It’s been over 6 months since I’ve read this book before writing a review, and I’ve read some great, powerful books in that time. Even before this book, lots of titles have had an impact on my thinking, but none so much as The Kingdom of God is Within You.

Say what you want about Tolstoy, but he was not afraid of asking the tough questions and giving tough answers. His complete rejection of the state of affairs in his day, nationalism, war, poverty, dehumanizing work, state building, imperialism, religion, made him an outcast, as I’m sure he would be today, because he asked the question “Is our society, the world we have built, anything like the Kingdom of God that Jesus preached about?”. To his point, the main inspiration for his thoughts, the Sermon on the Mount, was preached by an outcast who reject the current affairs of his day, and those inspired by this work of Tolstoy, namely Gandhi and MLK, were also the enemies of the status quo. Maybe there’s something to his message if so many leaders of justice take him as their inspiration?

Overall, the book is not an easy read but a rewarding one. If you are like me and have ever felt that the way things look in the world are not right, and that the Kingdom of God that Jesus preached seems so far away but don’t know why, I would highly recommend this book. The truths that Tolstoy preached in his day are just as applicable now, perhaps more so.

Herein, Tolstoy elaborates his absolutist view on the Sermon on the Mount. Taken by many as a good teaching on the conduct of Christ, Tolstoy takes the Sermon... as the alpha and the omega in terms of a world view and espouses it into all encompassing philosophy. From there everything is taken apart; organised religion, states, standing armies, organised repression etc. etc. where he calls for benevolent co-operation between all parties. Certainly not without its flaws or merits, he does great job in managing to tie this up with his own contemporary history, and illustrate various Christian sects who have drawn the same conclusions, as well as giving some well due ribbing to the hypocrites.

I have no rating or opinion on this book. Each reader will need to come to their own conclusions about the book.
Tolstoy was a pacifist and anarchist. He argued for these positions in his book.
He does a pretty good job of making his arguments clear.

Tolstoy's is another book most Christians will NOT want to read and, if they start, will quickly put down.

They will because one of the greatest Jesus-Following writers of all times quickly proves that Jesus means what He says when our King commands clearly and unambiguously in Matthew 5:38: "Do not resist evil" ...with violence of any kind to save your life or that of another.

Most North American Pastors teach most Christians a convoluted message involving the unBiblical "Just War Doctrine" and, therefore, justified violence.

The demonic denial protecting both those messages is incredibly powerful. I know because I used to be trapped by both the "just war", and "just violence" doctrines taught by most traditional and evangelical churches.

Only Holy Spirit can give those who are willing "the eyes to see and the ears to hear"!

Enjoy and be blessed ...if you will!

GaryFPatton
(2013-10-03)

This book, was a complicated mixed bag. Reading Tolstoy's philosophy of a supposed dawning age of "real" Christianity, sometimes sounding profoundly insightful, sometimes sounding like utter nonsense, I oscillated wildly from emphatic agreement to emphatic disagreement, sometimes within the same page or even the same sentence.

Such ambivalence started right from the get-go. Tolstoy dismisses the supernatural elements of Christian doctrine, considering them a distraction from the implicitly world-changing divine words of Jesus. Also dismissing the corrupted institution of the church itself, Tolstoy curiously creates a dichotomy between the "Sermon on the Mount" and the "creed," claiming we cannot have both. He has strong, pointed defenses of Christ's commands of non-violence ("Occasions for fulfilling the commandment of non-resistance to evil by force are taught for the most part as occasions for not fulfilling it"). Yet none of his responses to his contemporary critics told me how his exegetical approach applied to the sermon's portions about cutting off eyes or arms.

Amidst the oversimplified logic dressed up in compelling narrative (too many times he too hastily concludes "It could not be otherwise"), there are also a lot of interesting and thought-provoking discussions. One amusing quote:

n  The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.n

Tolstoy includes many interesting quotes from other writers as well. In a discussion of the relentless military build-ups of the end of the 19th century, it was quite haunting to read this knowing what came twenty years later: "the most trifling pretext will be sufficient to throw the whole of Europe into the fire of universal war".

Indeed, the pacifistic discussions of conscientious objection were the book's strongest elements for me. He picks apart various contemporary attitudes to the bellicosity of his day, wondering why no one asks, not what ought this or that government to do, but what he considers the real question: "Ought I to participate in it?" He has wonderfully polemic attacks on universal conscription, arguing that to resist it is better no matter how you slice it, because, after all, forced service is not really that different from the prison sentence you might get for refusing, except that besides being a virtual slave to your commanding officers you might also have the horror of being ordered to kill people who haven't done anything to you! While it's easy to dismiss his rambling and contradictory conjectures about what would happen broadly if everyone dismantled all their armies, it was certainly interesting to read this during Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine and think about what might have been different if more individual Russians had accepted Tolstoy's positions. His poetic quotes and descriptions of the horrors of war were also moving and timely ("The young recruits, moving about in lines yonder, are destined to death like the flocks of sheep driven by the butcher along the road. They will fall in some plain with a saber cut in the head, or a bullet through the breast. And these are young men who might work, be productive and useful. Their fathers are old and poor. Their mothers, who have loved them for twenty years, worshiped them as none but mothers can, will learn in six months' time, or a year perhaps, that their son, their boy, the big boy reared with so much labor, so much expense, so much love, has been thrown in a hole like some dead dog, after being disemboweled by a bullet, and trampled, crushed, to a mass of pulp by the charges of cavalry. Why have they killed her boy, her handsome boy, her one hope, her pride, her life? She does not know. Ah, why?").

Unfortunately, it's the book's attempts to go beyond a personal critique of military service into universal concepts of humanity that severely weaken it. Tolstoy has a simplistic model of human history progressing from an individual "pagan conception of live" to a group "social conception of life" to (beginning now but not quite realized) a universal "Christian conception of life". But wasn't it more primitive societies that were more collective and modern society that's more individualistic? He doesn't see any fundamental advantages to republics over dictatorships (which perhaps were less obvious in the 1800's, but which also mutes the relevance of his arguments to my modern wondering about making exceptions for resisting invasion...) While emphatically rejecting the revolutionary Marxists of his day just as strongly as he rejected all forms of existing government, he did have a simplistic Marxist philosophical view of capitalism as inherently oppressive. Lacking nuance or an understanding of other perspectives, he sometimes claims his arguments are obvious to everyone, and sometimes claims people don't see them because they've been hypnotized by the various powers that be. He tries to refute the idea that good rulers are necessary to stop evil by saying that ruling is inherently evil, but he assumes his conclusion by using his definition of what is evil, not his opponent's. His final monologues about how the old order of war and violence persists but is also being slowly undermined mostly sounds like nonsense, especially knowing what was to come in the following century. (The sentence I found the most insane: "Power selects and attracts the worst elements of society, transforms them, improves and softens them, and returns them to society.")

And yet.

His descriptions of the possible hesitations, up and down the chain of command, to follow through on orders to kill because of one's internal recognition of the wrongness, feels strangely prescient, not of war itself, but at least of the restraint in using nuclear weapons during the Cold War. And the description of growing doubts among whole ranks of soldiers as to the justness of their role comes to mind when thinking of the disastrous Russian performance in this very invasion of Ukraine, what with desertions, abandoned vehicles, internal sabotage, and the like. Modern tales of unmotivated Russian conscripts ruining their superiors' strategies due to their lack of desire to kill their Ukrainian brothers actually sounds... quite Tolstoyian. Indeed, universal conscription has largely disappeared in the rest of the modern world and seems unlikely to ever come back. Is humanity finally, over a century later, beginning to reach a point of universal Christlike love that actually renders the ugliness of mass warfare untenable, as never before? Perhaps that's still a fantasy, as the reality of the destruction that has still managed to occur in Ukraine can attest, to say nothing of the other conflicts ravaging other parts of the globe. But perhaps we can dream.

The 19th century theological "Turn on, tune in, drop out." Vehement, bursting, and Quakery.

This is a great book to read before you go to sleep. I gave it three stars because it gave my brain a bit to think about, not because it is a well-written book by any stretch of the imagination. Tolstoy has a lot of great ideas, but this book is more of a collection of ramblings than a comprehensive work. Each chapter begins with a summary of its contents, which can be up to two pages on its own, and then proceeds to restate those ideas in even clumsier prose. Tolstoy's short stories were works of art, so I was disappointed that he seemed to put little effort into the writing of this book, seeking only to have his ideas heard.

For those who see that the Christian Church has ceased to follow the most important teachings of Christ, this book can be good back-up. For those who believe that the Church is the be-all and end-all of Christian doctrine, I'd recommend you at least read parts of this book for a serious wake-up call.

Lays out the predicament of class exploitation and violent government. Denies the necessity of young people slaughtering eachother. Analyzes the rising armies and rising tensions of the time and largely predicts The Great War. Offers an interpretation of Jesus that does not support military blood showers. Proposes an internal conception of God. Rather than acting for the good of your given culture or for the good of humanity, you may act according to the good within yourself, to approach that innate quality which can never be realized in the longest life.

You have to give credit to Tolstoy for being uncompromising in his beliefs. You do not have to give him credit for his hermeneutics, as he throws out 90% of the bible (the entire OT, which Christ confirmed, and the new testament, which creates the "was jesus really so incompetent as to not pick any legitimate apostles?" question that Mormons stumble over. Ultimately, Tolstoy's pacifism relies on illegitimately limiting the applicable texts to just the four gospels, and then interpreting Matt 5:39 as strictly "resisting" in general, instead of "revenge", which the exegesis and historical/intra-biblical evidence seems to show https://www.jerusalemperspective.com/...).

Though his theology is piecemeal, un-holistic, and worthless, his politics are not. He makes good arguments for anarchism, but his variety of christianity is assumed to be operating upon it. I think without that absolute pacifism of early christianity, his utopia falls apart. He did, however, make an excellent point with regards to authority being necessarily force, see below: 

"The effect of moral influence on a man is to change his desires and to bend them in the direction of the duty required of him. The man who is controlled by moral influence acts in accordance with his own desires. Authority, in the sense in which the word is ordinarily understood, is a means of forcing a man to act in opposition to his desires. The man who submits to authority does not do as he chooses but as he is obliged by authority. Nothing can oblige a man to do what he does not choose except physical force, or the threat of it, that is—deprivation of freedom, blows, imprisonment, or threats—easily carried out—of such punishments. This is what authority consists of and always has consisted of.

In spite of the unceasing efforts of those who happen to be in authority to conceal this and attribute some other significance to it, authority has always meant for man the cord, the chain with which he is bound and fettered, or the knout with which he is to be flogged, or the ax with which he is to have hands, ears, nose, or head cut off, or at the very least, the threat of these terrors. So it was under Nero and Ghenghis Khan, and so it is to-day, even under the most liberal government in the Republics of the United States or of France. If men submit to authority, it is only because they are liable to these punishments in case of non-submission. All state obligations, payment of taxes, fulfillment of state duties, and submission to punishments, exile, fines, etc., to which people appear to submit voluntarily, are always based on bodily violence or the threat of it.

The basis of authority is bodily violence. The possibility of applying bodily violence to people is provided above all by an organization of armed men, trained to act in unison in submission to one will. These bands of armed men, submissive to a single will, are what constitute the army. The army has always been and still is the basis of power. Power is always in the hands of those who control the army, and all men in power—from the Roman Caesars to the Russian and German Emperors—take more interest in their army than in anything, and court popularity in the army, knowing that if that is on their side their power is secure.

The formation and aggrandizement of the army, indispensable to the maintenance of authority, is what has introduced into the social conception of life the principle that is destroying it."

Additionally:

"Every savage has something he holds sacred, something for which he is ready to suffer, something he will not consent to do. But what is it that is sacred to the civilized man of to-day?"

On a related note to the first quote, he mentions how public opinion is the only thing stronger than force and is the only thing which can being about the christian ideal.

Tolstoy sees the root of all institutional power as violence, since that's the only way to force people to do things against their will, their desire (except changing their will or desire), so he opposes all institutions, governmental and religious.

I wonder what tolstoy would think about the pacification of europe and the west once fully secularized and christian morals are made utterly implicit, buried under grand, french revolution-esq chants. It seems good on the surface, until you see the influx of muslims who have no intention of remaining passive.

A good summary of the book can be found at the end of it:

"And, indeed, what sort of ethical doctrine could admit the legitimacy of murder for any object whatever? It is as impossible as a theory of mathematics admitting that two is equal to three.

There may be a semblance of mathematics admitting that two is equal to three, but there can be no real science of mathematics. And there can only be a semblance of ethics in which murder in the shape of war and the execution of criminals is allowed, but no true ethics. The recognition of the life of every man as sacred is the first and only basis of all ethics.

The doctrine of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth has been abrogated by Christianity, because it is the justification of immorality, and a mere semblance of equity, and has no real meaning. Life is a value which has no weight nor size, and cannot be compared to any other, and so there is no sense in destroying a life for a life. Besides, every social law aims at the amelioration of man's life. What way, then, can the annihilation of the life of some men ameliorate men's life? Annihilation of life cannot be a means of the amelioration of life; it is a suicidal act.

To destroy another life for the sake of justice is as though a man, to repair the misfortune of losing one arm, should cut off the other arm for the sake of equity."

4.5 stars.

I have been slowly been drifting apart from a very strict Hauerwasian conviction of non-violence, and feel fairly torn by the arguments between pacifism and its alternatives. Whatever is the case, I actually enjoyed this book a lot, and there's a lot in here to think about. Tolstoy does focus a lot of his critique of violence on state violence, and I do agree with this emphasis. Anyways, hopefully more thoughts on this book forthcoming.

[Edit / Jan 12, 2019]

Some additional thoughts I've had since I've finished reading:

So I was standing in a decrepit building waiting for Yasmine Hamdan show to start. I was discussing with some friends the issue of Tolstoy’s anarchism. It sometimes can come across as a stubborn purity politics that refuses to engage with absolutely any aspect of the state, including voting and jury duty, as an issue of removing oneself from an institution as extremely violent as the state. I have a friend who has no patience for this type of politics, the sort that rejects any opportunity of reform through electoral mechanisms. I myself feel a little torn on the issue of the state, though I think a lot of it comes down to the semantics of what it means to engage with or participate in the state. The issue though, as I was later discussing on a GO bus ride weeks later on my way to a free Messiaen concert, was that Tolstoy was living under Tsarist Russia, and his notion of the state was in some ways different than the one we might have today. Of course we still live under a state that is perpetually engaging in unjustified violence (the recent forced removal by RCMP of Wet'suwet'en people is a case in point) but we do have opportunities to vote people out of office and some reforms do make a difference in some people’s lives, even if they are never ultimately enough. There is something troubling about trying to create good in the world using a colonial government like Canada’s and I think there is merit to living out radical alternatives that displace state authority within small autonomous communities, which many indigenous communities are exemplars of for others on Turtle Island. However these communities also (out of necessity and survival) make it their task to challenge the government to rectify its hypocrisy and transform it into less harmful iterations of itself, especially since state actions are constantly impinging on the lives of these communities (e.g. the Trans Mountain pipeline). Chomsky said that reform is a parallel initiative that occurs alongside the work of bringing about a new more egalitarian ordering of society. A part of that process of reform involves electoral politics, and a small part involves voting. Whatever the philosophical implications involved, I’m on the same page as that.

Tolstoy also had a similarly dismissive perspective of the Church, which he implied to be something immoral to engage with. If Tolstoy’s ecclesiology was one more open to the porous and unknowable boundaries of what actually constitutes the Church, I think it would have made for a more interesting portion of writing, but maybe that is a postmodern delusion I have, given the century I live in.

One of the struggles I have had with Tolstoy is the same one I have had for Dostoyevsky. One of the conversations that has consistently come up with religiously engaged Russian writers like these two are the way they are used by people like Jordan Peterson, who insists that God is ‘necessary’. Dostoyevsky’s characters imply this perspective as does Tolstoy in this book, saying:

“The Christian doctrine shows man that the essence of his soul is love—that his happiness depends not on loving this or that object, but on loving the principle of the whole—God, whom he recognizes within himself as love, and therefore he loves all things and all men.

In this is the fundamental difference between the Christian doctrine and the doctrine of the Positivists, and all the theorizers about universal brotherhood on non-Christian principles.

Such are the two principal misunderstandings relating to the Christian religion, from which the greater number of false reasonings about it proceed. The first consists in the belief that Christ's teaching instructs men, like all previous religions, by rules, which they are bound to follow, and that these rules cannot be fulfilled. The second is the idea that the whole purport of Christianity is to teach men to live advantageously together, as one family, and that to attain this we need only follow the rule of love to humanity, dismissing all thought of love of God altogether.”

Now I sort of agree with the broad outline of these statements from within the internal grammar of Christianity, yet I cannot hold them as objective truths that hold any normative force for anyone who does not choose to exist within that grammar. I have not adequately fulfilled the demands entailed in becoming a Christian nor do I even know all that it entails. It will take a lifetime to figure that out, and even then, it’s not likely I will have done so. How arrogant then is it of me to assume that I know what non-Christians need more of, especially when I can barely figure out what people of my own faith require. I cannot speak of what people (as persons of non-Christian faith) need because that is an act of power over them, for I am in no position to judge what they need by virtue of my sheer ignorance.

But the better question might be, when Jordan Peterson claims God is ‘necessary’, for whom and for whose interest does he mean? Here we find out God is simply a mythic tool to bring ‘order’ out from ‘chaos’. And what ‘chaos’? In my view, God is a merely dragged onto the scene by a leash to fulfill Peterson’s quest to conserve so-called ‘Western’ civilization, which he claims to be undergirded by Judeo-Christian values— at which point I ask, values such as colonialism, imperialism, and state-sanctioned violence? I think it’s telling how Peterson perceives ‘order’, when he says feminist activism against patriarchy is really an attack on ‘Western’ civilization, and lumps them in with so-called ‘Islamists’. Peterson’s obsession with individualism and personal responsibility is also a glimpse into what his order-chaos dichotomy is all about. God for him is ‘necessary’ to maintain the Capitalist order of individual personal responsibility as well as hierarchies being necessary for a ‘sophisticated’ society to function. Tolstoy thinks God is necessary for a fairly different reason, a negative one, which claimed that the state’s existence was unjustified, as was that of violence. I have maybe over-specified Peterson’s reasons for claiming God to be necessary, because he believes God to be an almost master-signifier, which gives meaning to the rest of life, like maybe Sartre and Camus were taking up with Nietzsche.

Peterson’s conception of God is a Tillichian one of ultimate concern, derived in some measure from Dostoyevsky. While I think this is a universalizing imposition of Christianity on its surroundings, I do see some merit with this view but qualify it as only one way of perceiving the situation. Yet I understand this as an issue of idolatry, and really I believe Peterson is in the business of idolatry. Hauerwas and Willimon wrote:

“Tillich assumed that, though believing in Christianity had become difficult, many modern people are unavoidably religious. Indeed, religion became the determinative Tillichian genus of which “Christianity” is but a species. In the American utilitarian setting, this became the coarse generalization (Eisenhower) that it doesn’t matter what you believe as long as you believe in something…

…This belief, on which much apologetics tends to be based, is that everyone must believe in something. This is the Constantinian assertion that religious belief is unavoidable. Constantine knew that, in order to keep the Empire afloat, if people were no longer classically pagan, they would have to be made imperially Christian. You cannot run a world without people believing in something.”

And so ‘faith’ or ‘ultimate concern’ is ‘necessary’ in the service of running Empire. And I cannot help but perceive that to be the case for Peterson, and that is the way I would like to distinguish Tolstoy here. Although, I do think Tolstoy remains problematically a Christian supremacist and sees Christianity as a religion that supersedes all others. His basic schema (and other Christians on the left have similarly problematic schemas, like Zizek) goes like:

“In the first theory of life a man's life is limited to his one individuality; the aim of life is the satisfaction of the will of this individuality. In the second theory of life a man's life is limited not to his own individuality, but to certain societies and classes of individuals: to the tribe, the family, the clan, the nation; the aim of life is limited to the satisfaction of the will of those associations of individuals. In the third theory of life a man's life is limited not to societies and classes of individuals, but extends to the principle and source of life—to God.”

I think this is an important distinguishing factor between Tolstoy and Peterson’s individualism (however couched Peterson's individualism is in it being about the ‘divinity’ of the human individual). The first two theories Tolstoy mentions can be mapped onto the forms of life described by Agamben and Arendt via Aristotle: zoe as “bare life” and bios as “political life”. Or the animal and the socio-political. Tolstoy sees religious life as superior to mere political life, which leads me into my next point.

It seems like for some portions of the book Tolstoy is directly attacking communists and revolutionary socialists and their engagement with violence. I think that’s fine, but there isn’t quite an adequate consideration of what we might today call structural violence, and so non-violence is not really an accurately descriptive term especially if one benefits from such a violent social order. Paulo Freire locating the origin of violence with those in power (the oppressor) is a more comprehensible position for me. Everyone who benefits from power (certainly I am) is in some sense is implicated in violence though. Tolstoy bringing up Jesus driving people out of the temple with whips and Ananias being struck dead by the Holy Spirit for not yielding his property into the common pool were only mentioned in passing by Tolstoy and not properly addressed. Interestingly these are the two examples that come up in the work of Jose P. Miranda as questioning reductive pacifist framings of Jesus or New Testament theology.

All this being said, I still think Tolstoy’s pacifism to be very convincing, even if I myself have not quite sorted through this issue in my head. One of his more interesting and less sectarian quotes on violence is a good critique of imperialism and capitalism also:

“it was the will of those in power that... Poland was divided, and Ireland and India ruled by the English government, and that the Chinese are attacked and the Africans slaughtered, and the Chinese prevented from immigrating by the Americans, and the Jews persecuted by the Russians, and that landowners appropriate lands they do not cultivate and capitalists enjoy the fruits of the labor of others. It has come to the present state of things; one set of men commit acts of violence no longer on the pretext of resistance to evil, but simply for their profit or their caprice, and another set submit to violence, not because they suppose, as was supposed in former times, that this violence was practiced upon them for the sake of securing them from evil, but simply because they cannot avoid it.”

My favourite parts though were his socio-economic commentary. A great example very relevant to CSR today:

“But the sophistry of hypocrisy reasons that the merchant can pass for a virtuous man without giving up his pernicious course of action; a religious man need only have faith and a liberal man need only promote the modification of external conditions – the progress of industry. And so we see the merchant (who often goes further and commits acts of direct dishonesty, selling adulterated goods, using false weights and measures, and trading in products injurious to health, such as alcohol and opium) boldly regarding himself and being regarded by others, so long as he does not directly deceive his colleagues in business, as a pattern of probity and virtue. And if he spends a thousandth part of his stolen wealth on some public institution, a hospital or museum or school, then he is even regarded as the benefactor of the people on the exploitation and corruption of whom his whole prosperity has been founded. If he sacrifices, too, a portion of his ill-gotten gains on a Church and the poor, then he is an exemplary Christian. A manufacturer is a man whose whole income consists of value squeezed out of the workmen, and whose whole occupation is based on forced, unnatural labor, exhausting whole generations of men. It would seem obvious that if this man professes any Christian or liberal principles, he must first of all give up ruining human lives for his own profit. But by the existing theory he is promoting industry, and he ought not to abandon his pursuit. It would even be injuring society for him to do so. And so we see this man, the harsh slave-driver of thousands of men, building almshouses with little gardens two yards square for the workmen broken down in toiling for him, and a bank, and a poorhouse, and a hospital – fully persuaded that he has amply expiated in this way for all the human lives morally and physically ruined by him – and calmly going on with his business, taking pride in it.”

Haha that’s Tolstoy at his best. To conclude, I will simply leave a few other quotes that I think are worthwhile:

“And to preach this Christian truth and to support it by Christian example we set up among them prisons, guillotines, gallows, and preparations for murder; we diffuse among the common herd idolatrous superstitions to stupefy them; ...we give land to those who do not need it; we make a display of senseless luxury in the midst of suffering poverty; we destroy the possibility of anything like a Christian public opinion, and studiously try to suppress what Christian public opinion is existing.”

“There is no one today who does not see the uselessness and injustice of collecting taxes from the toiling masses to enrich idle officials; or the senselessness of inflicting punishments on weak or depraved persons in the shape of transportation from one place to another, or of imprisonment in a fortress where, living in security and indolence, they only become weaker and more depraved; or the worse than uselessness and injustice, the positive insanity and barbarity of preparations for war and of wars, causing devastation and ruin, and having no kind of justification.”

“A single fortune gained by trading in goods necessary to the people or in goods pernicious in their effects, or by financial speculations, or by acquiring land at a low price the value of which is increased by the needs of the population, or by an industry ruinous to the health and life of those employed in it, or by military or civil service of the state, or by any employment that trades on men’s evil instincts – a single fortune acquired in any of these ways, not only with the sanction, but even with the approbation of the leading men in society, and masked with an ostentation of philanthropy, corrupts men incomparably more than millions of thefts and robberies committed against the recognized forms of law and punishable as crimes.”

This book is listed as being one of Gandhi's favorites. This book makes me really angry. I'm loving it.

I finished reading what I wanted. I think I like Gandhi's version of Pacifism better, though I'm still learning what that means. Need to find a book to read so I can, hopefully one written by him.

I like the beginning although I do not entirely agree with the non-resistance to violence principle; sometimes using violence to warrant the safety of one or more of loved ones is necessary; nor do I believe that Jesus intended the turn the other cheek to be interpreted as a mandate for the absolute rejection of using violence. The first laws are to love God and your neighbor as yourself, and sometimes you have to hurt another neighbor to protect your neighbor out of love. I do however generally deplore violence and most assuredly do think war to be conceptually inhuman and should always be prevented from actualization as much as possible.

The mid section of the book, about the advent of a universally accepted pure Christian life-conception (perfect absence of violence), was not that interesting and proved to be too much wishful thinking and overoptimism on Tolstoy's part; although it can hardly be denied, especially for our persistently thoroughly blood-soaked world, that it is a most noble goal for humanity to pursue. Tolstoy's principled antagonism toward war and conscription is outstanding and worthy of eternal applause not least because of his brave maverick position. The arrival of communism, world war I, Nazism and world war II would have been brutally vicious slaps in the face for poor old Tolstoy.... had he lived.

The last portion of the book, however, the conclusion spanning some 80 pages, was most interesting and most inspiring and had he not included it I would've given the book a considerably lower ranking. His anarchic stance on general (abusive) government is as exemplifying as courageous. On a personal note, Tolstoy presented me the material for me to finally be able to fully understand system-idolatry.