Foreword

Summary

Over the last century or so, nonviolence as a concept and a practice has become more popular than at any other time in human history. This is due in no small part to the example set by Mahatma Gandhi, the “great soul,” as the Indian poet Tagore called him. From the mid-twentieth century to present, that popularity has only grown, due to many circumstances: the example of Martin Luther King Jr., the publication of Gene Sharp's 1973 work The Politics of Nonviolent Action, the release of Richard Attenborough's 1982 film Gandhi, and a series of video productions commissioned by the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict, most notably the one-hour film “Bringing Down a Dictator.” These people and events have inspired many people to adopt nonviolence either as a tactic for doing battle or as a way of life, or as some course of action or conduct in between.

The recent upsurge in the popularity of nonviolence has coincided with the life of Andrew L. Fitz-Gibbon, and in this collection of essays and chapters written over the course of his philosophic career, Fitz-Gibbon reveals his own developing understanding and practice of nonviolence. His path toward nonviolence began, interestingly enough, with an early idealism about nations and the glory of war. But that idealism was tempered by a sense that all is not right with the mass killings that are a part of war. Coupled with his Christian beliefs, this sense led him to pacifism, a rejection of the violence that is war. The various paths that the world has taken toward nonviolence over the last one hundred years or so have provided rich soil from which Fitz-Gibbon has woven his own approach to nonviolence, and as a result Fitz-Gibbon's work provides a mature and insightful approach to nonviolence that remains, remarkably, idealistic and pragmatic at the same time.

Principled nonviolence has always been subject to charges of idealism, of a lack of realistic approaches to problem-solving and justice. How can one always stand on a principle of nonviolence when one sees another person unjustly set upon? Does nonviolence require that one refrain from intervening, allowing the injustice to continue? And if one does intervene, what if the nonviolent intervention fails to stop the attack?