ABSTRACT
Tolstoy's novel and magnum opus War and Peace rises beyond the relation between states and state policy to consider questions of the human condition and its disposition to war and peace. In fact, Gandhi brings back into political theory a discourse on the presuppositions of war and peace which has gone missing in post-Enlightenment political theory. The problem of peace has, of course, been discussed in political theory and elsewhere but it remains a discussion at the level of policy rather than a matter of the structure and institutions of state and society. The dualistic method constitutes peace primarily as a matter of the relation between states rather than a condition of human society. Non-violence as a law of the human species presupposes the non-dualism of mind and the world, subject and object, fact and value and means and ends. These are illustrated in experiments with Truth in science, religion and politics that constitute the history and culture of civilizations.
