Abstract

The article suggests that Gandhi’s integrated thought and practice is of great significance today. It focuses on three arguments that Gandhi put together and tested in practice, and presents them in the way that R. B. Gregg explicated them. The first is Gandhi’s critique of the problems of Western industrial civilization: increasing global inequality; increasingly destructive cycles of war and violence; and the relentless domination and exploitation of human beings, communities and ecosystems. The second argument is the alternative Gandhi developed: his idea of a ‘countermodernity’ or ‘alternative civilization’ that is grounded in the power of nonviolence, equality, and mutual cooperation. The third and most original argument he put forward and lived every day of his adult life is the nonviolent way (or ways) of life that has the capacity to transform modern social systems of inequality, violence and domination into alternative social relationships and systems in which equality, nonviolence and self-organising democratic cooperation would become paramount.