The Self as Legitimate Target: Self-sacrifice and Self-determination in Mazzini and Gandhi

Both Giuseppe Mazzini and M.K. Gandhi were proponents of an uncompromisingly ethical approach to politics, and both were obliged to confront the appeal of violence. Their tactics, while in many ways opposed, elicited similarly intense controversies. Mazzini was widely believed to have condoned terrorist aggressions, while encouraging insurrectional acts with little or no hope of success. Gandhi, for his part, was accused of irresponsible naïveté and utopianism for his inability to grapple with absolute evil. Recent historiographical scholarship has retraced the appropriation of Mazzini’s thought by the leaders of the independence movement in South Asia. This contribution seeks to identify a previously underemphasized element of commonality between the positions of the two thinkers, with a bearing on the criticisms they faced with respect to the justification of violence. The evocation of self-sacrifice is seen to lie at the problematic centre of both Mazzinian and Gandhian tactics, as a response to the issue of providing a normative justification for forcible collective action against an unjust legal order. The self is thus portrayed as an acceptable object for violence, joining the shock-value of testimony (martyrdom) with a muting of the issues of responsibility for causing harm.