Civility and Politicized Love in Gandhi

Abstract

Gandhi presents a discourse of politicized love which draws heavily from a Christian conception of agape but which does not reduce to the latter. Such love is politicized through a requirement that the best kind of dissenting agents, satyagrahees (the agents called upon to engage in civil disobedience and noncooperation) are also called upon to love their enemies or, if they have none of the latter, at least their opponents. In his most famous political tract, Hind Swaraj (1909), Gandhi equates their struggle, satyagraha, with a politicized ‘love-force’, although this is not quite a definition, given that he also equates satyagraha with many other things. Moreover, there is also an occasional doubling of Gandhi’s account of political agency. Alongside the requirement for love, a requirement which is simultaneously political and spiritual, there is (again occasionally) a more minimal conception of civility from which, I will suggest, a plausible contemporary approach to civil disobedience may be constructed. The contemporary relevance of such a civility based account will then be shown through its application to the phenomenon of self-immolation, which Gandhi did not comment upon in detail but which his attitude towards civility can help us to understand. The point of this inclusion is to show that Gandhi’s approach towards civility extends effectively into new contexts.