Customer Reviews

The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People

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I picked up this book after hearing the author speak at a book signing in Washington, DC. I was quite impressed by the power of his thought, and this book demonstrates the same qualities of well-supported, insightful and frequently iconoclastic analysis. The central premise, as the above reviews note, is that "political power" - which is based upon the consent of the governed and the agreement by political actors to keep promises and to behave within certain rules - and "violence" - which relies upon ruling by fear of harm and actually destroys the social bonds from which actual "power" flow - are at odds, and that ultimately political ends may be more effectively achieved by application of "power," a constructive force, than by "violence." Accordingly, the author argues, the political aims of mass movements of people frequently may be more effectively achieved by non-violent means than violent ones. And lest this example be dismissed by "realists," the author analyzes in-depth examples of non-violent or mostly non-violent "revolutions" that include the Indian independence movement, the collapse of the Soviet empire, and the transformation of South Africa from apartheid state to democracy (as well as a host of other, somewhat less-striking examples including the growing democratization of South Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia, the Phillipines, Chile, Argentina, Spain, Portugal, Greece, etc.) Although, in my view, the author does not fully answer one of the central questions posed in response to pacifism - how can a non-violent movement gain political traction when confronted by a totalitarian system that utterly denies the worth of human life? - his thoughts on non-violent mass movements are fascinating and thought-provoking, and shed much needed light on largely non-violent political transformations - like the collapse of the Soviet empire or the democratization of South Africa - that have been taken for granted. Thus, while I am not entirely convinced of some of his points, I believe that the author has framed a very interesting political argument, one which cannot be dismissed out-of-hand and must be answered by those who feel that the liberal application of violence by the United States is helping to make the world a safer place.

Not by any means an easy or a quick read, this book is very worthwhile and good material for thought whether you tend to agree with the author's perspective or not. Recommended.

Edit of 21 Dec 07 to add links

This book, together with William Geider's The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy, and Mark Hertsgaard's The Eagle's Shadow: Why America Fascinates and Infuriates the World, in one of three that I believe every American needs to read between now and November 2004.

Across 13 chapters in four parts, the author provides a balanced overview of historical philosophy and practice at both the national level "relations among nations" and the local level ("relations among beings"). His bottom line: that the separation of church and state, and the divorce of social responsibility from both state and corporate actions, have so corrupted the political and economic governance architectures as to make them pathologically dangerous.

His entire book discusses how people can come together, non-violently, to restore both their power over capital and over circumstances, and the social meaning and values that have been abandoned by "objective" corporations and governments.

The book has applicability to Iraq, Afghanistan, and other places where the US is foolishly confusing military power with political power. As he says early on, it is the public *will* that must be gained, the public *consent* to a new order--in the absence of this, which certainly does not exist in either Iraq or Afghanistan, no amount of military power will be effective (to which I would add: and the cumulative effect of the financial and social cost of these military interventions without end will have a reverse political, economic, and social cost on the invader that may make the military action a self-inflicted wound of great proportions).

Across the book, the author examines three prevailing models for global relations: the universal empire model, the balance of power model, and the collective security model. He comes down overwhelmingly on the side of the latter as the only viable approach to current and future global stability and prosperity.

A quote from the middle of the book captures its thesis perfectly: "Violence is a method by which the ruthless few can subdue the passive many. Nonviolence is a means by which the active many can overcome the ruthless few."

Taking off from the above, the author elaborates on three sub-themes:

First, that cooperative power is much greater, less expensive, and more lasting that coercive power.

Second, that capitalism today is a scourge on humanity, inflicting far greater damage--deaths, disease, poverty, etcetera--that military power, even the "shock and awe" power unleashed against Afghanistan and Iraq without public debate.

Third, and he draws heavily on Hannah Arendt, here a quote that should shame the current US Administration because it is so contradictory to their belief in "noble lies"--lies that Hitler and Goering would have admired. She says, "Power is actualized only where word and deed have not parted company, where words are not empty and deeds not brutal, where words are not used to veil intentions but to disclose realities, and deeds are not used to violate and destroy but to establish relations and create new realities."

Toward the end of the book the author addresses the dysfunctionality of the current "absolute sovereignty" model and concludes that in an era of globalization, not only must the US respect regional and international sovereignty as an over-lapping authority, but that we must (as Richard Falk recommended in the 1970's) begin to recognize people's or nations as distinct entities with culturally-sovereign rights that over-lap the states within which the people's reside--this would certainly apply to the Kurds, spread across several states, and it should also apply to the Jews and to the Palestinians, among many others.

On the last page, he says that we have a choice between survival and annihilation. We can carry on with unilateral violence, or we the people can take back the power, change direction, and elect a government that believes in cooperative non-violence, the only path to survival that appears to the author, and to this reviewer, as viable.

This is a *very* important book, and it merits careful reading by every adult who wishes to leave their children a world of peace and prosperity. We can do better. What we are doing now is destructive in every sense of the word.

Other recommended books with reviews:
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Wharton School Publishing Paperbacks)
Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World's Last Dictators by 2025
Faith-Based Diplomacy: Trumping Realpolitik
Day of Reckoning: How Hubris, Ideology, and Greed Are Tearing America Apart
The Global Class War: How America's Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future - and What It Will Take to Win It Back
A Foreign Policy of Freedom: Peace, Commerce, and Honest Friendship

Best known for THE FATE OF THE EARTH (1982), Jonathan Schell is an anti-war essayist and frequent contributor to "The Nation," "The New Yorker," "Harper's," "The Atlantic," and "Foreign Affairs" magazines. In his pacifist manifesto, THE UNCONQUERABLE WORLD, Schell examines the history of conventional war, nuclear war, people's war and revolution, from Von Clausewitz's premise that wars are fought to secure political objectives, to the Bush administration's ongoing "war on terrorism," while simultaneously examining the history of nonviolence, from Jesus's commandment to "put up thy sword," to Gandhi's, Havel's, and Martin Luther King's more recent nonviolent victories. (King liked to say that Jesus gave him "the message," and Gandhi gave him "the method" to practice what he preached, p. 246.) Along the way, Schell carefully develops his argument that all government depends for its existence on the cooperation of its citizens, civil servants, and soldiers. If that cooperation is withdrawn, the government will fail in its objectives (p. 128). This philosophy ("satyagraha") was demonstrated by Ghandi, who prescribed nonviolent action in which the participants refused to cooperate with laws they regarded as unjust or otherwise offensive to their consciences, accompanied by their willingness to suffer the consequences (p. 119). "The nonviolent actor," Schell observes, "exhibits the highest degree of freedom also because his action originates within himself, according to his own judgment, inclination, and conscience, not in helpless, automatic response to something done by someone else" (p. 133). In other words, noviolence is a means by which "the active many can overcome the ruthless few" (p. 144).

Since September 11th, Schell writes, the "Augustan" policies of the Bush administration have brought us to the brink of "some nuclear 1914 or anthrax 1914" that could "send history off the rails" (p. 8). Americans are now faced with a choice between "two Americas" and two possible futures. In an imperial America, power would be put in the hands of the president and checks and balances would end; civil liberties would be lost; military spending would supercede social spending; the gap between rich and poor would increase; electoral politics would be dominated by corporate money; and social, economic, and ecological agendas would be neglected. In an alternative America, the immense executive power would be broken up into the three branches of government as the Constitution provides; civil liberties would remain intact; money would be driven out of politics; and the social, economic, and ecological agendas of the country and world would become government's chief concern (pp. 345-46). Whereas the Bush administration's policies rely upon individuals confirming the system, fulfilling the system, making the system, becoming the system ("living the lie"), Schell advocates a revolution in our hearts and minds in which violence becomes unnecessary, and we are able to live instead in truth, which means living in opposition to the repressive regime.

Carefully reasoned, thoroughly analytical, radical, brilliantly revolutionary, highly intellectual, and hopeful, Schell's UNCONQUERABLE WORLD is one of the most important books of our time.

G. Merritt

Schell's identification of the phenomenon of "people's war," the
bottom-up fight for freedom waged by colonized peoples over the last 250
years is nothing short of revolutionary. The basis of the analytical framework he builds to explicate the different varieties of colonial oppression and local resistance, Schell historicizes people's war in its most important incarnations starting with the Spanish resistance to Napoleon's invasion, moving through Gandhi's non-violent formulation which he developed in South Africa and employed against the British in India, discussing how this form of resistance taken up by Martin Luther King to fight the people's war against the squalid Jim Crow regime in the American South. He notes that over time, "people's war" has been successful more often than it has not, that colonial regimes cannot win against forces which refuse to fight using oppressor's tactics, or use the narrow forms of redress, such as "working through the system," which are offered by those in power under the head of democracy.

He begins by examining the great military strategist Von Clausewitz's theory of warfare. In a section that it perhaps somewhat overlong, Schell takes apart Clausewitz in light of the changes in warfare since Clausewitz's time. Clausewitz did witness the first examples of total war in which every citizen was enlisted in the war as either a soldier or as a possible target of war -- the great "democratic" army of Napoleon, and wrote about it in contrast to prior European wars where relatively small forces of men fought limited conflicts for their aristocratic masters. What Clausewitz could not see was that with the emergence of the atomic bomb, total war was extended beyond competing nations, their peoples and ideologies, to include the entire world and the possible destruction of humanity. He notes, as does Jeremi Suri does in his history of the post-nuclear age, POWER AND THE PEOPLE, that the possession of nuclear weapons and the protests such weapons engendered (including the proxy wars fought by client states which became a feature of the post WWII landscape and were much more likely to end a global conflagration than skirmishes before the bomb) ultimately served to push together the Soviet Union and United States out of fear of their own people.

Schell also discusses various theories of power, including the Hobbesian justification of power, the Weberian observation that the state holds power by reserving the right to violence. He upends a lot of this theory by noting that fear and intimidation only work for so long. Eventually people begin, like water freezing in a crack in the sidewalk, to break apart the structures of such regimes. He discusses how Vaclav Havel and his friends during the Soviet occupation initiated a small scale alternative "government" which sought to deliver minimal social goods, a stop that worked to give citizens a way to see they could exert control over their own lives even in the shadow of the totalitarian state. This strategy that has been used since the American elite formed the Committees of Correspondence and the Continental Congress to throw off the oppressive economic policies of their colonial masters. The "people's government" was in place and thus Washington's task was to outlast his opponents so that this government could take its rightful place -- a strategy which has been used in successful "people's war" ever since. Once the state is made irrelevant, it ceases to exist, an analysis growing out of Hannah Arendt's discussions of power.

It is hard to do justice to a work like this in a short review. Schell advances a fairly radical theory here, but his evidence is sound, his argument is clear and straightforward (although a bit repetitive). Perhaps most compelling in this age of "terror," Schell helps us see that resistance against colonial powers and homegrown totalitarian regimes has a long history, and that for the most part, that people's war has been successful.

Through incisive historical analysis, Schell demonstrates that people power has been ignored to our own peril. In the modern world people simply won't settle for the neo-colonial status assigned to them by the corporate globalization / militarization machine. Just think about the war in Iraq and the new regimes in South America, for example, or the collapse of the WTO talks in Cancun. And WMD have made the old and disasterous paradigm of all-out warfare obsolete.

Schell traces people power through the American, French, and Russian revolutions, onto Gandhi's non-violent action and Mao's peoples' war. What is amazing is that even the most violent and repressive regimes have eventually collapsed non-violently. Often the greatest violence has come during the drive to establish a new order.

Schell also suggests that we need to update the principles of liberal democracy. For example, respect for individual rights may need to be extended to include group rights, responsibilities, and power sharing. He cites the settlement in Northern Ireland as an example. This is, of course, tricky business, but he makes a compelling case that we need to be more flexible and far sighted in our concepts of democracy.

Schell, now a columnist for The Nation, is a creative thinker and analyst of the first order - a true public intellectual.

This is a compelling book with well-supported arguments. "The Unconquerable World" explains why ventures such as the U.S. in Iraq are doomed to failure.

My favorite section is the one dealing with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Modern American myth has it that the U.S. was solely responsible for the "defeat" of the USSR - through Afghanistan, the insane weapons race, etc. While these surely had their contribution, Schell describes the rise of people's movements in Eastern Europe that, without actively intending to bring about the demise of their oppressor, did just that.

I highly recommend "The Unconquerable World" for anyone wishing to understand social and political change, and the very real possibilities of non-violence as a path for these changes.

We value prophets for the accuracy of their prophetic power. "The Unconquerable World" was published in 2003, but in consequent years it has aged well, mainly because Schell sees the U.S. as an imperial enterprise that could decide to perform a more creative role in the world, and that is still true. In 2010 its analyses and prescriptions seem all the more relevant to the so-called "post-9-11" world, which is really the "post-1945 ( Hiroshima)" world.

In "Civilization and its Discontents," Freud's last, pessimistic look at what force might be equal to the death instinct he found in us, Freud ended with the hope that some new form of Eros, by which he meant all forms of affirmation that favor life, would rise up to counter the forces of death. Schell traces the full scope the forms non-violence took in the 20th century in the very midst of the possibility of nuclear holocaust, not just Gandhi and King, but Havel and Mandela and even the thinking of Hannah Arendt, to arrive at the hopeful possibility that the non-violent potential in each citizen could find political expression in ways that are not utopian but, in the context of a nuclearized world, altogether practical.

In a nation where citizens were curious about assessing their own true self-interest, "The Unconquerable World" would be number one on the New York Times best seller list;

This book will appeal to readers of 'Big Picture' history -- the kind that goes beyond specific periods or events to trace a larger thread or pattern in world history. It will alter your perspective on the modern world, no matter how well versed you happen to be.

Schell makes a persuasive case for the rise of a new current in the modern period seldom explored in other big-canvas histories. It brings together the themes of non-violence, popular sovereignty, and national self-determination. Schell ties the root of these ideas to a deeper shift from what he calls coercive power to cooperative power. Over time, we move from a politics shaped by military might, authoritarian government, and imperialism, to smaller government, civil society, and solidarity among diverse populations.

The book offers an illuminating survey of three distinct but closely related fields of history -- warfare, revolution, and the notion of national sovereignty. At the outset of the twenty-first century, as the limits of conventional war become clearer, so too, for Schell, are the limits of conventional understandings of sovereignty.

Drawing on examples that include the US adventure in Vietnam, the Soviet campaign in Afghanistan, and the eventual fall of the Iron Curtain, Schell demonstrates how conventional military might, of even the greatest powers, has ultimately failed to conquer the smallest populations united by a will to self-determination.

Yet, as Schell reveals, the tendency of cooperative power to prevail over military force was evident much earlier on, in the British, American, French and Russian revolutions. In each case, a mass embrace of revolutionary ideals preceded or often prevented violence, helping to lay the groundwork for the large-scale transitions that followed.

Among the most provocative parts of the book are Schell's argument against a central idea in western political theory -- that national sovereignty must always be indivisible and unified, over a given territory and people. In its place, he highlights the rising currency of an approach to sovereignty as divisible and inter-lapping, as we find it in the EU and other federations.

The last portion of the book set outs a provocative vision of where things are headed. Some may read this part as a series of more or less implausible policy proposals. But given the strength of his argument about the inevitable expansion of cooperative power, Schell's roadmap offers a compelling case for a number of notable trends. For both an interesting read on deeper, world-historical currents, and a healthy dose of optimism, this book is sure to deliver.

We value prophets for the accuracy of their prophetic power. "The Unconquerable World" was published in 2003, but in consequent years it has aged well, mainly because Schell sees the U.S. as an imperial enterprise that could decide to perform a more creative role in the world, and that is still true. In 2010 its analyses and prescriptions seem all the more relevant to the so-called "post-9-11" world, which is really the "post-1945 ( Hiroshima)" world.

In "Civilization and its Discontents," Freud's last, pessimistic look at what force might be equal to the death instinct he found in us, Freud ended with the hope that some new form of Eros, by which he meant all forms of affirmation that favor life, would rise up to counter the forces of death. Schell traces the full scope the forms non-violence took in the 20th century in the very midst of the possibility of nuclear holocaust, not just Gandhi and King, but Havel and Mandela and even the thinking of Hannah Arendt, to arrive at the hopeful possibility that the non-violent potential in each citizen could find political expression in ways that are not utopian but, in the context of a nuclearized world, altogether practical.

In a nation where citizens were curious about assessing their own true self-interest, "The Unconquerable World" would be number one on the New York Times best seller list;

I bought this book about 2 years ago, but I just recently got around to reading it after some recent related posts:

[...]

So I read through the book with those posts in mind, along with looking for 5GW ideas ([...] )and xGW ideas in general.

My notes:

* The book of course doesn't use terminology like 4GW and 5GW, but it is in the ballpark.
* The book does outline its own conflict taxonomy: Total War (think 2GW and 3GW), People's War (think 4GW) and Non-violent Action and Activism (think 5GWish).
* He does not quite get all the way to a 5GW theory though.
* 5GW-ish Examples used: Ghandi, MLK, non-violent movements in eastern Europe and Russia that (helped) bring down the USSR.
* The People's War Section (aka 4GW) covers Mao and China, and Vietnam.
* "It was the genius of the inventors of people's war to challenge this deceptively self-evident proposition [Pslog: That an enemy is defeated when they are ready to do are will] by discovering, in the very midst of battle, the power of politics. What if, the inventor's of people's war asked, the people on the losing side declines to do the will of the conqueror and, taking a further step, organized itself politically to conduct its own business? In people's war, political organization did not stand on its own; it was interwoven with the military struggle into Mao's seamless fabric."
* The general purpose strategies for states in relations among each other are: Universal Empire (aggressive), seeking to maintain a balance of power (defensive), collective security by a group a sates pooling together.
* Quoting a 5GW statements of John Adams on the American Revolution: "The revolution was in the minds of the people, and in the union of the colonies, both of which were accomplished before hostilities commenced"
* He is a lefty, and found those parts of the book off-putting.
* I quite liked the historical parts on China, Ghandi and MLK.