Vol. 19.2 carries the subtitle “Gandhi 150, Part II” and arrives in March 2021 — a date that says almost as much as the contents. Work on the philosophical themes had been well underway before the COVID-19 pandemic, the mass movement for Black Lives Matter, or the catastrophic Texas winter infrastructure failure of February 2021 that left millions without electricity or water; and yet, as the editor’s introduction notes, the concepts assembled here illuminated each of those crises with uncanny precision. Associate editor Sanjay Lal steps into the guest editor role for this issue. The introduction — written by Moses from Austin during Spring Break 2021 — is organized thematically rather than sequentially, weaving the issue’s contributions across four interlocking strands: religion and democracy, Gandhian economics, the over-demandingness of pacifist leadership, and the syndemics of militarism. The presiding spirit is still Gandhi at 150, but the issues pressing on every page — a pandemic, a racial justice uprising, a state’s collapsed infrastructure, the approaching twentieth anniversary of September 11 — ensure that these studies in pacifism and nonviolence are being tested in real time.
The issue leads with two Author Meets Critics forums that together place Gandhian philosophy at the center of two live debates in political and religious thought. In the first, Douglas Allen, author of Gandhi After 9/11, meets critics Lal and Karsten Struhl. Allen’s project is to free Gandhi’s philosophy from the dogmatisms and absolutes that have sometimes accumulated around it — remaining faithful to Gandhi’s own flexibility while also, where necessary, challenging his inflexibilities and blind spots. Lal and Struhl engage Allen in what the introduction calls a “robust dialogue,” inviting readers into the living intricacies of Gandhian wisdom rather than the comfort of settled positions. The second forum centers on Lal’s own book, Gandhi’s Thought and Liberal Democracy, with critics Jeff Shawn Jose, Douglas Allen, and Michael Allen. Lal’s argument is that the liberal state’s nominal separation of religion from public life does not achieve genuine religious neutrality — it merely vacates the field to anti-democratic religious dogmatisms that operate with full force in civil society, as school rituals, as cultural presumptions, as political power. Inspired by Gandhi’s ecumenical practice, Lal argues that a democratic state ought to exercise engaged, constructive interest in religious education, better to cultivate the conditions for a more genuinely democratic common life.
Three articles and a collaborative afterword extend the issue’s Gandhian economic and ethical inquiry. Sanjay Lal’s “Revolutionary Nondualism” takes up the charge — familiar from Martha Nussbaum’s critique of Stoicism — that philosophical traditions counseling detachment from the material world cannot coherently generate arguments for protecting the poor or providing a social safety net. Lal argues that Gandhi’s nondualism is a case in point: seemingly vulnerable to the same objection, it nonetheless contains the resources for a robust anti-poverty ethics, one that holds personal responsibility and structural remedy in tension rather than allowing either to dissolve the other. Michael Allen’s “Techno-Satyagraha” arrives, as the introduction notes, with particular force against the backdrop of Texas’s infrastructure collapse. Drawing on Gandhi’s own practice of spinning thread as a model of economic self-reliance, Allen argues for a Gandhi-inspired approach to political economy that is anti-dogmatic and technologically responsive — neither capitalist nor socialist in any fixed sense, but negotiating resilient relationships between regional, national, and global scales. Federico Germán Abal’s “Why Pacifist Leadership Overcomes the Over-Demandingness Objection” takes on the standard dismissal of pacifism as saintly and therefore impractical: Abal’s move is to distinguish between the obligations of ordinary moral agents and those of people who explicitly assume leadership roles within peace movements. While many people may lapse from strict pacifist practice without moral failure, those who take on the mantle of pacifist leadership have accepted a higher standard — and holding them to it is not over-demanding. Lal and Allen close the issue with a joint afterword, “Gandhi’s Economics and the ‘Defund the Police’ Movement,” in which their two articles’ differing approaches to Gandhian political economy are brought to bear on a controversy at the center of the BLM summer: the call to redirect resources away from police and toward community infrastructure and social services.
Three reviews anchor the issue in its urgent contemporary moment. Gail Presbey reviews Sarah Azaransky’s This Worldwide Struggle: Religion and the International Roots of the Civil Rights Movement, which reconstructs the interreligious dialogue between Black theologians in the United States and Gandhian satyagrahis in India that was formative for the American civil rights movement. The exchange was a genuine two-way critique: Gandhi challenged the racism embedded in American Christianity; Black religious philosophers questioned Hindu caste. Azaransky pays particular attention to Bayard Rustin — who worked alongside Martin Luther King Jr. from 1956 and stood with King and John Lewis at the 1963 March on Washington — as a living conduit between the two traditions. Presbey’s review lands in an issue that opened with a description of John Lewis, in the last days of his life, standing on a Washington street freshly painted with the words “Black Lives Matter”: the historical arc from Gandhi to Lewis to the summer of 2020 is made palpable. Tom Hastings reviews War and Health: The Medical Consequences of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, edited by Catherine Lutz and Andrea Mazzarino and grounded in Brown University’s Watson Institute Costs of War Project. Hastings takes readers on what the introduction calls “a grim tour” of the syndemics of post-9/11 militarism: the direct killing and wounding of civilians, the long-lived damage of unexploded ordnance and toxic chemicals, and the psychological and social traumas that continue to accumulate two decades on. Will Barnes reviews Judith Butler’s The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind, finding in Butler’s work a decisive refusal of the saintly model: Butler’s nonviolence is not obedience to a morally impeccable superego but a demand for the equal grievability of all lives. Drawing on Freud and Fanon, Butler argues that in a world where violence is thoroughly normalized, the nonviolent resister embodies a scandalous rupture — and connects the equality of embodied life to a social ethic of shared infrastructure, an insight Barnes finds critically anticipatory of the very disaster that struck Texas as the issue was going to press.
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