Hardcover, 476 pages
English language
Published 1969 by W.W. Norton & Company.
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Many of the methods of civil disobedience so widely and so sporadically used today have their origin in Mahatma Gandhi's militant nonviolence. In order to elucidate the nature of what Gandhi called his Truth in Action, Erikson sets out to retell in great detail a relatively little-known event in Gandhi's middle years, namely, his assumption of a leadership in a strike of textile workers in the city of Ahmedabad in 1918. Erikson explains Gandhi's method of concentrating on local grievances of high symbolic value as a way of mobilizing Indian masses both spiritually and politically — a method that distinguished Gandhi from the charismatic figures (Lenin, Wilson) of the post-World War I period.
Erikson reviews Gandhi's childhood and youth and discusses ways in which his personal history may have prepared him to be the revolutionary innovator of militant nonviolence. He follows Gandhi through his decades abroad and considers why, on …
Many of the methods of civil disobedience so widely and so sporadically used today have their origin in Mahatma Gandhi's militant nonviolence. In order to elucidate the nature of what Gandhi called his Truth in Action, Erikson sets out to retell in great detail a relatively little-known event in Gandhi's middle years, namely, his assumption of a leadership in a strike of textile workers in the city of Ahmedabad in 1918. Erikson explains Gandhi's method of concentrating on local grievances of high symbolic value as a way of mobilizing Indian masses both spiritually and politically — a method that distinguished Gandhi from the charismatic figures (Lenin, Wilson) of the post-World War I period.
Erikson reviews Gandhi's childhood and youth and discusses ways in which his personal history may have prepared him to be the revolutionary innovator of militant nonviolence. He follows Gandhi through his decades abroad and considers why, on Gandhi's return, India proved ready to become the motherland of large-scale civil disobedience. Finally, Erikson investigates the pacific propensities in human nature which may now be open to Gandhi's turth as a pwoerful antidote to the thread of nuclear annihilation.
Erikson counterpoints Freud's insights into the nature of sexuality (and Gandhi's disavowal of it) and Gandhi's insights into the nature of armed violence (and Freud's fatalism regarding it) and concludes that only a combination of these insights might give man some measure of mastery over his fatal alternation of repression and excess.
Erikson has been able to interview some witnesses of the events he described — something not possible in his earlier work on young Luther. He relates how they come to join Gandhi at a time when they were young and alienated and he was in his middle years, on the threshold of becoming India's Mahatma. Erikson's experience in interviewing them permits him to spell out some criteria for a psychohistorical inquiry. In doing so, he attempts to clarify his own role as a reviewer, the roles of his witnesses as recorders, and the relative nature of such historical documents as Gandhi's autobiography.