One of the main themes running through Gandhi’s life and work was the battle against evil. This book offers a fascinating reconstruction of Gandhi and the doctrine of Ahimsa or non-violence. Gandhi’s moral perfectionism is contrasted with other forms of perfectionism, but the book stresses that Gandhi also offered a doctrine of the second best. Following Gandhi, the author argues that outward violence with compassion is intrinsically not as good as non-violence with compassion, but it is a second best that is sometimes a necessary evil in an imperfect world. The book provides an illuminating analysis of coercion, non-co-operation, civil disobedience and necessary evil, comparing Gandhi’s ideas with that of some of the leading western moral, legal and political philosophers. Further, some of his important ideas are shown to have relevance for the working of the Indian Constitution. This book will be essential for scholars and researchers in moral, legal and political philosophy, Gandhi studies, political science and South Asian studies.

With an intense focus on both the depth and practicality of Mahatma Gandhi’s political and religious thought this book reveals the valuable insights Gandhi offers to anyone concerned about the prospects of liberalism in the contemporary world. Gandhi’s Religious Thought and Liberal Democracy makes the case that for Gandhi, in stark contrast to commonly accepted liberal orthodoxy, religion is indispensable to the public life, and indeed the official activity, of any genuinely liberal society. Gandhi scholars, political theorists, and activist members of a lay audience alike will all find much to digest, comment upon, and be motivated by in this work.

This study is an endeavour to enquire into the nature and efficacy of liberal primacies and the extent to which Gandhi imbibed them. Gandhi does not emerge as a liberal in the parlance of well stirred ideaological congruence. And yet he remains the most outstanding exponent and activist of the liberal spiirt. He built upon this foundation, as innovative superstructure. It is not always possible to expect an activist of the national movement to scrupulously adhere a specific ideology. Gandhi renovated the liberal thinking and sought to transform the idiom and primacies of Philosophy of nationalism and creative protest.

Tensions between individual rights and group interests, as well as between interests of different groups, are critical issues in multicultural societies. In this book, Haksar offers a theoretical framework for thinking about these dilemmas, particularly in light of Gandhi's ideas.

Throughout his long career as a political thinker and activist, Mahatma Gandhi encountered the dilemma of either remaining faithful to his nonviolent principles and risking the failure of the Indian nationalist movement, or focusing on the seizure of political power at the expense of his moral message. Putting forward his vision of a "nonviolent nationalism," Gandhi argued that Indian self-rule could be achieved without sacrificing the universalist imperatives of his nonviolent philosophy. Conceived as a study in the history of political thought, this book examines the origins, meaning, and unfolding of Gandhi s dilemma as it played itself out in both theory and political practice. This discussion is inextricably linked to significant and timely issues that are critical for the study of nationalism, for Gandhi s vision raises the important question of whether it is indeed possible to construct a benign type of nationalism that is rooted in neither physical nor conceptual forms of violence.

Europeans and Americans tend to hold the opinion that democracy is a uniquely Western inheritance, but in The Common Cause, Leela Gandhi recovers stories of an alternate version, describing a transnational history of democracy in the first half of the twentieth century through the lens of ethics in the broad sense of disciplined self-fashioning. Gandhi identifies a shared culture of perfectionism across imperialism, fascism, and liberalism—an ethic that excluded the ordinary and unexceptional. But, she also illuminates an ethic of moral imperfectionism, a set of anticolonial, antifascist practices devoted to ordinariness and abnegation that ranged from doomed mutinies in the Indian military to Mahatma Gandhi’s spiritual discipline. Reframing the way we think about some of the most consequential political events of the era, Gandhi presents moral imperfectionism as the lost tradition of global democratic thought and offers it to us as a key to democracy’s future. In doing so, she defends democracy as a shared art of living on the other side of perfection and mounts a postcolonial appeal for an ethics of becoming common.

This volume presents an original account of Mahatma Gandhi's four meanings of freedom: as sovereign national independence, as the political freedom of the individual, as freedom from poverty, and as the capacity for self-rule or spiritual freedom. In this volume, seven leading Gandhi scholars write on these four meanings, engaging the reader in the ongoing debates in the East and the West and contributing to a new comparative political theory.