POLITICAL NONVIOLENCE
A Moral History
This course fulfils the gateway requirement for the Minor in Nonviolence Studies
and the new degree pathway in Global Justice, part of The Democracy Institute’s Project
GIFT | Global Inquiries in Freedom & Tyranny.
The Problem
A critical dimension of modern democratic life is the moral and political permissibility—or the aura of unavoidability— granted to violence. Whether practiced by states or by autonomous non-state actors, modern modes of violence take complex forms and are justified (or condemned) in complex legal and philosophical language. Some of these forms are spectacular, such as the violence witnessed in times of war, terrorist attacks, suicide bombings, and nighttime missile offensives launched by states and non-state actors. Other forms are underpinned by grand ideological impulses and claims to higher purpose and reason, like those that are conducted in the name of revolutionary justice, racial purification, class warfare, or humanitarian intervention. Most frequently, however, violence in modern life functions within the rhetoric and structure of political rationality, good governance, social security, and moral duty. Although they are no less powerfully underwritten by religious, caste, or racial prejudices and fanaticisms.
What separates modern practices of violence from premodern forms is not only their immense visibility aided by technology mass mobilization, big data, and even artificial intelligence. What separates ultramodern forms of violence is also the conceptual rigor and systemically defended biases that sustain their rhetoric and practice. We moderns, in other words, think more rigorously about both the necessity and futility of violence and mount tacit, epistemic defense of it. Indeed, what we call modern politics—secular or religious, tyrannical or democratic, imperial or anticolonial—has over last four centuries generated more concepts, norms, laws, judgments, and misunderstandings than any other period in recorded history of who we, as humans, are, and what we might, at the very limit of our humanity, become when the choice of violence presents itself to us.
The Paradox
Violence may repel us, but it also constitutes us, its temptation cutting to the soul of our very selfhood and identity. This relationship between violence and identity will form the core problem of our political theory this semester. Here is the most paradoxical element of political violence: even as we theorize about it in classrooms and on campuses, it compels us to look away when we see it executed or orchestrated against others in the world, thereby obscuring from our view the real structure and form of injustice that makes such violence possible in the first place. The more moderns have thought about the effects of violence, then, the more they have been tempted by it and the less they have been compelled to respond to it. This denialism—or lie—is the moral scaffold of violence. Without a lie, perjury, or just insincerity of those who claim to be superior, as James Baldwin repeatedly tells us, there would be no violence.
In the simplest sense, political nonviolence is the art of unlearning this paradox. And in the most fundamental sense, political nonviolence is the craft of making the inequality of our world visible, on its own stark, unjust terms. But nonviolence achieves it not in the form of desolation—nonviolence is anything but weak—but as hope, or as Barack Obama insists, as a promise to reclaim our democracy, our freedom, our humanity itself.
The Question
In this course, we are concerned with those particular concepts and practices that emerged within the context of nineteenth and twentieth century political culture and transformed our understanding of what it means to be free and to be human. We examine the relationship between conceptual transformations in our understanding of human freedom, on the one hand, and the century’s democratic and anti-democratic tumult and its violent philosophical, moral, and military crises, on the other. Remember, one form that nonviolence can take is civil disobedience (or resistance), and sometimes, as Ta-Nehisi Coates writes in Between the World and Me, nothing is more disobedient than excellence in the face of cruelty, nothing more liberating than a militant cosmopolitanism of thought in the face of official segregation. This too is political nonviolence.
Law & Nonviolence Among the most rational elements of modern life is the discourse of “law and order.” But the rhetoric of law and order has also meant the endemic presence of police power in civic life and the shadow of paramilitary forces in public spaces: these forces whose brutality, even and especially in liberal democracies, is always discriminatory and unequally felt, enforced by our racial and caste-ridden history. There is a history of violence underneath our democratic life, in other words. Just as we cannot understand the power of Gandhi without the brutal history of empire against which he struggled from the 1910s onward, we cannot grasp the hope of the Obama era without the courageous nonviolence of those whose commitment to civil rights in the 1960s required them to spill and sacrifice their own blood in face of the most brutal police assaults on their bodies.
This is the question we pursue through the semester. Can we separate the perils of our democratic life—and its future—from the history and structure of its unequal, systemic, and enduring violence to which we often respond with indifference, even disdain? Is “nonviolence” a name for seeking this separation of democracy from cruelty, a separation of sacrifice from power?
REQUIRED READINGS
Primary Readings
Bhimrao Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste, with a Reply by Mahatma Gandhi
(Jullundur: Bheem Patrika Publications, 1936).
Hannah Arendt, The Portable Hannah Arendt (New York: Penguin, 2000).
James Baldwin, The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings (New York: Vintage, 2010).
James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (London: Michael Joseph, 1963).
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox
(1961; New York: Grove Press, 2004).
Michel Foucault, Society Must be Defended: Lectures at College de France 1975-76
(New York: Penguin, 2003).
Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at College de France 1978-79
(New York: Picador, 2008).
M.K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, or Indian Home Rule
(1909; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Martin Luther King, Jr., The Radical King, ed. Cornel West (Boston: Beacon Press, 2016).
Judith Shklar, The Faces of Injustice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990).
Secondary Readings
This set of Secondary Texts is aimed at developing a set of shared intellectual commitments and conceptual vocabulary. The seminar will use these secondary materials throughout the sections, with the purpose of cultivating a broader, interpretive awareness of why humanistic learning—the commitment to reading and interpretation—remains fundamental to reimagining and regenerating our social and civic contract. The texts and authors chosen here also exemplify the ways in which to develop this interpretive skill, which is one of the key outcomes we strive to accomplish. They help students deepen their understanding of the civic skills that an act of judgment (and dissent) requires when one lives in a democracy. This is why we dedicate a module to rhetoric, letting students closely study how language—free speech—came to be a legal weapon for violence and domination in liberal democracies.
Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010).
Judith Butler, The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind (New York: Verso, 2020).
Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power (New York: Penguin, 2017).
Nikole Hannah-Jones, The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story
(New York: One World, 2021).
Eddie Glaude, Jr., Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and its Urgent Lessons for our Own (New York: Crown, 2021).
SEMINAR SCHEDULE
WEEK ZERO
What is Violence?
We begin by going carefully through the course syllabus, work through arguments about liberalism and its complex relationship to violence laid out in our syllabus blurb. We will together put in place the conceptual framework for the semester in broad sketches. This week, we also begin to read, slowly but regularly, the following texts to which we shall return throughout the course of the semester:
W.E.B Du Bois, Darkwater: Essays from Within the Veil.
James Baldwin, The Evidence of Things Not Said.
Michel Foucault, Society Must be Defended.
MODULE I
LAW, VIOLENCE, AND FREEDOM
Does Nonviolence Belong to Politics?
M. K. Gandhi, Hind Swaraj, or Indian Home Rule.
Hannah Arendt, “What is Freedom?” in The Portable Hannah Arendt.
Martin Luther King, Jr. “Palm Sunday Sermon on Mohandas Gandhi” in The Radical King.
The Liberalism of Our Fears
W.E.B Du Bois, “Of our Spiritual Strivings” in The Souls of Black Folk.
Judith Shklar, “The Liberalism of Fear.”
Frederick Douglass, “The Dred Scott Decision” in Two Speeches by Frederick Douglass.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Fear of a Black President.”
Martin Luther King, Jr. “The Violence of Desperate Men” in The Radical King.
Into the Colonial Night
Terisa Siagatonu, “Atlas.” [Poetry Foundation]
Frantz Fanon, “On Violence” in The Wretched of the Earth.
W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Souls of White Folk” in Darkwater: Essays from Within the Veil.
Albert Memmi, Racism, Chapter 1 & 2.
Segregation and Its Other
Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism.
James Baldwin, “My Dungeon Shook” in The Fire Next Time.
Judith Shklar, “Giving Injustice its Due” in The Faces of Injustice.
W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk [Selections on “Double-Consciousness” in Chapter 1 is key]
Martin Luther King. Jr. “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” in The Radical King.
Force and the Law
Frederick Douglass, “The American Constitution and the Slave” in The Speeches of Frederick Douglass.
Martin Luther King, Jr. “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence” in The Radical King.
Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence.”
Judith Butler, “The Radical Equality of Lives.”
MODULE II
SOVEREIGN
VIRTUE
LOGICS OF SACRIFICE
Power in a Rightless World
Hannah Arendt, “The Perplexities of Rights of Man” from The Portable Hannah Arendt.
Michel Foucault, “The Right of Death and Power over Life.”
Judith Shklar, “Misfortune and Injustice” in The Faces of Injustice.
Michelle Alexander, “The Fire this Time” in The New Jim Crow.
Achille Mbembe, “The Society of Enmity.”
Midterm Research and Writing Break
Writing Week
Making Cruelty Political
James Baldwin, “The White Problem” in The Cross of Redemption.
James Baldwin, “Letter from a Region in my Mind” in The Fire Next Time.
Judith Shklar, “Putting Cruelty First.”
Langston Hughes, “Let America be America Again.”
The Burden of Disobedience
M.K. Gandhi, “Letter to Hitler” 1 & 2.
Hannah Arendt, “Letter to Ralph Ellison.”
Hannah Arendt, “Reflections on Little Rock” in The Portable Hannah Arendt.
W.E.B. Du Bois, “The General Strike” in Black Reconstruction in America.
Self-Government: On Lying in Democracy
Michel Foucault, “Governmentality.”
Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, Lectures 2 & 3.
James Baldwin, “On Being White…and Other Lies” in The Cross of Redemption.
James Baldwin, “Black English: A Dishonest Argument” in The Cross of Redemption.
Judith Shklar, “Conscience and Liberty” in On Political Obligation.
MODULE III
NO NONVIOLENCE WITHOUT EQUALITY
Refusing Vengeance
James Baldwin, “Letter from a Region in my Mind” in The Fire Next Time.
Martin Luther King, Jr., “Loving your Enemies” in The Radical King.
Martin Luther King, Jr. “Give us the Ballot” in Eleven Speeches.
Hannah Arendt, “Forgiveness” in The Human Condition.
Judith Butler, The Force of Nonviolence.
Final Research and Writing Break
Writing Week.
Justice in the Shadow of Morality
B. R. Ambedkar, Annihilation of Caste: With a Reply to M. K. Gandhi.
Hannah Arendt, “The Social Question” in The Portable Hannah Arendt.
Audrey Lorde, “The Uses of Anger.”
Judith Shklar, “The Sense of Injustice” in The Faces of Injustice.
Final Research Seminar
Presentations
Ideas and Arguments
The Ends of Political Nonviolence
Hannah Arendt, “Action” in The Human Condition.
Tracy K. Smith, “Declaration” [Poetry Foundation].
Ta-Nehisi Coates, “My President was Black: A History of the First African American White House—and of What Came Next” in We Were Eight Years in Power.
Eddie Glaude Jr., Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and its Urgent Lessons for Our Own.