The Abolitionist Dilemma

The Abolitionist Movement in the United States faced a contradiction: whether a non-violent movement could employ violence in defense of the enslaved. How did its leading thinkers address it?

Hello folks, Derek here with the second entry in Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins’ special Foreign Exchanges series on the anti-war/non-violence movement as a political tradition. As I mentioned in the preface to his introductory piece, this series is being offered as a special for paid FX subscribers. I hope those who are interested in the piece will consider subscribing to FX to support Daniel’s work as well as everything else that goes on here. Please subscribe today:

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The major assumption of this series is that there is an anti-war/non-violence political tradition that, even as it has informed anti-war movements around the globe for centuries, has been neglected in the study of the history of political thought. Yes, there have been myriad books and articles devoted to the history of the antiwar movement. But there has been much less of an effort to frame it within the history of political thought—like, for instance, with republicanism, liberalism, democracy, Marxism, etc. To this end, the series aims to discuss the key thinkers and ideas of non-violence, while also bringing attention to the work of practitioners and scholars of nonviolence. But to set this up, I believe it is necessary to devote a number of essays to what constitutes the core features of this tradition. My earliest pieces will be devoted to addressing this matter and specifically in dialogue with Domenico Losurdo’s book, Non-Violence: A History Beyond the Myth.

Losurdo—a highly regarded Italian Historian of a Marxist persuasion who died in 2018—is most well known in the US for his 2005 book Liberalism: A Counter-History. It presents a damning account of the history of liberalism suggesting that its pretense to freedom, rights, and liberty in reality produced forms of exclusion that empowered imperialism, racism, and genocide. As with his work on liberalism, Losurdo’s book on the history of non-violence sees it as flawed and riven by contradictions that, in many instances, led to the inverse of what it had originally proclaimed.

But in presenting defenders of nonviolence in such a critical light, Losurdo often shows how they adjusted, morphed, and adapted it to address new ethical dilemmas and political changes. Indeed, it is these adjustments and attempts at redefinition that offer readers a kind of rise and fall narrative of the non-violent thought. In this sense he sees a clear throughline that connects American Abolitionists, Tolstoy, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., the Dalai Lama, and so on. Losurdo’s schema is valuable, as not only does he reveal the limitations of non-violence but—in his critique—shows at the same time how it became a tradition in the history of political thought. He also attempts to carve out a space for what he calls “A Realistic Non-Violence in a World Prey to Nuclear Catastrophe.”

I limit myself in this entry to the book’s first chapter, which focuses on the American Abolitionist Movement of the first half of the 19th century. Of crucial importance is the reason why Losurdo commences with the Abolitionist Movement, which is twofold. First, he argues that it marks the advent of the first group committed to building a social political order based entirely on nonviolence. He points to David Dodge’s 1815 book War Inconsistent with the Religion of Jesus Christ, as well as the formation of the American Peace Society (1828) and the founding, by William Lloyd Garrison, of the New England Non-Resistance Society (1838).