Vol. 18 opens with a declaration: pacifism and nonviolence are not marginal or naïve positions but the core of a robust philosophical tradition deserving serious, sustained engagement. The editor’s introduction notes a small but telling coincidence — around 2014–2015, Andrew Fiala was negotiating the title of what would become The Routledge Handbook of Pacifism and Nonviolence, and in March 2016 The Acorn‘s editors were revising the journal’s own subtitle, both projects landing independently on the same terms. A zeitgeist was at work. Fiala supplies the epigraph for the volume: students sympathetic to pacifism routinely write things like “I’m not really a pacifist, but I think that war is wrong” — a confusion that leaves people unable to clearly affirm what they actually believe. The issue sets out to name the tradition clearly and to argue for its philosophical seriousness across every section.
Andrew Fiala’s lead article, “The Pacifist Tradition, and Pacifism as Transformative and Critical Theory,” makes the systematic case. Against the standard move of defining pacifism as an absolute, dogmatic rejection of all violence — a straw man that is easy to dismiss — Fiala argues that pacifism is best understood as a family resemblance tradition analogous to feminism: a long global conversation, normatively affirmative in character, whose core claim is that peace is an end-in-itself and that nonviolent means are the preferred path toward it. The pacifist canon is wide — Jesus and the Buddha, Erasmus, Tolstoy, Gandhi, Jane Addams, Dorothy Day, King, Thich Nhat Hanh, the Dalai Lama, Robert Holmes — and the tradition interweaves Western, South Asian, East Asian, Islamic, and indigenous sources in ways that standard social and political philosophy has largely ignored. Fiala situates the tradition beside the just war tradition as its historical interlocutor, argues that justice, liberty, equality, and happiness are each best understood within a framework organized around peace, and insists that admitting rare exceptional cases for violence does not defeat the tradition’s core project — which is not primarily about exceptional cases but about transforming the world to reduce them. Steven Steyl’s “What Can Virtue Ethics Offer Pacifists?” takes a complementary approach from within Aristotelian ethics, a tradition that has long been hospitable to war and largely hostile to pacifism. Steyl translates a pacifist argument from suffering into an argument from the virtue of compassion: a genuinely compassionate agent, sensitive as she is to others’ suffering, will be profoundly averse to lethal warfare. But a single-virtue argument cannot by itself constitute a complete pacifism, because the virtues are generally held to be unified and reciprocal — an agent with genuine compassion should also have the courage and practical wisdom to recognize when force is needed. The more serious obstacle is the impracticality objection: a compassion-based pacifism will seem to leave the innocent undefended. Steyl maps two avenues available to the virtue ethicist in responding to this objection, finds neither fully developed in the current literature, and calls for further scholarly work — framing the article as an opening of a research program rather than a conclusion.
The issue’s feature section pairs two very different kinds of tribute. Tommy Curry’s The Man-Not: Race, Class, Genre, and the Dilemmas of Black Manhood won the American Book Award, and Vol. 18 memorializes an Author Meets Critics session hosted by the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy at its 2018 meeting in Indianapolis. The book’s central argument — that Black men and boys occupy the position of “outgroup-alien males” in patriarchal societies, targeted not for coercion and control but for extermination and social ostracization — draws on social dominance theory and global masculinities research to challenge what Curry sees as intersectionality’s failure to account empirically for the distinct targeting of Black males. Critic Anthony Neal argues that the book does what no other recent text on Black males has done as well: it refuses to simply cite negative statistics and instead catalogues the conditions that produce them, making dehumanization visible as a structured outcome rather than a cultural given. Critic Dwayne Tunstall frames the book as a call to repentance — a demand that US academia forsake its “anti-Black racist misandry” and learn to care about Black men and boys as persons rather than as objects of study or spectacle. The editor notes that as the introduction was being written, Curry was taking a position at the University of Edinburgh — a departure that, given the cultural logic the book describes, the introduction quietly marks as a kind of exile. Duane Cady’s “Remembering Mulford Q. Sibley (1912–1989)” offers a warm, personal, 30-year commemoration of the iconoclastic Quaker pacifist and political theorist who taught at the University of Minnesota for four decades, served as faculty advisor to the Student Peace Union during the McCarthy era, and edited The Quiet Battle, the canonical anthology of nonviolent resistance that circulated among Vietnam War resisters. Cady’s recollections bring Sibley alive — the red tie he adopted as a permanent rebuke to red-baiters, the letter to the student newspaper calling for a campus communist professor, a “Society for the Promotion of Free Love,” and a “Nudist Club” to make clear that the real issue was academic freedom, not communism. Cady first met Sibley in 1972, studied with him at a 1983 NEH summer seminar on utopian literature, and credits Sibley’s encouragement with leading to his first publication.
Six reviews carry Vol. 18’s argument outward into film, activism, philosophy of war, climate theory, music, and literature. Arnold Farr reads Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther film through two competing moral frameworks: the Standard Morality Reading, in which T’Challa is the hero upholding nonviolence, order, and tradition, and the Liberation Morality Reading, in which Erik Killmonger — a product of racial oppression rather than its cause — functions as the conscience of Wakanda, forcing its comfortable citizens to confront the suffering of Black people outside its borders. Farr finds the film genuinely dialectical, with Killmonger raising the question of who gets to define violence when structural oppression is itself a form of it, and ends with skepticism that the sequel will sustain the liberation-philosophical tension rather than reverting to a villain-from-outside plot. Court Lewis reviews Howard Caygill’s On Resistance, which begins with Clausewitz to argue that the philosophy of war is, paradoxically, an illuminating resource for understanding nonviolent resistance — offering, Lewis concludes, “a rubric by which to measure the nature of resistance, whether to understand it as a mere reaction to an event or situation, or to understand it as a means to correct abuses in order to instill positive and lasting changes.” Tom Hastings reviews two books from what he treats as revered Quaker elders: Staughton and Alice Lynd’s third edition of Nonviolence in America: A Documentary History (Orbis, 2018), which now includes documentation of Veterans for Peace joining indigenous resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline, and George Lakey’s How We Win (Melville House, 2018), a comprehensive guide to nonviolent direct action from a practitioner Hastings calls “a nonviolence training mentor to many.” Walter Kendall reviews Bruno Latour’s Down to Earth, which frames the climate crisis as a failure of political imagination: the standard right-left binary leaves both sides sharing the nation-state presuppositions that make the crisis intractable, and Latour argues for a “Territorial” rather than “Modern” orientation as the necessary conceptual precondition for addressing it — a theoretical preparation, Kendall argues, for evaluating the recently proposed Green New Deal. Finally, Court Lewis reviews two very different books together: Dario Martinelli’s Give Peace a Chant, which classifies Songs of Social Protest by their Umwelt relations, lyrical types, and musical types, recovering the embodied and affective dimensions of nonviolent resistance that political philosophy tends to neglect, and William Irwin’s Little Siddhartha, a philosophical novel that takes up the story where Hesse left off — a “jewel of philosophical literature,” Lewis writes, that invites readers into reflection as their fears of pacifism and nonviolence “take an overdue respite.”
The Acorn Journal 