This essay draws on Edward Said’s account of travelling theory to unsettle the myth of doctrine that has formed around civil disobedience. One consequence of this contemporary canonization of Gandhi’s narrative, however, has been to obscure the radical critique of violence that originally motivated it. The genealogy Gandhi invented in these years has become a cornerstone of contemporary liberal narratives of civil disobedience as a continuous tradition of conscientious appeal ranging from Socrates to King to Rawls. Most enduring of these were Socrates and Henry David Thoreau. As a newspaper editor in South Africa, he chronicled his experiments with satyagraha by drawing parallels to ennobling historical precedents. Mohandas Gandhi is civil disobedience’s most original theorist and most influential mythmaker.
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