Chapter 5 - Rehabilitating Nonresistance

Summary

In this chapter, I take a fresh look at that way of being pacifist called nonresistance. I suggest that those of us committed to nonviolence would do well to revisit some of the emphases of this earlier, and now often maligned, movement.

Pacifist Types

First, I need to clarify different ways of being “pacifist.” In the literature, “pacifist” is used in two ways. In older literature, pacifist stood for any ideology or theory that is in some way related to peace. The English word “pacifist” is a transliteration of the Latin pacifici meaning peacemaker (Hershberger 1944 , 172). In more recent literature, it is more common to narrowly define pacifism as an opposition to war. On occasion, though pacifist has meant opposition to war, it has not been an opposition to all forms of violence. For example, war may be opposed, but personal self-defense accepted, as might the violence of the criminal justice system and police violence. At other times, pacifist has stood for opposition to all forms of violence, of which war is only one kind. Pacifism has also been modified, as in “nuclear pacifism.” Here, pacifism is not opposition to “conventional” war, but to war that involves the use of nuclear—and often biological and chemical—warfare. In other words, nuclear pacifism is opposition to war when WMDs would be threatened or used. When people embrace pacifism or oppose pacifism (as in Ward Churchill's Pacifism as Pathology), it is not always clear what way of being pacifist is included.

In any discussion of pacifism, clarity is needed as to the use of the word. In this chapter, for analytical purposes, I suggest four ideal types of pacifism. I am using “types” in the particular and technical sense favored by Max Weber. He suggested that ideal types are mental constructs used to under-stand complex social institutions and to provide for comparative analyses (1949, 89–95). An ideal type is a term applied to an agglomeration of characteristics to which social institutions may be compared. Unlike the Platonic forms, ideal types are rooted in empirical phenomena as observed in human history and social development.