Freedom from Violence: Sectarian Nonresistance from the Middle Ages to the Great War

Raymond A. Jones is a history professor at Carleton University in
Ottawa.

The simultaneous publication of these two fine studies is a suitable
climax to the career of the distinguished Canadian historian of pacifism
Peter Brock, whose retirement was also marked by an international
conference from which we look forward to seeing a festschrift in the
near future.

Brooks’s invaluable historical surveys of European and American
pacifism, Pacifism in Europe (1972) and Pacifism in the United States
(1968), are here brought up to date to reflect more than two decades of
intensive peace research. Brock—himself a conscientious objector in
World War II—focuses attention in his first volume on the unorthodox
religious sects whose faith led them to renounce war and violence.
Before the emergence of the modern state, it was possible for many of
these sects to withdraw from society, but inevitably, in spite of
migrations, the Anabaptists, Hutterites, and Mennonites found their
separational pacifism compromised by the ever-increasing intrusions of
state power.

In the modern era, many pacifists groups whose inspiration was still
primarily religious found in Western liberal societies the potential for
affecting political change. Pacifism’s new orientation aimed to change
societies’ attitudes toward war. In Britain, the Peace Society (formed
in 1816) began its century-long campaign to abolish war as did the
American Peace Society in the U.S. at the same time. By far the most
interesting parts of Brock’s second volume, which deals with these new
orientations, are the chapters on Tolstoy’s philosophy of nonviolence
(out of which emerged Gandhi’s passive resistance, Satyagraha).

Vera Brittain wrote in Humiliation with Honour that “pacifism is
nothing other than a belief in the ultimate transcendence of love over
power.” Brock’s life-long study of pacifism is ample witness to this
and he rightly concludes Freedom from War by stressing that, as in the
past, the pacifist impulse remains the concern of the individual
conscience.