ABSTRACT
Gandhi's statements about obligations were, for the most part, performatory utterances, made under varying circumstances during a long life of political activity. They were never fitted neatly into a systematic theory. This chapter explains how Gandhi treated political obligations, indicating the beliefs he found essential to nonviolent disobedience and identifying some of the difficulties that he encountered in subordinating political obligations to moral obligations. Civil disobedience is treated as a species of an essentially spiritual principle, Satyagraha, "the exercise of the purest soul force in its perfect form". Civil disobedience is essentially a dynamic concept and involves active resistance to the unjust laws. Passive Resistance is used in the orthodox English sense and covers the suffragette movement as well as the resistance of the non-conformists. Gandhi's distinction as a political thinker does not lie just in the enunciation of the familiar doctrine that evil and unjust laws ought to be disobeyed.
