the quite different tasks of politics can only be solved by violence.”Footnote 3 According to Weber, all of the major religious traditions made room for a separate ethic for politics. For instance, Christ's “absolute ethic” of turning the other cheek was not applicable to politics, because “for the politician the reverse proposition holds, ‘thou shalt resist evil by force.’”Footnote 4
Weber's lecture brings to the fore a leitmotif that is ubiquitous in modern political thought. Theorists from John Locke to Karl Marx and Friedrich Hayek to Jean-Paul Sartre all affirm the basic proposition that bad means sometimes lead to good ends and that physical violence is therefore a necessary means for politics. For the most part, disputes about violence in modern political theory center around when violence is necessary, but most agree that physical violence is necessary and good on some occasions.Footnote 5 Pacifism has a long and distinguished intellectual heritage but I argue that, in broad strokes, Weber's view has prevailed. As I will show below, pacifist arguments have failed to persuade most of the publics of the world. Most people believe physical violence is part and parcel of legitimate political orders.
However, pacifist thinkers have played a critical role in developing a set of political practices that have spread widely, become greater in frequency, and are increasingly more effective than the violent alternatives. Nonviolence, while springing from pacifist thought, refers to a distinctive set of political practices that do not require actors to adopt pacifism. A growing body of empirical literature demonstrates that nonviolence is more effective than violence in a wide variety of circumstances. At the same time, research on violence and war shows that even as horrors of human conflict continue, our propensity for self-inflicted destruction is generally in decline. In addition, the traditional material factors thought to determine military success do not hold up under scrutiny. Bolstering recent empirical work on civil resistance and violence, epochal and unprecedented political achievements have also been won largely through nonviolence, including the legal abolition of slavery and the entry of women into politics. Even as pacifism as an ideology has failed to convince the publics of the world, a wide range of evidence points to the increasing success of nonviolence and the decreasing success and frequency of physical violence. These findings have led to a striking convergence in recent research among political scientists, sociologists, and political theorists, who explain both the limits of violence and the power of nonviolence.
In what follows, I expand upon and develop the distinction between pacifism and nonviolence to outline and offer a preliminary defense of a new form of pacifism that I call pragmatic pacifism. Footnote 6 I begin with a brief intellectual history of pacifism and discuss how the methods of nonviolence were developed as part of it. I show that the ideological position of pacifism, usually articulated as a rejection of all violence on moral grounds, has failed even among many of those who use nonviolence successfully. While pacifists are usually the vanguard of nonviolent movements, the available evidence suggests that many of those who participate in nonviolence are not pacifists. Moreover, public opinion surveys from a wide variety of countries show that broad majorities of people believe that physical violence is justified in certain circumstances. Next, drawing on recent empirical work on nonviolence, the incidence of war, factors influencing the outcomes of wars and the use of violence by states to control their populations as well as an historical narrative highlighting epochal political changes achieved through nonviolence, I show that the political reliability of violence has been decisively called into question while the political fortunes of nonviolence are on the rise.
The second half of this article examines how the success of nonviolence and the research that examines nonviolence can form a feedback loop that informs a new brand of pacifism. Pragmatic pacifism reformulates pacifism as a principled commitment to non-violence grounded in a realistic understanding of the historical record and the inherent political liabilities of violence. Through the study of cases from five continents, large-n statistical analyses, and reconsiderations of the writings of Mahatma Gandhi, scholars have constructed the elements of a people-centered theory of power. The use of nonviolence draws our attention to how people organize themselves, which studies of nonviolence and recent studies of military power suggest play a decisive role in achieving political success and military victory. These studies give us a rich understanding of what makes political action—including violence—effective and ineffective. They also show that nonviolent methods show distinct advantages over violent methods because nonviolence is carefully attuned to perennial political realities that those who use violent methods tend to ignore.
Against the conventional wisdom, pragmatic pacifism maintains that the advocates of violence are prone to unrealistic ideological commitments that are often doomed to failure, whereas nonviolence offers a self-limiting, pragmatic, and realistic approach that accounts for the manifold difficulties of politics. In contrast to traditional pacifism, which rejects violence on moral grounds, this brand of pacifism relies upon political as opposed to moral principles to make the case against violence. Violence may be immoral, but recent empirical and theoretical work pushes us toward the perhaps more important insight that violence is counterproductive to politics. Since the use of nonviolence in practice is motivated by a wide variety of moral, material, and political aims, a more full complement of reasons and principles for rejecting violence gives this brand of pacifism a better chance of political success.
Pacifism and Nonviolence
Before arguing that pacifism has failed and nonviolence has succeeded, I will first describe the two terms as I use them here and the historical relationship between them. “Pacifism” refers to a distinct ideological position in the history of religious, ethical, and political thought. The core feature of pacifism is the principled rejection of the use of physical violence in personal and political life. This definition in the main follows Theodore Koontz, who argues that pacifism in its common usage today generally refers to the belief that it is morally wrong to participate in killing for any reason. Minimally, this means that killing is wrong “for me” but the view usually extends to the larger claim that participation in war or violence is morally unacceptable for everyone. Footnote 7 Koontz emphasizes that pacifism is the rejection of all uses of violence for moral reasons, but my conception is more inclusive. I allow that pacifism may be grounded in either moral or pragmatic reasons, as long as one holds that physical violence can and should be rejected.Footnote 8
For the most part, pacifists have generally grounded their ideas in religious or ethical precepts. In the West, pacifism finds its earliest clear expression in Christian thought.Footnote 9 Early Christian thinkers from North Africa, such as Origen and Tertullian, argued that the ethic Christ described disallowed doing violence to any person for any reason. In particular, they rejected physical self-defense by individuals, communities, or governments as a legitimate reason for violence. Instead, they recommended embracing martyrdom and articulated a view of conscientious objection to military service.Footnote 10 With Constantine's conversion to Christianity, these views were rejected by Church officials in favor of the just war theories of Augustine and, later, Thomas Aquinas. However, pacifism was revived in the radical Protestant theologies of the Anabaptist, Quaker, Mennonite, and Brethren communities.
The main pacifist movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were often led by members of these religious communities, but the view gained adherents among other denominations and secular organizations as well. Until they were convinced otherwise by John Brown, many prominent abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison, rejected war as a legitimate means for achieving political ends.Footnote 11 Out of the women's movement grew pacifist organizations such as the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, led by Jane Addams, who along with prominent women's rights advocates such as Sylvia Pankhurst and Aletta Jacobs vehemently opposed World War I as part of the 1915 Women's International Congress at the Hague.Footnote 12 World War I also inspired the creation of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (1915) and the secular War Resisters' International (1921). Both organizations are still active in assisting conscientious objectors and both continue to reject participation in war.Footnote 13 They also inspired an ongoing campaign to refuse to pay taxes that go to military purposes.Footnote 14
In the East, the roots of pacifism can be found in the intertwined Jain, Hindu, and Buddhist traditions, which predate the Christian tradition by many centuries. The Jain belief in the sacred status of all life influenced Mohandas K. Gandhi as a child and adolescent,Footnote 15 but as an adult he attempted to interpret the ancient Hindu tale recounted in the Bhagavad Gita as a statement against war. Gandhi's deep and abiding rejection of physical violence even in the face of extreme violence on the part of others, led him to famously (or infamously) oppose the use of war against HitlerFootnote 16 and recommend that rape,Footnote 17 robberyFootnote 18 and other forms of personal violence be met with nonviolence instead of physical resistance.
Gandhi's attempt to create a way of life that “will not, on any account, desire to use brute force” inspired many followers.Footnote 19 In his own time, a Pashtun Muslim named Abdul Gaffar Kahn led tens of thousands in resisting the British without violence in the Northwest Frontier (now Pakistan). A generation later in the United States, Martin Luther King, Jr. led the American civil rights movement and eventually opposed the Vietnam War on the grounds that “I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today—my own government.”Footnote 20 The Dalai Lama, following in Gandhi's footsteps, interprets the Buddha's teachings as prohibiting violence even in the face of the ongoing Chinese occupation of Tibet.Footnote 21 Although these various thinkers and organizations offer many different reasons for their pacifism and sometimes differ on the application of their ideals in particular circumstances, they have in common a broad-based rejection of war and physical violence in personal and political life on moral grounds. For the most part, this means rejecting the use of physical violence in the most trying and difficult circumstances, including for the purposes of self-defense or the protection of the innocent.
As part and parcel of this ideological position, pacifists have forwarded and developed a distinctive form of political practice, variously called non-resistance, nonviolence, ahimsa, soul force, and satyagraha. The origins of the practice arguably trace back to the critical spiritual texts and stories that pacifists draw upon. The biblical scholar and theologian Walter Wink posits that Matthew 5:38 describes a “third way” between submission and violent resistance. Jesus intones to “not resist an evildoer” but also that “if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also.'” Through extensive analysis, Wink argues this is a display of defiance against oppressive authorities.Footnote 22 Gandhi's interpretation and translation of the Bhagavad Gita turns on his claim that the text develops the theme of ahimsa (or non-violence).Footnote 23 As a practice, nonviolence also has earlier, non-religious roots. In the first century of the Roman republic, the plebs, who were no pacifists, regularly used a brand of civil disobedience to refuse participation in war and gain leverage over the patricians.Footnote 24 In addition, at the dawn of Western political philosophy, Socrates performed and offered a nascent theory of non-injurious political action.Footnote 25
However, the first extensive attempt to identify and theorize the distinctive practices that we now call nonviolence appeared in a work by a Unitarian Minister from Massachusetts named Adin Ballou, entitled Christian Non-Resistance (1846). Ballou was keen to refute the adequacy and legitimacy of a brand of pacifism that had been “imperiously preached by despots to their subjects, as their indispensable duty and highest virtue.” Governments tried to instill “necessitous non-resistance” or “passive obedience and non-resistance.”Footnote 26 Ballou claimed that true Christian non-resistance meant “the right to offer the utmost moral resistance” and indeed held it to be a duty to practice what he believed was “the highest kind of resistance to evil.”Footnote 27 Although not a member of Ballou and Garrison's New England Non-Resistance Society, Henry David Thoreau was present at meetings where Ballou made his case. A few years later, in the work that popularized the term “civil disobedience,”Footnote 28 Thoreau offered a secular version of Ballou's non-resistance and further examined how the practice affected an individual's relationship to government. Thoreau's version also differed from Ballou's because he did not claim to offer a replacement for violent resistance to injustice. That is, Thoreau was not a pacifist.Footnote 29
Gandhi might have never known of Ballou's writings were it not for Leo Tolstoy taking notice of them. Tolstoy wrote that Ballou's works offered comprehensive examinations of exceptional cases where he “shows that it is precisely in them that the application of the rule [of non-resistance] is both necessary and reasonable.”Footnote 30 Gandhi was particularly concerned with how one might confront physical violence in the very moment it was being practiced. He discerned that one might be able to engage in “conscious suffering” (or tapas) where certain actions were taken with the expectation of provoking physical punishment from others. This kind of suffering, unlike the suffering of people resigned to their fate, could be used to one's political advantage. For political campaigns that might involve putting one's body at risk, he coined the term satyagraha, or “holding fast to the truth.” The term avoided the negative, inactive, and “passive” connotations of nonresistance and nonviolence while acknowledging that refraining from violence in the face of the violence of others is difficult. Gandhi also continued to employ the term ahimsa to refer to the broad range of practices (satyagraha among them) that he wished to cultivate in himself and encourage in others.Footnote 31
A bewildering variety of movements and causes have taken up Gandhi's methods and a growing number of political theorists and philosophers have reflected on the significance and character of satyagraha and nonviolence. As a matter of terminology I want to emphasize that, as I use the terms, pacifism is the ideological and principled rejection of war and violence, whereas nonviolence refers to methods of political action that eschew violence, with satyagraha placing special emphasis on methods that may put those taking action at physical risk. As a point of reference, Gene Sharp's volume describing and compiling 198 Methods of Nonviolent Action offers a more or less comprehensive description of the various activities encompassed by the term nonviolence.Footnote 32 Sharp creates six categories for the 198 Methods: 1) protest and persuasion, 2) social noncooperation, 3) economic noncooperation: boycotts, 4) economic noncooperation: strikes, 5) political noncooperation and 6) nonviolent intervention. While the majority of the techniques described do not necessarily entail being subjected to the violence of others, as Sharp notes “nonviolent action is designed to operate against opponents who are able to use violent sanctions.”Footnote 33 Any and all of the actions Sharp compiles might be met with violence and thus, if the participants are disciplined, become satyagraha. Footnote 34
I mentioned earlier that pacifism as an ideology can be adopted for either moral or pragmatic reasons and I will discuss this further later. For now, it is important to emphasize that the distinction between pacifism and nonviolence I am offering here does not map onto the familiar distinction in peace studies scholarship between “principled nonviolence” and “strategic nonviolence.”Footnote 35 The distinction in peace studies turns on the character of and motives behind the practice, not one's general ideological orientation to violence. Indeed, advocates of principled nonviolence sometimes abandon pacifism and argue that violence should be used to protect innocents.Footnote 36 Likewise, advocates of strategic nonviolence are often among the most insistent that there are suitable alternatives to violence even in the most extreme circumstances.
The ideology of pacifism and the practice of nonviolence are closely related historically. Pacifists have been at the forefront of developing nonviolent practices and participating in nonviolence may lead some people to become pacifists. However, the distinction between pacifism and nonviolence is important because practicing and participating in nonviolence or satyagraha does not require one to reject the utility or morality of all violence and warfare.
The Failure of Pacifism
There are many ways one might assess the success or failure of ideologies. On its own terms, it might be argued that pacifism has failed because it has not eliminated war and violence from human life. However, even the most committed pacifists would probably say such a standard is too high, as few pacifists claim that the complete eradication of violence can be achieved.Footnote 37 Alternatively, we might say that pacifism has succeeded in at least one sense: Even if only adopted by a minority of thinkers or persons throughout history, the idea that violence and war should be rejected on principle has almost always played some role in conversations about the problem of self-inflicted human suffering. Pacifism has shown remarkable persistence through the ages.
However, I wish to argue that despite its long and esteemed intellectual heritage, pacifism has failed politically when held in comparison to other contemporary ideologies. At one point or another over the course of the last century, liberalism, republicanism, socialism, communism, and fascism have each been adopted by millions of persons to become part and parcel of large-scale governance structures. Pacifist principles have never been adopted by a sufficiently large number of people to make it the animating principle and taken for granted assumption of a sizable political community.Footnote 38
Millions have been convinced that particular wars or acts of violence are pragmatically or morally wrong. During the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, anti-war and peace movements have on occasion garnered vast numbers of supporters. However, while such movements have often been led by pacifists, the majority of the participants have grounded their opposition in just-war principles or internationalist liberalism, both of which affirm that some wars are just, necessary, and legitimate.
For instance, with the memory of the Great War still fresh, the 1930s saw what was perhaps the high water mark of anti-war sentiment in Great Britain. In 1934 and 1935, the League of Nations Union created an informal “peace ballot,” which garnered the participation of 11.6 million British citizens, or around 38 percent of the adult population; 95.9 percent of participants believed “Great Britain should remain a member of the League of Nations,” 90.6 percent were in favor of “all-round reduction in armaments by international agreement,” 82.5 percent were in favor of “the all-round abolition of national military and naval aircraft by international agreement,” and 90.1 percent demanded that “the manufacture and sale of armaments for private profit be prohibited by international agreement.” Yet even amidst this unprecedented expression of desire to avoid war and even among this self-selected group, 58.7 percent of those who participated agreed that “if a nation insists on attacking another, the other nations should combine to compel it to stop by, if necessary, military measures.”Footnote 39
Despite revisionist histories of a public united in the war effort, public opinion in the United States was ambivalent at best about entering World War II, in part because of disillusionment with American involvement in the Great War. Although most Americans intensely disliked Hitler, Roosevelt saw the need for a massive propaganda campaign to overcome “a psychology which comes very close to saying ‘Peace at any price.’”Footnote 40 German military victories combined with the attack on Pearl Harbor overwhelmed isolationist tendencies, with 56 percent of Americans favoring sending American troops abroad in March 1942.Footnote 41 A similar dynamic played out in the peace movements and anti-nuclear campaigns of the 1980s in the United States. Although organized by pacifists who thought that the nuclear age might finally lead to an outright rejection of war, the movement saw “a gradual replacement of absolute pacifism with modified, circumstantial versions of antiviolence” in order to accommodate “political contexts dominated by Political Realism.”Footnote 42
Given extant polling data, it appears that the belief that some wars are legitimate and justified continues to be the dominant opinion among the people of the world. Consider, for instance, what might be considered a hard case: public opinion regarding the authorization of force by international institutions as opposed to one's own government. Polling from 2006–2008 found that strong majorities in 16 countries on four continents (over 60 percent in all cases and as high as 89 percent in the case of Nigeria) believe that the UN Security Council should have the right to authorize military force to defend a country under attack. Strong majorities in 18 countries (over 60 percent in all cases and as high as 90 percent in the case of Kenya) believe that the UN Security Council should have the right to authorize military force to prevent severe human rights violations such as genocide.Footnote 43 In 2002, strong majorities of people in six European countries and the United States approved of using troops from their own country to uphold international law (German and US approval were the lowest, at 68 percent and 76 percent respectively).Footnote 44
Yet this does not generally translate into publics believing that their governments should only go to war with United Nations approval. While publics in Great Britain, France, and Germany by strong majorities believe UN approval should be sought, publics in the United States, Russia, Turkey, Pakistan, Jordan, and Morocco are more evenly divided on the issue.Footnote 45 Approval for particular wars may run very high for those countries involved. For instance, despite the fact the UN did not authorize the war, 72 percent of Americans approved of the decision to go to war in Iraq in March 2003.Footnote 46
As one might expect, among those who use the techniques pacifists have developed, there is a much stronger commitment to pacifism. However, what evidence we have suggests that even people who have directly participated in confronting violence with nonviolence are not always, themselves, pacifists. Timothy Garton Ash, summarizing his recent and extensive edited volume of nonviolent case studies says that “again and again [adopting nonviolence was] often less unequivocal than is generally assumed.”Footnote 47 A study of participants in three of Gandhi's most successful satyagrahas found that most were committed pacifists, at least in the context of the particular campaign. However, the study also attributed this not so much to an ideological commitment as to a belief in Gandhi's leadership.Footnote 48
With respect to the American civil rights movement there is both direct and indirect evidence that some significant number of those who participated were not pacifists. In 1964, after the March on Washington and in the wake of dramatic political successes that used nonviolence, only 17 percent of African Americans supported withdrawal from Vietnam. This was a higher percentage than the 13 percent of whites and by 1970 that number had ballooned to 57 percent (37 percent for whites).Footnote 49 However, the statistic leaves little doubt that most of those who were sympathetic to and likely many of those who participated in nonviolent direct action were not pacifists. The direct evidence includes a study of 165 white activists who spent the summer of 1965 organizing voter registration drives in the South. The study found that most (but not all) were pacifists at the time and that their pacifism had waned, especially with regard to the issue of self-defense, 20 years later.Footnote 50 (However, the commitment to pacifism among such activists was still much higher than in the general population.)Footnote 51 We also have direct evidence from oral histories, which report that leaders in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference had to work hard to convince African American participants to refrain from retaliating against white violence and terrorism.Footnote 52
To take one final example, there is also indirect evidence for a less than pacifist ideology among participants in a more recent nonviolent uprising. In 2011, Egypt witnessed one of the most dramatic unarmed insurgencies in modern history. The revolution brought millions into the streets.Footnote 53 However, the Egyptian public, by a majority of 78 percent, was among those mentioned above who approve of the UN Security Council's right to authorize the use of military force to defend a country. Strong majorities also approve of the Security Council's right to authorize the use of military force to prevent severe human rights violations (83 percent), prevent a country that does not have nuclear weapons from acquiring them (74 percent) and—in perhaps the most relevant poll question given the nascent revolution—64 percent of Egyptians said they believed the Security Council had the right to authorize force to restore a democratic government that has been overthrown.Footnote 54
The failure of pacifism to garner widespread support on par with other modern ideologies is also reflected in the dearth of literature in political science on the topic. A number of critically important book-length studies of Gandhi by political theorists and comparativists excepted,Footnote 55 there has been very little interest in pacifism in American political science since the civil rights movement. The last article on pacifism to be published in the American Political Science Review (prior to Karuna Mantena's Reference Mantena2012 piece discussed here later) was Mumford Sibley's “The Political Theories of Modern Religious Pacifism” in 1943.Footnote 56 Even including the recent upsurge in interest in nonviolence, there have been only a handful of articles devoted to discussing pacifism in all of the major generalist political science journals combined in the United States over the last 40 years.Footnote 57 Just war theory, treatments of international relations from a liberal perspective, the democratic peace theory, realist and, more recently, constructivist perspectives have dominated discussions of war and peace.
The Success of Nonviolence
Although the assertion that war and violence can and should be rejected on principle has not held much sway with the public, the techniques that pacifists have developed have been adopted in nearly every country in the world.Footnote 58 A skeptic of the influence of pacifism in this regard might point out that, in part, this is due to the fact that pacifists simply created a concept of “nonviolence” and placed an array of political practices that have existed for millennia under that rubric. However, evidence increasingly suggests that whether by naming such practices or pioneering their use, pacifists have expanded the influence, visibility, and effectiveness of nonviolent political practices. While pacifism as an ideology has failed, the political techniques they developed have had wide and enduring success in achieving political goals of the highest order.
One kind of evidence for the success of nonviolence comes from empirical political science. The idea that war is an empirical problem has driven a generation of research in political science and peace studies.Footnote 59 Recently, scholars in this tradition have turned their attention to nonviolence and the techniques pacifists have developed, with a particular emphasis on “people power” movements or “civil resistance” in opposition to governments.Footnote 60 In the main, these studies have asked why civil resistance movements succeed or fail, an issue I will discuss later. But Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan's groundbreaking 2011 study examines the question of the political effectiveness of civil resistance relative to violent insurrection. Chenoweth and Stephan examine all known cases of armed and unarmed insurrections from 1900 to 2006 (323 cases) and find that the use of nonviolence greatly enhanced the chance of success for campaigns seeking to oust regimes and slightly increased the chance of success in anti-occupation and territorial campaigns.Footnote 61 Their findings hold across regime type, suggesting that authoritarian regimes are no less vulnerable to nonviolent tactics.Footnote 62 They also find that nonviolent campaigns that topple regimes are much more likely to beget democratic institutions.Footnote 63 Finally, they find that both the frequency and the success rate of nonviolent insurrections are increasing.Footnote 64
Yet even these remarkable findings do not quite capture the pivotal role nonviolence has played in epochal political changes. In world historical perspective, the spread of democracy is perhaps the most important political trend of the last three centuries. Chenoweth and Stephan's study suggests that in the last century, at least, nonviolence played a critical role in creating and solidifying democratic regimes. However, the spread of democracy would be much less meaningful if it had not been accompanied by two other changes that have been largely achieved through nonviolence.
The first is the legal abolition of slavery.Footnote 65 Slavery had been banned by individual political entities even in ancient times, but for almost all of human history some or most governments allowed or directly participated in slavery.Footnote 66 Slave rebellions occurred throughout history, sometimes numbering in the thousands, but only one, the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), ever succeeded. The American Civil War might be considered a second case where violence led to abolition. However, the end of legally sanctioned slavery was achieved for the most part through nonviolent techniques which, as discussed above, were theorized and developed by pacifist abolitionists.Footnote 67 By encouraging and assisting thousands of runaway slaves (many of whom themselves became abolitionists), boycotting products made by slave labor, tirelessly speaking and organizing international conventions, publishing newspapers and pamphlets, founding political parties and pressuring politicians, nineteenth and twentieth century abolitionists brought an end to the most lucrative and dynamic slave system in the history of the world.Footnote 68 Despite the extraordinary violence of slavery itself and the vicious violence used to defend the institution from abolitionists and slaves who dared to claim freedom, the goal of making slavery illegal in every country in the world was mostly accomplished without violent revolutions.
The second epochal event is the entry of women into politics in large numbers. Women have always had an important influence on politics, have sometimes resisted male dominance with violence, and have sometimes played an important role in violent revolutions alongside men.Footnote 69 However, the mid-nineteenth century women's movement, growing out of the abolitionist movement, was of a different character both in terms of its grand ambitions and distinctive political techniques. Early feminists took on a wide range of issues from property ownership to the right to vote and hold elective office. But among their most radical claims was the notion that women in general were capable of and suited for public, political action. Through rallies and meetings, declarations and hunger strikes, political organizing and public campaigning, they precipitated a historic change in the relationship between women and government. Despite brutal repression and ongoing organized and institutional resistance by men, women have been able to dismantle and replace the patriarchal legal structures in a large number of countries. Their achievements have been gained without a single violent revolution.
Along with this evidence for the relative effectiveness of nonviolence, there is gathering evidence for the ineffectiveness of violence in a variety of empirical literatures. Careful studies of military power show that, counter-intuitively, states with greater material capabilities are no more likely to win wars, or even battles, than states with lesser material capabilities.Footnote 70 Moreover, the likelihood that materially strong actors will lose wars has increased dramatically over the last two centuries.Footnote 71 The effectiveness of violence used by governments to control their populations has also been called into question. Decades of research on the death penalty has been unable to establish that it reduces crime.Footnote 72 Studying the effectiveness of torture is a controversial issue,Footnote 73 but qualitative studies drawing upon first-person accounts suggest that it is generally an ineffective way to garner reliable information.Footnote 74 Among non-state actors, large-n empirical studies increasingly show that terrorism is ineffective.Footnote 75
Finally, another trend may be related to the success of nonviolence. Two recent book-length studies argue that violence and war are on the decline in the world.Footnote 76 Joshua Goldstein argues that fewer wars are beginning, more are ending, and that the wars that remain are less lethal and smaller.Footnote 77 He argues that NGOs and the efforts of international institutions are the source of this decline, but accords most of the credit to United Nations peace-keeping in particular.Footnote 78 Steven Pinker's argument is even more ambitious. In one of the more extensive compilations of social science research in recent memory, Pinker argues that violence at every level—familial, tribal, neighborhood and state—has declined the world over.Footnote 79 Domestic violence, rape, murder, the death penalty, judicial torture, slavery, death rates in genocides and terrorism, lynchings, and the lethality and frequency of warfare over not only a 50-year time period but a 500-year time period have been reduced.Footnote 80 Factors such as changes in military technologies, resource availability, levels of affluence, and religion are not major causes of increases or declines in violence, he argues.
One might quibble with the way Goldstein and Pinker use various pieces of evidence, but the overarching narrative and the sheer weight of the evidence is convincing. Their explanations for why violence is waning, however, fail to adequately account for the potential influence of nonviolence. Instead, their arguments for the most part are consistent with the conventional wisdom (and the failure of pacifism), which affirm the distinction between good and bad violence. Goldstein's main thesis is that UN peacekeeping has played a crucial role in reducing warfare,Footnote 81 and Pinker's core claim is that a great deal of the reduction in the overall violence in the world can be attributed to the “pacifying” violence of powerful states.Footnote 82 Neither notes that not only has war decreased, but the rate of victory for attackers as opposed to defenders fell dramatically in the last quarter of the twentieth centuryFootnote 83 and they do not consider Jonathan Schell's related claim that “cooperative power”—as opposed to physical violence—has become the “political bedrock of our unconquerable world.”Footnote 84 While it may be correct that certain applications of violence can produce a net benefit in terms of reducing violence, another explanation or contributing factor seems equally viable. The development and expansion of the techniques of nonviolence may have made violence less politically effective and, therefore, less useful and “necessary” over time.
Explaining the Effectiveness of Nonviolence
The increasing use and success of nonviolence, the decreasing use and effectiveness of violence, and the still-stagnant political fortunes of pacifism beg for theoretical explanation and innovation. In a recent exchange, Sharon Nepstad and Wendy Pearlman discuss the pros and cons of “bigger theory-building” versus “exhaustive explorations(s) of complexity.”Footnote 85 In what follows, I bring together various literatures in different fields for the purpose of building a pragmatic theory of pacifism. I began this article by drawing upon Theodore Koontz's definition of pacifism. Whereas Koontz associates pacifism with the rejection of physical violence on the basis of moral principles, I defined pacifism as the rejection of physical violence for moral or pragmatic reasons. Koontz's definition is more precise and for the most part captures the spirit of pacifist arguments, if we are describing the long history of pacifist ideology. However, I insist that an ideological position rejecting violence can be made on pragmatic grounds because of developments in recent scholarship.
After nearly 40 years of sporadic interest in pacifism and nonviolence in established academic fields, the last few years have seen an upsurge in work on the topic. In sociology and political science, and among both political theorists and empiricists, there is a remarkable convergence in the character of interest in the topic. First, scholars have been keenly interested in explaining the effectiveness of nonviolence. How can nonviolence withstand the forces of violence, especially in direct confrontations with extreme repression? Second, since the effectiveness of nonviolence cuts against the conventional wisdom, its increasingly visible role has inspired a reassessment of the very nature of politics itself. What do explanations for the effectiveness of nonviolence tell us about politics, power and human conflict? I examine the first, more specific question here and then turn to the second, more far-reaching query in the final section.
Through careful examination of case studies and large-n statistical analyses, a number of causal mechanisms have been discerned regarding the effectiveness of nonviolence in the arena of civil resistance. Three critical factors appear to be at play: the organization and location of bodies, the sheer number of participants, and the loyalty of the armed forces.
First, in a comparative study of unarmed insurrections in South Africa, the Philippines, Burma, China, Nepal, and Thailand, Kurt Schock forwards the idea that successful uses of nonviolence find ways to 1) maintain and increase political leverage, meaning, to “mobilize the withdrawal of support from opponents or invoke pressure against them through the networks upon which [they] depend for their power,” and 2) to remain resilient in the face of repression, or “continue to mobilize collective action despite the actions of opponents aimed at constraining or inhibiting their activities.”Footnote 86 Schock argues that discerning the critical means for maintaining leverage and resilience requires paying attention to how bodies are organized. He notes that nonviolent techniques sometimes involve the concentration of bodies, or the gathering together of people in a public space to protest and demonstrate against the state, and at other times, they involve dispersion, where people withdraw participation and remove themselves from the scene, as during general strikes and boycotts. He posits that the agile use of concerted action requires using both techniques—and a diversity of techniques more generally. When organizers are astute observers of the strengths and weaknesses of a given regime, they calibrate the methods of resistance accordingly.Footnote 87 Schock's work is complemented by Wendy Pearlman's findings that there is an organic relationship between the degree of internal cohesion in the organizational structures of social movements and the likelihood and ability of movements to use nonviolence instead of violence.Footnote 88
Second, Chenoweth and Stephan argue that nonviolence has a critical and distinctive advantage over violence in resisting governments. Their data shows that nonviolence is much more likely to attract “high levels of diverse participation” and that the number of people participating in a campaign increases the probability of success.Footnote 89 They posit that the superiority of nonviolence on this score is due to the relatively low entry cost for participants. Active participation in violent campaigns requires physical skills and abilities that participation in nonviolent campaigns may not. Violent campaigns tend to attract young, able-bodied men but nonviolence can draw from a much wider pool of participants. Critical-mass theories of collective action suggest that open, mass action can lead to a decline in peoples' perception of risk, whereas violent campaigns may increase perceptions of risk.Footnote 90 Moral barriers to participation in nonviolence are lower and indeed, nonviolence can potentially mobilize “the entire aggrieved population,” whereas many may find participation in a violent campaign morally objectionable.
These factors suggest a connection between Schock's claims regarding the diversity of nonviolent tactics and Chenoweth and Stephan's claim that nonviolence has a distinct advantage when it comes to participation. Civil resistance campaigns can draw upon participants with “varying levels of commitment and risk tolerance” because nonviolent campaigns can make use of those who are willing to place their lives on the line in direct action but also those who are more risk averse but willing to stay home in a boycott or strike. Violent campaigns, however, generally require participants to have high levels of commitment and risk tolerance.Footnote 91
A third factor in the effectiveness of nonviolence is the ability of such campaigns to disarm their opponents through defections and shifts in loyalty in security forces. In a book appearing concurrently with Chenoweth and Stephan's volume, Sharon Nepstad studies civil resistance in China, East Germany, Panama, Chile, Kenya, and the Philippines. The three cases where the campaigns ended in success all involved security force defections and she traces how those campaigns were able to effect them while the others did not. She notes that defections can come from the top down as in Chile, the bottom up as in East Germany, or some mix of the two as in the Philippine case. Sticking rigorously to nonviolence, the presence of a shared collective identity among the soldiers and the resisters, and a critical-mass dynamic where troops were more willing to defect when they were aware that other soldiers were doing so, all seem to have played a role.Footnote 92 Nepstad's broad claim, that security force defections play a critical role in success, are generally reinforced by Chenoweth and Stephan's large-n findings. They show that nonviolent campaigns are more likely than violent campaigns to produce security force defections and that such defections improve the chance of success by nearly 60 percent.Footnote 93 Even when violent campaigns manage to garner widespread participation, their use of violence prevents them from fully realizing the effect numbers have on encouraging defections in nonviolent campaigns.Footnote 94 Chenoweth and Stephan note that the defections of civilian bureaucrats, economic elites, and others may be important as well, but are more difficult to measure and observe.Footnote 95 Both studies show that nonviolence tends to “pull apart the opponent's pillars of support” whereas violence is more likely to “push them together.”Footnote 96
A Pragmatic Pacifism: People Centered-Power and the Character of Politics
The study of nonviolence serves as a feedback loop where practice can inform a new brand of pacifism keen to emphasize certain aspects of political reality. A critical part of this brand of pacifism is a reconsideration of certain aspects of politics and power. While peace studies scholars often distinguish between strategic nonviolence and principled nonviolence, there has not been an equally vigorous effort to describe a pragmatic pacifism that complements the tradition of moralistic pacifism. The work of some important twentieth-century progenitors and new interpretations of Gandhi's thought and practice can be brought together for that purpose. Explanations for the effectiveness of nonviolence, work being done on military power, and the renaissance in Gandhi studies in political theory grapple with a wide-variety of circumstances. But they reveal striking common themes and interconnections. To be clear, not all of the scholars mentioned here are self-identified pacifists and the claim to pragmatism to some degree fights against the notion that pacifism is ideological. Yet, taken together, recent scholarship points the way toward a distinctive and compelling set of reasons for rejecting violence in politics.
Material resources, economic interests, and bureaucratic structures all play a role in the conflicts examined by Schock, Nepstad, and Chenoweth and Stephan, but their central locus of concern is the organization, actions, and loyalties of ordinary people. Though none of the three studies mentioned above dismisses structural factors, two of the three challenge the long-standing view in the social-movements literature that structural and political opportunities are required for nonviolence to appear and be effective.Footnote 97 All three challenge the common assumption that wielding weapons against those who do not have them ensures political success. Chenoweth and Stephan believe their study amounts to a
call for scholars to rethink power and its sources in any given society or polity. Although it is often operationalized as a state's military and economic capacity, our findings demonstrate that power actually depends on the consent of the civilian population, consent that can be withdrawn and reassigned to more legitimate or more compelling parties.Footnote 98
This is a call to examine how the behaviors of ordinary people are not simply determined by other, more powerful forces and people. The study of nonviolence suggests that concerted action moves politics and is to some extent self-generating. Trends in the political science literature, one empirical and the other theoretical speak directly to this rethinking of power.
A refocusing of attention on people and how they organize themselves is underway in perhaps an unlikely field: studies of military power. Both the victors and losers in wars use violence, but the theory of power percolating in this work is consistent with a pragmatic pacifism. A recurring theme of recent work on military power is that material superiority plays a much less important role in determining the outcomes of wars than how people organize themselves when practicing violence. I mentioned above that empirical studies demonstrate that even at the level of battles, much less wars, there is strong evidence that material superiority does not lead to victory.Footnote 99 The strange puzzle of the materially weak winning wars has been the subject of sustained study in its own right. Arreguín-Toft finds that the critical factor is the strategic interaction between combatants. In large measure, the various strategies he describes can be mapped on to Schock's models of dispersion and compression, for instance, with some combatants choosing direct engagement and others electing for guerilla warfare.Footnote 100 Similarly, Stephen Biddle argues that the “modern system” of force employment, or a particular method for tactically arranging and organizing troops, is the critical explanatory factor in victory since the first World War.Footnote 101 In an exchange with eminent military scholars, Biddle refutes the view that new military and information technologies have changed how military power is exercised and notes that his analysis only scratches the surface in measuring “soft” variables. He measures how people are organized in battle, but other people and organizational factors such as morale and logistics might be equally important.Footnote 102
Even military scholars who assume that using more violence will lead to victory find that governments cannot use violence without the support of certain domestic publics. The civil resistance literature, which argues that the defection of security forces is an important factor in bringing down regimes, bears a relationship to Gil Merom's argument that militarily powerful democracies cannot sustain their war efforts against lesser militaries when important constituencies withdraw their support.Footnote 103 More broadly, other works on military power in the last decade suggest that
materialist indicators of power could prove to be highly misleading: We may discover that there is a tremendous disconnect between a state's access to technological, financial, and human resources and the social, political and other intangible factors that allow it to translate those resources into military power in war.Footnote 104
From within the US military itself, the dramatic initial failures of the war in Iraq led to a new Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, which “practically screams out” that superior military might needs political support to be effective.Footnote 105
A people-centered understanding of power has also had a revival in political theory. The precursors of the recent upsurge can be found in the highly influential thought of Hannah Arendt and the all but ignored work of Gene Sharp.Footnote 106 Arendt was both deeply impressed with nonviolence and hesitant to place faith in the applicability of Gandhi's methods in extreme circumstances.Footnote 107 Yet her fundamental categories of politics and her view of power as “concerted action” challenge the view that politics can be anything but human words and deeds (as opposed to material resources and technologies). For Arendt, “to act” means to say or do something in the presence of others that reveals something unique about that individual. Power is concerted action and therefore, by definition, pluralistic, somewhat coordinated but also somewhat unpredictable. It is never coerced. Indeed, while power and violence can be combined and violence can sometimes take on the qualities of action, they have an uneasy relationship to one another.Footnote 108 Power and violence are phenomenologically opposite.Footnote 109 Violence is the use of implements to either destroy or physically intimidate others. Regimes that rely upon violence can win the obedience of their subjects and officials while destroying civil society, but they have trouble generating active participation, which is the source of the energy and dynamism of all societies and political orders. Rulers often use violence when power is slipping away or as a substitute for power. But even totalitarian regimes need some power because they count on the active cooperation of the secret police and a network of informers.Footnote 110 This emphasis on the quality of action and the claim that action and power expressed as physical violence have a somewhat degraded quality resonates with Chenoweth and Stephan's assertion that broad-based and diverse movements are more effective than violent insurgencies.Footnote 111
In The Politics of Nonviolent Action, Gene Sharp more clearly specified the relationship between this view of power and traditional understandings. Sharp lists sources of power familiar to most political scientists and theorists: authority, human resources, skills and knowledge, material resources, and sanctions (including physical violence), but argues that these sources depend upon cooperation. For Sharp, power is a function of the degree of cooperation that a ruler is able to muster from four groups of people: the general population, the ruler's agents, foreign governments, and foreign peoples.Footnote 112 Sharp does not deny that material resources, authority, and the ability to impose sanctions help people win the cooperation of other people. It is just that most traditional theories of power fail to realize the extent to which the cooperation of other people also affects one's ability to deploy material resources, retain authority, and impose sanctions.Footnote 113
More recently, a number of scholars have extended and updated these arguments. My own work posits that Arendt's theory of power can be used as a philosophical foundation for a “credible” pacifism. I offer a pointed critique of moralistic pacifism, in that I allow that physical violence may be just in certain situations.Footnote 114 But in support of the brand of pragmatic pacifism that I am forwarding here, I argue that even in extreme situations there is almost always a nonviolent method that can take the place of violent alternatives. I make this argument in two ways. First, I argue that Arendt's theory of action demonstrates that violence is not as reliable as is often assumed. Killing people does not have predictable political results because it operates in the “somewhat intangible” “‘web’ of human relations,” which makes it difficult to know what meanings people will assign to it or what actions they will take in response to it.Footnote 115 Second, I offer a corresponding explanation for the underestimated effectiveness of Gandhi's satyagraha. By taking on suffering while consciously refusing retaliation, Gandhi's methods take control of and usurp the meaning of an opponent's violence in the moment it is being practiced.Footnote 116 Both violence and nonviolence can fail or be successful, but the reasons they succeed or fail are more similar than different and turn on how people respond to each.
This line of thinking is consistent with the current revival of Gandhi scholarship, which forwards the idea that his well-earned reputation as a political moralist has overshadowed his most important insights into the character of politics. Three scholars have pointed to Gandhi's theory and practice of political action as an alternative to the brand of formalistic liberalism that has dominated Anglo-American political theory and philosophy for a generation. In a critique of liberal approaches to moral and political controversies, Farah Godrej highlights the ways in which Gandhi offers a “more realistic understanding of political life than its Rawlsian counterpart.”Footnote 117 She argues that the reliance of liberalism on dialogue and consensus building leaves little room for true agonism. Liberalism envisions political orders that either bracket their most fundamental controversies or devolve into violent conflict when those issues come to the fore. In contrast, Gandhi's satyagraha engages with the “conflictive, and often imperfect nature of the political world”Footnote 118 and offers up a means that takes politics “beyond merely a matter of reasoned deliberation and speech, [by turning] the body into an instrument of nonrational, emotive persuasion.”Footnote 119 This more holistic and realistic human psychology acknowledges both the integrative character of human faculties and our limitations when it comes to knowing the truth. In addition, Gandhi's method of self-suffering tests the commitment of those who practice it and places the most deleterious consequences of political action on the shoulders of those who believe they are in the right. In this way, nonviolence acknowledges our always partial access to truth and the plurality of human perspectives but also allows for dramatic political actions that express our deepest frustrations and disagreements.
In a recent exchange with Anthony Laden, Rainer Forst, David Armitage, Duncan Ivison, and Bonnie Honig, James Tully makes the complementary point that satyagraha is the counter-point to Western theories that find a “necessary relation between violence and reason.” Citing Honig's interpretation of Haemon's reasonable violence in Antigone, he argues that the “familiar outcome” of reasonable violence is not peace and order but “violent struggles for existence or justice” where all sides claim their violence is consistent with reason. Tully argues that nonviolence works because it supplies a “more basic and prevalent” version of reasoned agonism. While not always effective, nonviolence has a better chance of transforming “both the game and game players” in a “sea of violence.”Footnote 120
Karuna Mantena goes so far as to say that Gandhi is best understood not as a proponent of pacifism as Koontz defines it, but a critic of “a moralistic politics of conviction or ideological dogmatism.”Footnote 121 Gandhi's genius was, in effect, to move beyond pacifism as traditionally articulated and describe “a practical political orientation [and] a set of strategic responses rather than simply an ethical stance or standard of moral judgment.”Footnote 122 She argues that Gandhi forwarded a brand of political realism that was highly cognizant of the unintended negative consequences of political action that belie the best intentions of violent actors.Footnote 123 Practicing violence makes it difficult to reverse course or admit one's mistakes, and even when temporarily effective, it ensures that domination becomes a marker of legitimate authority. This inclines more people to use it, creating a competitive and violent atmosphere of escalation.Footnote 124 By offering a “model of self-limiting action,” Gandhi hoped to “internally constrain” these negative effects while still vigorously pursuing progressive political ends. Like Schock and Chenoweth and Stephan, Mantena emphasizes that nonviolence works when those who use it are highly attentive to the particulars of a given political context. Only with a pragmatic approach can psychological and political dynamics be transformed in the midst of conflict.Footnote 125 Nonviolence demands moving away from abstract goals and utopianism, which often tend toward violence. Gandhi maintained that political ends had to be grounded in “immediate, intimate, and precise practices” and therefore he refused temporal or conceptual abstraction of the ends from means. Indeed, it was “precisely that separation that opens up the possibility of coercion.”Footnote 126
This research provides the basis for a new brand of pragmatic pacifism. In one sense, all of the social scientists and political theorists referenced here forward non-ideological and even anti-ideological understandings of power and politics. Certainly, the analysts of military power mentioned earlier do not adopt pacifism. However, taken together, their work provides a rich array of explanations for political outcomes that sidelines and minimizes the importance of the aptitude for killing and imposing one's will through physical coercion. These works do a better job of explaining why violence either fails or succeeds than traditional theories that place physical violence at the center of politics and show why nonviolence is generally more effective than violence even in extreme circumstances.
This makes for a distinctive kind of ideology. Pragmatic pacifism claims that the task of developing new political strategies to confront violence is never complete and that violence will always reappear. However, it retains an ideological element in forwarding two principles: 1) as yet unseen circumstances can be addressed by creative nonviolence, and 2) politics and power have certain characteristics that make violence unnecessary. These are ideological commitments because they can never be definitively established but nevertheless might become the animating force of a certain brand of politics, which can only respond to the vagaries of a specific context.Footnote 127 On the basis of these propositions, a pragmatic pacifism continues to forward a broad-based rejection of violence.
Pragmatic pacifism induces the two propositions from observations about the character of politics. One could argue that without moralistic pacifism, pragmatic pacifism would not be possible since without faith in the immorality of all violence, certain nonviolent practices would have never been developed. In addition, the moral condemnation of violence is itself an essential part of the political strategy of nonviolence, in that nonviolence almost always seeks to delegitimize the violence of one's opponents. Yet we now have sufficient experience with nonviolence to ground a broad rejection of violence in observations of previous practice. All of the research examined here suggests that the effectiveness of nonviolence turns on the ability of those who use it to be pragmatic, creative, and flexible. A pragmatic pacifism observes the increasing use and success of nonviolence, the decreasing use and effectiveness of violence, and forwards the belief that nonviolence is sufficiently adaptable to confront violence in diverse political circumstances.
Conclusion
Although pacifist ideology has failed, the failure is not set in stone. The current work in empirical political science and political theory provides a new ground and a robust set of reasons for pacifism that complements and goes beyond the traditional moralistic reasons for rejecting violence. In certain respects, pragmatic pacifism blurs the distinction between empirical political science and political theory. Mantena writes that, for Gandhi, “the is/ought question is reconfigured as a means/ends question, one in which the tighter imbrication of the normative and the empirical that realism recommends can be enabling rather than constrictive.”Footnote 128 This increasing overlap has come to be reflected in academic work on nonviolence. Large-n quantitative techniques and case study work have pushed social scientists toward the theoretical view that how people organize themselves (and the very fact of their organization) is the critical factor in shaping the character of political societies and institutions. At the same time, political theorists have come to see Gandhi's theory of nonviolence as more empirically accurate—more attentive to reality—than theories that forward the view that violence allows us to circumvent political constraints and power dynamics. Social science methods and political theory have provided a new understanding of how nonviolence works and why violence frequently fails. The political fortunes of pacifism may yet be revived if nonviolent methods continue to show promise and a brand of pragmatic pacifism offers the best explanation for how politics works.
In the closing passages of “Politics as a Vocation,” Weber tries to bring into balance his view that a realistic understanding of politics requires embracing violence. He notes that while nine out of ten romantics are “windbags,” on rare occasion he encounters a proponent of socialism or international peace with true political maturity.Footnote 129 Such a person, despite the possibility of political failure and though they may be young in years, says “‘Here I stand; I can do no other.’”Footnote 130 Although Weber has tried throughout his lecture to link taking responsibility with doing violence, here he suggests that taking responsibility in politics and acting on principle are not entirely mutually exclusive. Both require embracing the tragic dimension of political action. He cautions that only the principled politician with real courage and fortitude will be able to survive the inevitable disappointments and difficulties of politics. Politics is like the “strong and slow boring of hard boards” and only those who do not crumble in the face of those who oppose them—and do not dismiss those who oppose them out of hand for being too stupid and stubborn—have the calling for politics.
The “success” of nonviolence as I have described it here strongly confirms the view that politics is difficult and frustrating. Chenoweth and Stephan note that while nonviolent civil resistance succeeded nearly twice as often as violent campaigns in the last century, the techniques still only succeeded about half of the time.Footnote 131 Hannah Arendt's conception of power is intimately linked to her assertion that political action rarely succeeds in achieving its ends and often produces unpredictable results.Footnote 132 In part, the general trend in Gandhi scholarship, which downplays or disputes aspects of his moralism, stems from a desire to moderate the sky-high expectations Gandhi's own rhetoric sometimes set for nonviolence. But Gandhi also beseeched campaigners to not be too concerned with the results of their endeavors and instead focus only on using nonviolent means, because other people's reactions to one's efforts never could (or should) be entirely under one's control.Footnote 133 Indeed, Weber's description of a mature and principled politician as one who fails in the immediate term but persists in pressing forward in spite of failures bears a striking resemblance to Gandhi's model of the nonviolent activist.Footnote 134
Yet Gandhi's claim to be a “practical idealist,”Footnote 135 interpreted through the lens of the pragmatic pacifism I have described here, also tells us that Weber's final nod to the tragic idealist has it backwards when it comes to the issue of political maturity. Actions motivated by good intentions that in practice lead to bad outcomes are just as often the hallmark of those who embrace the use of violence as those who reject it. The good intentions of keeping us safe, overthrowing a corrupt regime, punishing criminals or defending freedom frequently end up being a catalogue of excuses for violence that leads to more conflict and suffering and stands little chance of political success. The weight of extensive empirical evidence demonstrates that the practitioners of violence are more often the tragic idealists than are pacifists. Nonviolence grapples more effectively with the frustrating, difficult and unpredictable aspects of politics than violence. Pragmatic pacifism is the stance of a mature political actor.
