The Ludwig von Mises Institute presents The Libertarian Tradition, an audio series with Jeff Rigenbach.
Mohandas K. Gandhi was born October 2, 1869 in Porbunder, a port town in western India on the shores of the Arabian Sea.
His father was a high-ranking official in the government of the small principality
that nominally ruled the immediate area. In effect, the elder Gandhi reported to the local
princes and they in turn reported to the local British officials who really ran things. The
younger Gandhi was interested in a medical career, but he abandoned that idea in favor of pleasing
his parents, showing his humility and obedience, and carrying on family traditions. In 1888,
At the age of 18, he moved to London to study law. He returned to India three years later,
only to discover that he was unable to earn a decent living as an attorney, at least in his
own country. After his attempts to establish a private practice in Bombay failed, he took
up residence in Porbunder once again, working under the supervision of well-established lawyers,
doing what we would describe today as the work of a paralegal.
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,
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.
Up to this time in his life, Mohandas Gandhi had been a model of self-effacing cooperativeness.
As his biographer, the late B. R. Nanda, put it, he had so far not been conspicuous for self-assertion
or aggressiveness. Gandhi himself, much later in life, observed that he had been brought up to
carry out the orders of the elders, not to scan them. And he did not scan them. He carried them
come out, uncomplainingly and faithfully.
Nor did the young Mohandas Gandhi betray even the slightest interest in politics and public events.
Nanda put it this way.
Until the age of 18, Gandhi had hardly ever read a newspaper.
Neither as a student in England nor as a budding barrister in India had he evinced much interest
in politics.
Indeed, he was overcome by a terrifying stage fright whenever he stood up to read a speech
All those who had made his acquaintance during his early years in India and England disappeared
after the move to South Africa and was never seen again.
He was replaced by a Gandhi made of sterner stuff, a Gandhi who had had his fill of living
as a doormat for other human beings, a Gandhi who would rise up with a vengeance against
anyone who dared to employ force against him.
The name's a few of the indignities forced upon Gandhi shortly after his arrival by South
African laws mandating second-class treatment for people who qualified as colored.
One day, while traveling to Pretoria, he was unceremoniously thrown out of a first-class
railway compartment for which he had paid, and left shivering and brooding at Peter Maritzberg
station.
In the further course of the journey, he was beaten up by the white driver of a stagecoach
In response, as Nanda writes, Gandhi blossomed almost overnight into a proficient political
campaigner.
He drafted petitions to the colonial legislature and the British government and had them signed
by hundreds of his compatriots.
He infused a spirit of solidarity in the heterogeneous Indian community.
He flooded the government, the legislature and the press with closely reasoned statements
of Indian grievances.
Finally, he exposed to the view of the outside world the skeleton in the imperial cupboard.
The discrimination practiced against the Indian subjects of Queen Victoria in one of her own
colonies in Africa.
Beginning in the fall of 1906, Gandhi began using still another tool, which he called
satyagraha.
It called for those he had organized to peaceably defy any unjust law and to suffer any and
all penalties resulting from their defiance.
Nanda translates satyagraha as a devotion to truth, but it is also sometimes translated
as Firm Insistence on Truth or Persistence in the Pursuit of Truth.
It was, Nanda writes, a new technique for redressing wrongs through inviting rather
than inflicting suffering, for resisting the adversary without rancor and fighting him
without violence.
Jim Powell reports in his book The Triumph of Liberty that around 1907 Gandhi campaigned
in South Africa against laws that prevented Indians from traveling, trading and living
freely, and a friend gave him a copy of Henry David Thoreau's Civil Disobedience, which
he read while imprisoned for three months in Pretoria.
He acknowledged that Thoreau's ideas influenced me greatly.
I adopted some of them and recommended the study of Thoreau to all my friends who were
helping me in the cause of Indian independence.
Powell quotes Gandhi as having said further that, until I read that essay, Thoreau's
On the Duty of Civil Disobedience, I never found a suitable English translation for my
Indian word, Satyagraha.
The Thoreau scholar Walter Harding wrote that after first reading Civil Disobedience in
that Pretoria jail cell, Gandhi always carried a copy with him during his many imprisonments
in the years to come.
Given this connection between Thoreau and Gandhi, and you virtually guarantee that someone
will ask, whether plaintively, sarcastically, or in a spirit of genuine curiosity, but was
Gandhi a libertarian?
Well, of course that depends on how you define your terms, what you mean by the word libertarian,
and what kind of evidence you think counts when it comes to deciding whether a particular
A great many people who are willing to honor Glenn Becks or Bob Barr's claim to be a libertarian
are strangely unwilling to extend the same benefit of the doubt to say Emma Goldman or
Rudolph Rocker.
In the case of Mohandas Gandhi, these are the facts.
P. R. Nanda reports that in Durban in January of 1897, Gandhi was assaulted and nearly lynched
by a white mob, but he refused to prosecute his assailants.
It was, he said, a principle with him not to seek redress of a personal wrong in a court
of law.
According to Nanda, the distrust of the apparatus of government was almost as deep-rooted in
Gandhi as in Tolstoy.
He would have agreed with the 19th century doctrine that government is best which governs
least.
In fact, Nanda writes, this Jeffersonian maxim was central to Gandhi's thinking.
A society organized and run on the basis of complete non-violence, he stated repeatedly,
would be the purest anarchy.
That state is perfect and non-violent where the people are governed the least.
And again, the ideally non-violent state will be an ordered anarchy.
That state will be the best governed, which is governed the least.
The intellectual historian George H. Smith puts the matter very similarly.
Gandhi's hatred of state oppression, he writes, was as passionate and deeply felt as any contemporary
libertarian.
Smith quotes Gandhi as having said that any man who subordinates his will to that of the
surrenders his liberty and thus becomes a slave. According to Smith, many
analysts have pointed out that Gandhi was in the anarchist tradition and that
his anarchism was strongly individualistic. In contrast to the
supposedly oriental view that the individual counts for nothing, Gandhi
argued that the individual is the one supreme consideration. No society, Gandhi
Smith cites the supporting opinion of the Indian academic philosopher Raghavan Iyer,
who spent most of his adult life in the United States teaching at the University of California.
It would not be extravagant, Iyer wrote in 1973, to consider Gandhi as one of the most
revolutionary of individualists and one of the most individualistic of revolutionaries.
Smith quotes Iyer as claiming that Gandhi could not believe in the moral priority of
any collective agency over the individual.
Smith's own judgment is unequivocal, by any reasonable libertarian standard, the same standard
we apply to a Sam Adams, a Thomas Paine or a Lysander Spooner, he writes, Mohandas Gandhi
qualifies as heroic.
Smith acknowledges that in the enormous corpus of Gandhi's writings we find no systematic
treatise on political theory, yet scattered throughout letters and articles we find unmistakable
indications of his anarchist tendencies.
Gandhi, Smith maintains, was predominantly libertarian in his outlook.
Throughout his career as an activist, Gandhi was guided by his vision of an anarchist society.
Nor is this all.
Gandhi repeatedly called himself an anarchist, Smith writes.
He refused positions of political power.
He called for the abolition of the Indian Congress after independence.
He criticized Nehru's government.
He desired the abolition of the Indian military and the maintenance of, at most, a minimal
police force.
His entire social program revolved around establishing decentralized village republics
which would use social sanctions to maintain order and which would be free of state control.
Gandhi was a vigorous opponent of imperialism, including Zionism, war, including World War
II, censorship, and virtually every other kind of state intrusion.
In the end, of course, the case for Mohandas Gandhi as a libertarian is closed by the fact
of his pacifism.
In online forums where blowhards with little information pontificate on subjects in which
they are particularly uninformed, you often run into the assertion that libertarianism
is not pacifism.
Perhaps you have confused libertarianism and pacifism, a self-appointed pundit will intone
with an air of great confidence and certainty.
And there is a grain of truth behind all this posturing.
It's true that libertarianism is not pacifism, at least, not necessarily.
On the other hand, pacifism is libertarianism.
If you abjure all violence, you must abjure the state.
Thus, while not all libertarians are pacifists, all pacifists are libertarians, whether they
realize it or not, and admittedly a great many pacifists have not realized it.
Gandhi, it appears, did realize it.
As all the world knows, Mohandas Gandhi returned to India in 1914, at the age of 44, just after
the outbreak of what later came to be called World War I.
For the next three decades, he organized and led the movement to free India from British
control, a movement that succeeded in its aims.
On January 30, 1948, while on his way to the platform from which he was to address a prayer
meeting in Delhi, he was murdered by a Hindu nationalist wielding a pistol.
Assassinated is the term usually employed, since Gandhi was both a political activist
and a public figure.
when he was 78 years old.
Does he deserve a place in the libertarian tradition?
I'd say so.
This is Jeff Rigenbach.