On Resistance to Evil by Force - Against Tolstoy: The Moral Case for Resisting Evil #1012311

This edition includes:
• New English translation
• Critical introduction

Can a person who sincerely seeks moral perfection take up the sword against evil — and can anyone who believes in God honestly refuse to? Ivan Ilyin's On Resistance to Evil by Force presses that question harder than almost any book you will read, and it gives none of the comfortable answers. It is a work of moral philosophy that still starts arguments.

Ilyin, a philosopher of law writing in the Russian émigré Berlin of the 1920s, takes Tolstoy's doctrine of non-resistance as his antagonist. He grants it a great deal — the call to inner self-perfection, to love, to judging oneself before judging others — and then isolates the single inference he will not accept. What follows is a patient anatomy of compulsion and violence, of psychic coercion and physical coercion, of love and the limits of love, and a set of concrete questions: what should a man do, armed, standing before a child about to be killed? Can he act and remain righteous? Ilyin is as severe with those who sanctify the sword as with those who refuse to draw it, and his closing chapters are about guilt, responsibility and the purification of the soul. His answer is not the one either camp expects.

This edition gives you that argument in a literary translation made to be read today: natural, living English that carries Ilyin's cadence — the antitheses, the parallel clauses, the phrase hammered into place like a preacher's — while holding faithfully to his substance, his voice, his tone and his images. A critical introduction opens the volume, before the author's text begins, so you can enter the argument with your bearings.

If you want to think seriously about what it costs to defend anything on earth, and who pays that price, this is a book to keep close and argue with. Add it to your library.