WEBVTT NOTE Mohandas K. Gandhi (1869–1948) 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:12.000 The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with Jeff Rigenbach. 2 00:00:12.000 --> 00:00:23.000 Mohandas K. Gandhi was born October 2, 1869 in Porbunder, a port town in western India on the shores of the Arabian Sea. 3 00:00:23.000 --> 00:00:28.000 His father was a high-ranking official in the government of the small principality 4 00:00:28.000 --> 00:00:34.160 that nominally ruled the immediate area. In effect, the elder Gandhi reported to the local 5 00:00:34.160 --> 00:00:40.720 princes and they in turn reported to the local British officials who really ran things. The 6 00:00:40.720 --> 00:00:46.640 younger Gandhi was interested in a medical career, but he abandoned that idea in favor of pleasing 7 00:00:46.640 --> 00:00:54.000 his parents, showing his humility and obedience, and carrying on family traditions. In 1888, 8 00:00:54.000 --> 00:01:00.400 At the age of 18, he moved to London to study law. He returned to India three years later, 9 00:01:00.400 --> 00:01:05.600 only to discover that he was unable to earn a decent living as an attorney, at least in his 10 00:01:05.600 --> 00:01:11.840 own country. After his attempts to establish a private practice in Bombay failed, he took 11 00:01:11.840 --> 00:01:17.680 up residence in Porbunder once again, working under the supervision of well-established lawyers, 12 00:01:17.680 --> 00:01:21.920 doing what we would describe today as the work of a paralegal. 13 00:01:21.920 --> 00:01:33.420 By the spring of 1893, 23 years old and apparently unable to support himself in the profession he had only entered in the first place in order to satisfy his relatives, 14 00:01:33.420 --> 00:01:48.720 he found himself forced by economic realities to accept a position in the legal department of an Indian company in the city of Durban on the eastern seacoast of South Africa, yet another part of the British Empire. 15 00:01:48.720 --> 00:01:55.200 Up to this time in his life, Mohandas Gandhi had been a model of self-effacing cooperativeness. 16 00:01:55.200 --> 00:02:02.560 As his biographer, the late B. R. Nanda, put it, he had so far not been conspicuous for self-assertion 17 00:02:02.560 --> 00:02:08.800 or aggressiveness. Gandhi himself, much later in life, observed that he had been brought up to 18 00:02:08.800 --> 00:02:14.960 carry out the orders of the elders, not to scan them. And he did not scan them. He carried them 19 00:02:14.960 --> 00:02:18.200 come out, uncomplainingly and faithfully. 20 00:02:18.200 --> 00:02:24.720 Nor did the young Mohandas Gandhi betray even the slightest interest in politics and public events. 21 00:02:24.720 --> 00:02:26.520 Nanda put it this way. 22 00:02:26.520 --> 00:02:30.840 Until the age of 18, Gandhi had hardly ever read a newspaper. 23 00:02:30.840 --> 00:02:36.720 Neither as a student in England nor as a budding barrister in India had he evinced much interest 24 00:02:36.720 --> 00:02:37.720 in politics. 25 00:02:37.720 --> 00:02:43.680 Indeed, he was overcome by a terrifying stage fright whenever he stood up to read a speech 26 00:03:13.680 --> 00:03:19.240 All those who had made his acquaintance during his early years in India and England disappeared 27 00:03:19.240 --> 00:03:23.200 after the move to South Africa and was never seen again. 28 00:03:23.200 --> 00:03:29.160 He was replaced by a Gandhi made of sterner stuff, a Gandhi who had had his fill of living 29 00:03:29.160 --> 00:03:34.880 as a doormat for other human beings, a Gandhi who would rise up with a vengeance against 30 00:03:34.880 --> 00:03:39.720 anyone who dared to employ force against him. 31 00:03:39.720 --> 00:03:45.360 The name's a few of the indignities forced upon Gandhi shortly after his arrival by South 32 00:03:45.360 --> 00:03:51.880 African laws mandating second-class treatment for people who qualified as colored. 33 00:03:51.880 --> 00:03:57.240 One day, while traveling to Pretoria, he was unceremoniously thrown out of a first-class 34 00:03:57.240 --> 00:04:04.080 railway compartment for which he had paid, and left shivering and brooding at Peter Maritzberg 35 00:04:04.080 --> 00:04:05.080 station. 36 00:04:05.080 --> 00:04:09.540 In the further course of the journey, he was beaten up by the white driver of a stagecoach 37 00:04:09.540 --> 00:04:26.220 In response, as Nanda writes, Gandhi blossomed almost overnight into a proficient political 38 00:04:26.220 --> 00:04:27.580 campaigner. 39 00:04:27.580 --> 00:04:32.960 He drafted petitions to the colonial legislature and the British government and had them signed 40 00:04:32.960 --> 00:04:35.160 by hundreds of his compatriots. 41 00:04:35.160 --> 00:04:40.220 He infused a spirit of solidarity in the heterogeneous Indian community. 42 00:04:40.220 --> 00:04:45.140 He flooded the government, the legislature and the press with closely reasoned statements 43 00:04:45.140 --> 00:04:46.700 of Indian grievances. 44 00:04:46.700 --> 00:04:52.940 Finally, he exposed to the view of the outside world the skeleton in the imperial cupboard. 45 00:04:52.940 --> 00:04:58.780 The discrimination practiced against the Indian subjects of Queen Victoria in one of her own 46 00:04:58.780 --> 00:05:01.400 colonies in Africa. 47 00:05:01.400 --> 00:05:07.240 Beginning in the fall of 1906, Gandhi began using still another tool, which he called 48 00:05:07.240 --> 00:05:09.040 satyagraha. 49 00:05:09.040 --> 00:05:15.840 It called for those he had organized to peaceably defy any unjust law and to suffer any and 50 00:05:15.840 --> 00:05:19.360 all penalties resulting from their defiance. 51 00:05:19.360 --> 00:05:26.060 Nanda translates satyagraha as a devotion to truth, but it is also sometimes translated 52 00:05:26.060 --> 00:05:31.860 as Firm Insistence on Truth or Persistence in the Pursuit of Truth. 53 00:05:31.860 --> 00:05:37.740 It was, Nanda writes, a new technique for redressing wrongs through inviting rather 54 00:05:37.740 --> 00:05:43.720 than inflicting suffering, for resisting the adversary without rancor and fighting him 55 00:05:43.720 --> 00:05:45.700 without violence. 56 00:05:45.700 --> 00:05:52.520 Jim Powell reports in his book The Triumph of Liberty that around 1907 Gandhi campaigned 57 00:05:52.520 --> 00:05:58.680 in South Africa against laws that prevented Indians from traveling, trading and living 58 00:05:58.680 --> 00:06:04.600 freely, and a friend gave him a copy of Henry David Thoreau's Civil Disobedience, which 59 00:06:04.600 --> 00:06:08.400 he read while imprisoned for three months in Pretoria. 60 00:06:08.400 --> 00:06:12.480 He acknowledged that Thoreau's ideas influenced me greatly. 61 00:06:12.480 --> 00:06:17.300 I adopted some of them and recommended the study of Thoreau to all my friends who were 62 00:06:17.300 --> 00:06:20.680 helping me in the cause of Indian independence. 63 00:06:20.680 --> 00:06:25.880 Powell quotes Gandhi as having said further that, until I read that essay, Thoreau's 64 00:06:25.880 --> 00:06:31.500 On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, I never found a suitable English translation for my 65 00:06:31.500 --> 00:06:34.200 Indian word, Satyagraha. 66 00:06:34.200 --> 00:06:39.280 The Thoreau scholar Walter Harding wrote that after first reading Civil Disobedience in 67 00:06:39.280 --> 00:06:45.780 that Pretoria jail cell, Gandhi always carried a copy with him during his many imprisonments 68 00:06:45.780 --> 00:06:48.120 in the years to come. 69 00:06:48.120 --> 00:06:53.200 Given this connection between Thoreau and Gandhi, and you virtually guarantee that someone 70 00:06:53.200 --> 00:06:59.580 will ask, whether plaintively, sarcastically, or in a spirit of genuine curiosity, but was 71 00:06:59.580 --> 00:07:01.280 Gandhi a libertarian? 72 00:07:01.280 --> 00:07:08.200 Well, of course that depends on how you define your terms, what you mean by the word libertarian, 73 00:07:08.200 --> 00:07:12.920 and what kind of evidence you think counts when it comes to deciding whether a particular 74 00:07:12.920 --> 00:07:25.160 A great many people who are willing to honor Glenn Becks or Bob Barr's claim to be a libertarian 75 00:07:25.160 --> 00:07:30.680 are strangely unwilling to extend the same benefit of the doubt to say Emma Goldman or 76 00:07:30.680 --> 00:07:32.680 Rudolph Rocker. 77 00:07:32.680 --> 00:07:36.560 In the case of Mohandas Gandhi, these are the facts. 78 00:07:36.560 --> 00:07:43.880 P. R. Nanda reports that in Durban in January of 1897, Gandhi was assaulted and nearly lynched 79 00:07:43.880 --> 00:07:48.400 by a white mob, but he refused to prosecute his assailants. 80 00:07:48.400 --> 00:07:54.040 It was, he said, a principle with him not to seek redress of a personal wrong in a court 81 00:07:54.040 --> 00:07:55.800 of law. 82 00:07:55.800 --> 00:08:01.040 According to Nanda, the distrust of the apparatus of government was almost as deep-rooted in 83 00:08:01.040 --> 00:08:03.400 Gandhi as in Tolstoy. 84 00:08:03.400 --> 00:08:09.040 He would have agreed with the 19th century doctrine that government is best which governs 85 00:08:09.040 --> 00:08:10.040 least. 86 00:08:10.040 --> 00:08:15.440 In fact, Nanda writes, this Jeffersonian maxim was central to Gandhi's thinking. 87 00:08:15.440 --> 00:08:22.440 A society organized and run on the basis of complete non-violence, he stated repeatedly, 88 00:08:22.440 --> 00:08:24.840 would be the purest anarchy. 89 00:08:24.840 --> 00:08:30.280 That state is perfect and non-violent where the people are governed the least. 90 00:08:30.280 --> 00:08:35.880 And again, the ideally non-violent state will be an ordered anarchy. 91 00:08:35.880 --> 00:08:40.320 That state will be the best governed, which is governed the least. 92 00:08:40.320 --> 00:08:45.440 The intellectual historian George H. Smith puts the matter very similarly. 93 00:08:45.440 --> 00:08:51.240 Gandhi's hatred of state oppression, he writes, was as passionate and deeply felt as any contemporary 94 00:08:51.240 --> 00:08:52.680 libertarian. 95 00:08:52.680 --> 00:08:58.160 Smith quotes Gandhi as having said that any man who subordinates his will to that of the 96 00:08:58.160 --> 00:09:04.400 surrenders his liberty and thus becomes a slave. According to Smith, many 97 00:09:04.400 --> 00:09:09.200 analysts have pointed out that Gandhi was in the anarchist tradition and that 98 00:09:09.200 --> 00:09:13.680 his anarchism was strongly individualistic. In contrast to the 99 00:09:13.680 --> 00:09:18.580 supposedly oriental view that the individual counts for nothing, Gandhi 100 00:09:18.580 --> 00:09:25.100 argued that the individual is the one supreme consideration. No society, Gandhi 101 00:09:25.100 --> 00:09:53.980 Smith cites the supporting opinion of the Indian academic philosopher Raghavan Iyer, 102 00:09:53.980 --> 00:09:59.420 who spent most of his adult life in the United States teaching at the University of California. 103 00:09:59.420 --> 00:10:06.040 It would not be extravagant, Iyer wrote in 1973, to consider Gandhi as one of the most 104 00:10:06.040 --> 00:10:12.420 revolutionary of individualists and one of the most individualistic of revolutionaries. 105 00:10:12.420 --> 00:10:17.860 Smith quotes Iyer as claiming that Gandhi could not believe in the moral priority of 106 00:10:17.860 --> 00:10:22.260 any collective agency over the individual. 107 00:10:22.260 --> 00:10:28.020 Smith's own judgment is unequivocal, by any reasonable libertarian standard, the same standard 108 00:10:28.020 --> 00:10:34.020 we apply to a Sam Adams, a Thomas Paine or a Lysander Spooner, he writes, Mohandas Gandhi 109 00:10:34.020 --> 00:10:36.460 qualifies as heroic. 110 00:10:36.460 --> 00:10:41.660 Smith acknowledges that in the enormous corpus of Gandhi's writings we find no systematic 111 00:10:41.660 --> 00:10:48.140 treatise on political theory, yet scattered throughout letters and articles we find unmistakable 112 00:10:48.140 --> 00:10:51.140 indications of his anarchist tendencies. 113 00:10:51.140 --> 00:10:56.420 Gandhi, Smith maintains, was predominantly libertarian in his outlook. 114 00:10:56.420 --> 00:11:03.140 Throughout his career as an activist, Gandhi was guided by his vision of an anarchist society. 115 00:11:03.140 --> 00:11:04.580 Nor is this all. 116 00:11:04.580 --> 00:11:09.060 Gandhi repeatedly called himself an anarchist, Smith writes. 117 00:11:09.060 --> 00:11:11.840 He refused positions of political power. 118 00:11:11.840 --> 00:11:16.380 He called for the abolition of the Indian Congress after independence. 119 00:11:16.380 --> 00:11:18.660 He criticized Nehru's government. 120 00:11:18.660 --> 00:11:24.160 He desired the abolition of the Indian military and the maintenance of, at most, a minimal 121 00:11:24.160 --> 00:11:25.680 police force. 122 00:11:25.680 --> 00:11:32.060 His entire social program revolved around establishing decentralized village republics 123 00:11:32.060 --> 00:11:38.660 which would use social sanctions to maintain order and which would be free of state control. 124 00:11:38.660 --> 00:11:44.800 Gandhi was a vigorous opponent of imperialism, including Zionism, war, including World War 125 00:11:44.800 --> 00:11:50.400 II, censorship, and virtually every other kind of state intrusion. 126 00:11:50.400 --> 00:11:55.740 In the end, of course, the case for Mohandas Gandhi as a libertarian is closed by the fact 127 00:11:55.740 --> 00:11:57.480 of his pacifism. 128 00:11:57.480 --> 00:12:02.940 In online forums where blowhards with little information pontificate on subjects in which 129 00:12:02.940 --> 00:12:08.620 they are particularly uninformed, you often run into the assertion that libertarianism 130 00:12:08.620 --> 00:12:10.560 is not pacifism. 131 00:12:10.560 --> 00:12:16.640 Perhaps you have confused libertarianism and pacifism, a self-appointed pundit will intone 132 00:12:16.640 --> 00:12:20.020 with an air of great confidence and certainty. 133 00:12:20.020 --> 00:12:23.500 And there is a grain of truth behind all this posturing. 134 00:12:23.500 --> 00:12:29.340 It's true that libertarianism is not pacifism, at least, not necessarily. 135 00:12:29.340 --> 00:12:33.780 On the other hand, pacifism is libertarianism. 136 00:12:33.780 --> 00:12:37.860 If you abjure all violence, you must abjure the state. 137 00:12:37.860 --> 00:12:45.380 Thus, while not all libertarians are pacifists, all pacifists are libertarians, whether they 138 00:12:45.380 --> 00:12:51.100 realize it or not, and admittedly a great many pacifists have not realized it. 139 00:12:51.100 --> 00:12:55.380 Gandhi, it appears, did realize it. 140 00:12:55.380 --> 00:13:03.260 As all the world knows, Mohandas Gandhi returned to India in 1914, at the age of 44, just after 141 00:13:03.260 --> 00:13:07.660 the outbreak of what later came to be called World War I. 142 00:13:07.660 --> 00:13:12.740 For the next three decades, he organized and led the movement to free India from British 143 00:13:12.740 --> 00:13:16.820 control, a movement that succeeded in its aims. 144 00:13:16.820 --> 00:13:23.140 On January 30, 1948, while on his way to the platform from which he was to address a prayer 145 00:13:23.140 --> 00:13:28.500 meeting in Delhi, he was murdered by a Hindu nationalist wielding a pistol. 146 00:13:28.500 --> 00:13:33.980 Assassinated is the term usually employed, since Gandhi was both a political activist 147 00:13:33.980 --> 00:13:35.860 and a public figure. 148 00:13:35.860 --> 00:13:38.620 when he was 78 years old. 149 00:13:38.620 --> 00:13:41.860 Does he deserve a place in the libertarian tradition? 150 00:13:41.860 --> 00:13:43.860 I'd say so. 151 00:13:43.860 --> 00:13:44.860 This is Jeff Rigenbach.