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In the last thirty years of his life, Leo Tolstoy wrote numerous books, essays and pamphlets expounding his newly-articulated views on violence, the state, the church, and on how to improve the human condition. Since then, these “Christian anarchist” views have often been dismissed as utopian or naive, and, despite inspiring many activists and intellectuals, often forgotten or ignored. Some of those views and arguments, however, arguably remain apposite today—and can in some cases be applied to broader phenomena than those he identified. This article focuses on one of the aspects of his Christian anarchist thought: his anticlericalism. The first Section recounts the evolution of Tolstoy’s views on religion and the church, and briefly describes Tolstoy’s peculiar metaphysics. The second outlines his main charges against the church, discusses some common objections to it, and considers the continuing relevance of his anticlericalism. The third seeks to secularise his anticlerical arguments by applying them beyond the church, against secular preachers and institutions, and does so by reflecting on the quality of debate in the contemporary public sphere, on the hypocritical distance between the morality preached by secular “clerics” and their practice, and on the steady process of ossification and betrayal which befalls secular political ideals. The article thus contributes to the literature firstly by summarising, discussing and reflecting upon the anticlericalism of a famous writer who also espoused controversial religious and political views; secondly by succinctly outlining his idiosyncratic metaphysics, including his peculiar reinterpretation of traditional Christian referents; and thirdly by applying the arguments that informed his criticisms of the church to a broader variety of religious and secular secular institutions.

Christian anarchism has been around for at least as long as \"secular\" anarchism. Leo Tolstoy is its most famous proponent, but there are many others, such as Jacques Ellul, Vernard Eller, Dave Andrews or the people associated with the Catholic Worker movement. They offer a compelling critique of the state, the church and the economy based on the New Testament.

A second generation of emerging Dalit theology texts is re-shaping the way we think of Indian theology and liberation theology. This book is a vital part of that conversation. Taking post-colonial criticism to its logical end of criticism of statism, Keith Hebden looks at the way the emergence of India as a nation state shapes political and religious ideas. He takes a critical look at these Gods of the modern age and asks how Christians from marginalised communities might resist the temptation to be co-opted into the statist ideologies and competition for power. He does this by drawing on historical trends, Christian anarchist voices, and the religious experiences of indigenous Indians. Hebden's ability to bring together such different and challenging perspectives opens up radical new thinking in Dalit theology, inviting the Indian Church to resist the Hindu fundamentalists labelling of the Church as foreign by embracing and celebrating the anarchic foreignness of a Dalit Christian future.

Both religion and anarchism have been increasingly politically active of late. This edited volume presents twelve chapters of fresh scholarship on diverse facets of the area where they meet: religious anarchism. The book is structured along three themes: •early Christian anarchist “pioneers,” including Pelagius, Coppe, Hungarian Nazarenes, and Dutch Christian anarchists; •Christian anarchist reflections on specific topics such as Kierkegaardian indifference, Romans 13, Dalit religious pra.

There are numerous approaches and conclusions regarding church and state relations and how Christianity affects public policy. Yet the purpose of this study is to question some of the philosophical assumptions and biblical interpretations that Christians hold to which support the state as a morally legitimate authoritative institution in the first place. This article will argue that various presuppositions regarding the state’s moral legitimacy are untenable, if not self-refuting. The philosophical commitments of a form of Christian Conservatism exemplified by Norman L. Geisler will be analyzed and critiqued by the Christian Libertarian Anarchist school of thought, represented by Gerard Casey. Geisler’s views on first principles, God’s moral law, social contracts, consent, anarchy, the distinction between vices and crimes, preconditions for virtue, and the common good will be examined. Then, Geisler’s interpretation of classic biblical texts supporting the alleged moral legitimacy of the state will also be assessed. This article will contend that if one were to consistently apply some pertinent principles found in Geisler’s prolegomena to theology when reasoning from natural revelation and the relevant biblical data, one will find that the conclusions are more compatible with the political theology of Christian Libertarian Anarchism. Hence the one who questions how Christianity affects public policy should take into consideration the reasons to deny that divine revelation affirms the state as a morally legitimate authoritative institution. If this is the case, the question ought to be reframed to determine how Christianity affects public policy within a state that has no legitimate moral grounds for authority.

Nietzsche’s distinction between the master and the slave moralities is certainly one of his most notoriously famous moral and political notions. To claim that there are two main perspectives on the world, one belonging to the accomplished, the other to the unaccomplished side of humanity and, moreover, that the last two millennia of European alleged cultural progress constitute, in fact, nothing more than the history of the progressive permeation of our entire Weltanschauung, of our very values, thoughts and feelings by the so called slave morality, while all the more finding the virtue of this process in a future self-demise of this entire decadent cultural and human strain, is something that has shocked and enraged most of the ideological philosophers ever since. As such, at a certain moment, despite their substantial doctrinaire differences, almost everybody in the ideologized philosophical world, would agree on hating Nietzsche: he was hated by the Christians, for claiming that “God is dead”, by the socialists for treating their view as herd or slave mentality and denying the alleged progressively rational structure of the world, by the liberals much on the same accounts, by the ‘right wingers’ for his explicit anti-nationalism, by the anarchists for his ontological anti-individualism (i.e. dividualism), by the collectivists for his mockery of any gregarious existence, by the capitalists for his contempt for money and the mercantile worldview, by the positivists for his late mistrust in science and explicit illusionism (i.e. the notion that illusions are a necessary fact of life). However, being equally resented by all sides of the political, moral, theological and epistemic spectra might indicate that one is, if not right, or unbiased, at least originally and personally biased. Any view that coherently achieves such form of specific equal contestation, especially one that has so robustly continued to do so for more than a century, deserves some consideration.

After Itō Hirobumi’s assassination by An Chunggŭn, Japanese media tended to urge the Japanese government to adopt coercive policies toward Korea, under which Japan suppressed “Korean riots” and finally annexed Korea. However, there were also some Japanese intellectuals who viewed An’s action sympathetically. They shared the Confucian ideal of shishi (gentleman activist), a universal ethico-political model in pre-modern East Asia. This article will attempt to analyze the logic of these Japanese who endeavored to understand An’s action from the vantage point of Korea’s subalterns. An Chunggŭn’s self-legitimization of his act, based as well on pan-regional Confucian ethics, was appropriated by his Japanese sympathizers as a sort of shishi consciousness, sometimes undistinguishable from the “bushidō (Way of the warrior) spirit”. The appropriations happened differently in diverse milieus, including socialist and Christian circles. Most of them limited themselves to sympathizing with An’s sacrifice for the sake of his country’s independence, without an attempt to criticize imperialist discourses. Although remaining a tiny minority, Baba Kochō (a progressive author and translator, 1869–1940), Kōtoku Shūsui (a socialist activist, 1871–1911) and Kashiwagi Gien (a Christian activist, 1860–1938) criticized Japan’s imperialist turn and its violations of Korea’s sovereignty which eventually precipitated the assassination attempts against Japanese officials. Kōtoku even went further offering a revolutionary strategy of anarchist communism and anti-imperialism aimed at building class solidarity between Asian peoples. While Kashiwagi did not renounce nationalism per se, he was in a position to relativize it based on the universal truth of Christianity. This article aims at grasping the meanings and historical significance of the expressions of sympathetic understanding towards An’s act in Japan.

A New Social Question: Capitalism, Socialism and Utopia brings together a selection of papers presented at the conference on \"Capitalism and Socialism: Utopia, Globalization and Revolution\" at New Harmony, Indiana, in 2014. New Harmony is best known as the site of industrialist Robert Owen's experiment in communal living in 1825, and it was Owen's legacy that drew scholars from across the Atlantic. Owen's work and his experiment at New Harmony again have currency as the world looks back on the 2008 economic crisis and as \"socialism,\" seemingly banished with the failure of experiments in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union at the end of the last century has returned to the political and economic lexicon. As David Harvey, Thomas Piketty and Joyce Appleby have lately reminded us, capitalism, particularly the forms it has assumed since 1945, is probably exceptional, perhaps ephemeral, but also dynamic and resilient. If the Great Recession has derailed personal lives, destabilized economies and unnerved politicians, it has also reminded us that we have not reached the \"end of history.\" Where there was once a Social Question, there is now a New Social Question. This edited, multi-disciplinary volume will appeal to readers in political science, economics, history, sociology, anthropology, literature, communications and cultural studies, and to academic audiences in North America, Britain and elsewhere.