Martin Luther King Jr et la référence à Gandhi dans "La marche vers la liberté"

Commentaire de texte Politique & international Sciences politiques

Date de publication :

23/06/2009

Langue :

Anglais

Format :

.doc

Nombre de pages :

5 pages

Niveau :

grand public

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Sommaire :

Sommaire

King's pilgrimage to Nonviolence
1. The discovery of Gandhi's Nonviolent resistance philosophy
2. Contacts with Gandhi's struggle
3. Toward a broad nonviolent movement
Theoretical comparison
1. Basic shares
2. Far away from Gandhi's sort of radicalism

Résumé :

« The intellectual and moral satisfaction that I failed to gain from the utilitarianism of Bentham and Mill, the revolutionary methods of Marx and Lenin, the social contract theory of Hobbes, the 'back to nature' optimism of Rousseau, and the superman philosophy of Nietzche, I found in the nonviolent resistance philosophy of gandhi » wrote king in Stride toward Freedom. gandhi is not the only reference of king's philosophical background but gandhi was the one who had made the most definitive contribution to developing civil disobedience as a method of political protest on a mass scale.
king was encouraged to study gandhi by Dr Johnson, the president of Howard University who considered that « gandhi's theories and techniques deserved Negro's most careful consideration ». He started to read gandhi in 1950-51. That's when began what he called an 'intellectual odyssey to nonviolence'.

Reading gandhi, he more and more believed in the validity of a philosophy based on Love : « my skepticism concerning the power of love gradually diminished and I came to see for the first time its potency in the area of social reform ». Before reading gandhi, king had been inclined to think of the ethics of Jesus as effective only in individual relationships and that other methods might be necessary for racial conflict. « I came to feel that this was the only morally and practically sound method open to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom ».
king said « while the Montgomery boycott was going on, gandhi was the guiding light of our technique of non violent social change ». Many methods used by gandhi were innovatively employed as mass meetings in churches.