Tolstoy’s Anarchy

“Tolstoy’s philosophy of non-resistance influenced and was developed by later thinkers. The most famous of these was Gandhi, who corresponded with Tolstoy in the year before the latter’s death, founded a cooperative colony named for Tolstoy in South Africa and drew on Tolstoy’s idea in the development of his own philosophy of non-violent, or passive resistance. Cataloguing the failures of the movement serves to obscure the more interesting questions about why individuals chose Tolstoyism, why they subsequently rejected it and the contexts from which they arrived and into which they departed.”