ABSTRACT
In the first few decades of the twentieth century there came into view two competing yet collaborative discourses of non-violence, one non-Western and the other Western. Where the former found its condition of possibility in the particular forms of anti-colonial politics popularised by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, in South Africa and in India, the latter emerged in more muted form out of the curious interchanges between English Guild Socialism and Continental Phenomenology. The chapter focuses on Gandhi's voice in the design for a 'modern' metaphysics of morals founded upon the valorisation of the principles of non-violence. The inter-war reconstruction of 'spirit', under review, begins its work as apologia; grasping the crisis of Europe as an ill effect precisely of its unchecked preeminence in the modern world. The spiritual morphology of the West was damaged by Europe's imperial and capitalist mutations, by its exercise of sovereignty over others that it was no longer possible to know the true article from an impostor.
