Beyond violence

...Sharp goes beyond nonviolent direct action to consider the necessary conditions for political freedom...

...When that consent is withheld, the power and legitimacy of a government will tend to dissolve...

...This is important and has worked successfully on a small scale when the society has been strong and the state has not...

...To rethink politics means to question the assumption that the role of the state must be expanded to meet the various needs of society...

...Rather, nonviolent techniques would be used for other purposes: for instance, to whip a citizenry into a war fever, as was clearly the case in the U.S...

...Charles Hamilton (Charles Hamilton is the publisher of Free Life Editions and the editor of "Fugitive Essays: Selected Writings of Frank Chodorov...

...Government's nonviolent response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan...

...Its relevance to a book on nonviolence is in the reminder that atomic war is the ultimate symbol—and reality—of violence...

...Similarly, a department of civilian-based defense (which Sharp suggests in one essay) or a state-supported national peace academy (which others have favored) would most likely be put to nefarious uses...

...Sharp has often written about the need to develop a civilian-based defense and a nonmilitary equivalent to war...

...Those conditions, he believes, are the degree of diffusion of decision-making throughout many different institutions in society versus the centralization of state power and the degree to which conflicts are resolved through nonviolent means versus violent means...

...This is best assured through the use of nonviolent techniques, for they are more than mere techniques...

...Sharp's cool, analytical approach may leave one feeling unfulfilled, as it did me at times, but there is much good thinking in these pages...

...Some of the essays in his new collection have previously been published in British or Indian publications but are available here for the first time for American readers...

...Walking through the streets of Hiroshima in 1946, a Japanese soldier muttered, "If only we'd been born in a country, not a damn-fool state" This statement of protest is taken from Ma-suji Ibuse's moving novel set in the aftermath of the atomic bomb...

...This perspective removes the magic from tyranny and opens up vistas for a multitude of nonviolent techniques for social change (although many people still tend to think that these kinds of alternatives should be effortless and danger-free or that they are suitable only for saints...

...Gene Sharp takes a thorough, analytical look at nonviolent direct action and nonmilitary defense as functional alternatives to violence and war...

...However, it is doubtful that a large and centralized state, like ours in America, would develop techniques detrimental to its own internal hegemony (as Sharp's analysis suggests...

...The conditions for freedom and social justice are best achieved through the decentralization of power among the voluntary and peaceful institutions that make up society...

...They carry with them the seeds for diffusing power in society, for empowering people, for institutionalizing humane forms of conflict resolution, and for promoting sane, eternal vigilance...

...Without a broader context, nonviolence can easily be trivialized...

...The application of political violence, Sharp argues convincingly, even for good or necessary reasons, carries with it the tendency to brutalize, to centralize, and to disenfranchise society...

...While almost everyone agrees that the use of violence is pernicious, this is often forgotten in the immediacy of the moment, and violence, used as political expediency, becomes a norm, leading to the betrayal of legitimate social goals...

...Political violence is not politically neutral...

...It is a pleasure to read a book so devoid of cant and fuzzy ideology and yet so committed to rethinking politics and promoting ways to act responsibly in a violent world...

...Sharp develops this theme and the case for nonviolent direct action in "Facing Dictatorship with Confidence," "The Political Equivalent of War," and "Strategic Problems of the South African Resistance...

...More than a third of the essays are new, and they concern the pressing necessity for us to "rethink politics...

...The quotation is also relevant because the distinction between country (or society) and state is central in Gene Sharp's new book, Social Power and Political Freedom...

...The most important contribution of Social Power and Political Freedom is to weave a social and political context around the issues of nonviolent action...

...The title essay ("Social Power and Political Freedom") repeats a central theme in Sharp's work: that a government's power rests in society and in the consent given by citizens...