Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) was the most influential, challenging, and
provocative pacifist of his generation. The most famous person
alive at the dawn of the twentieth century, his international
stature came not only from his great novels but from his rejection
of violence and the state. Tolstoy was a strict pacifist in the
last three decades of his life, and wrote at length on a central
issue of politics, namely, the use of violence to maintain order,
to promote justice, and to ensure the survival of society,
civilization, and the human species. He unreservedly rejected the
use of physical force to these or any ends. Tolstoy was a religious
pacifist rather than an ethical or political one. His pacifism was
rooted not in a moral doctrine or political theory but in his
straightforward reading of the teachings of Jesus as recorded in
the Gospels. Despite his fame, Tolstoy's pacifism remains
insufficiently studied. A hundred years after his death, Tolstoy is
a figure unfamiliar in political science, encountered, if at all,
as the author of hortatory quotations on the wrongness of political
violence or of allegiance to the state. This work of political
science offers an account of Leo Tolstoy as a Christian thinker on
political violence. It presents Tolstoy's pacifism as a striking
case of the impact of religious idealism on political attitudes.
The Russian novelist offers an instructive case study in Christian
pacifism and in the attractions and failings of strict, literalist,
and simplistic religious approaches to the many and complex issues
of politics. Today, the political implications of religious
fundamentalism, scriptural literalism, and Christian faith are very
much live issues and the contemporary discussion of them should not
omit pacifism. In this first study of Tolstoy's pacifism by a
political scientist, Colm McKeogh unravels the complexities of
Tolstoy's writings on Christianity and political violence. This
work serves scholars of political science by bringing together
relevant extracts from Tolstoy's writings and providing a succinct
treatment of the core political issues. It establishes that
Tolstoy's stance is primarily one of non-violence rather than
non-resistance. McKeogh's work then assesses the internal
consistency of Tolstoy's pacifism, its grounding in the Gospels and
Christian tradition, its political and anti-political implications,
and the meaning in life that it offers. It finds that Tolstoy does
great service to the pacifist cause (with his defense of peace as
close to the centre of Christ's message) and yet harm to it too (by
divorcing peace from the love that is even more central to Christ's
message). Tolstoy's political and religious legacy is not that of a
prophet, a social activist, a moral reformer, a political idealist
or pacifist theorist but that of a dissident. Tolstoy stands as one
of the great dissidents of twentieth-century Russia, a man who
condemned the system utterly and who refused to perform any act
that could be construed as compromising with it. He left behind a
powerful statement of the urgent human need to connect our daily
living to a deep and fulfilling conception of the meaning of life.
Tolstoy's Pacifism is important for political science, Christian
ethics, literature, and Russian collections.
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