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political science by bringing together relevant extracts from Tolstoy's writings and providing a succinct treatment of the core political issues. For today, the contemporary discussion of religious fundamentalism, scriptural literalism, and Christian faith, and their political implications, should not omit pacifism.
Recent years have seen valuable studies of Tolstoy, but the focus and purpose of this book is different. Gary Saul Morson tackles Tolstoy's philosophy of history and takes issue with Isaiah Berlin's famous essay. Richard F. Gustafson interprets Tolstoy's writings, both fictional and non-fictional, as theology. Daniel Rancour-Laferriere brings psychoanalysis to the study of Tolstoy. This work brings political science to the study of Tolstoy's Christian pacifism. It assesses the internal consistency of Tolstoy's pacifism, its grounding in the Gospels and Christian tradition, its political and antipolitical implications, and the meaning in life that it offers. It finds that Tolstoy does great service to the pacifist cause (with his defense of peace as close to the center of Christ's message) and yet harm to it too (by divorcing peace from the love that is even more central to Christ's message). In all, Tolstoy's pacifism shows that if Christian pacifism is not an expression of Christian love, then it is pointless.
This work is divided into seven chapters. The first chapter gives a brief account of Tolstoy's life but also an account of his views on the most urgent questions of life—for his pacifism was to be his answer to the issue of how to gain meaning in human life. The second chapter finds Tolstoy's rejection of consequentialist ethics, so central to his Christian pacifism, to have roots in his preconversion views on the inability of humans to act in history to bring about the consequences they desire. Tolstoy needed a simple and all-embracing vision to define and give meaning to his life, but he saw the world he lived in as one where events occur unpredictably through a concatenation of an infinite number of small causes. He therefore could not gain that necessary meaning through participation in, or attempted direction of, the course of events. The third chapter examines Tolstoy's writings on religion, Christianity, and the Gospels, which are the foundation of his pacifism. The fourth chapter outlines and critiques Tolstoy's pacifism, predominantly a nonviolent resistance that seeks to