Lesesaal

The Kingdom of God Is Within You

Leo Tolstoy

The founding work of Tolstoyan non-violence, written 1890–1893. Starting from the letters he received after What I Believe, it acknowledges as forerunners the Quakers, William Lloyd Garrison and Adin Ballou, and holds that Christianity is not a mystical religion but a new conception of life incompatible with the state, which rests on organised violence: the army, the courts, taxation. It calls for refusal of obedience and of military service. Banned in Russia, it was published in Berlin in 1894. Gandhi read it that year in South Africa.