An Anthology of Tolstoy's Spiritual Economics

by Leo Tolstoy, Kenneth C. Wenzer (Editor)

Scholars have tended to regard Tolstoy as a disciple of no one except a secularised Jesus, but Henry George was a strong influence; for example, Tolstoy devoted a large portion of his later life to the promulgation of the single tax' (a main tenet of George's philosophy) as a viable solution to suffering from falsity, greed, poverty, and bankrupt ideologies. The work examined in this volume is a testimony to both Tolstoy and George; it bears witness to a practical, economic and non-violent approach to the organisation of society, free from the domination of individuals, institutions, and mobs.KENNETH C. WENZERis an independent scholar specialising in the study of Henry George, Tolstoy, and Russian history.

287 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 14, 2014

About the author

Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (Russian: Лев Николаевич Толстой; most appropriately used Liev Tolstoy; commonly Leo Tolstoy in Anglophone countries) was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist fiction. Many consider Tolstoy to have been one of the world's greatest novelists. Tolstoy is equally known for his complicated and paradoxical persona and for his extreme moralistic and ascetic views, which he adopted after a moral crisis and spiritual awakening in the 1870s, after which he also became noted as a moral thinker and social reformer.

His literal interpretation of the ethical teachings of Jesus, centering on the Sermon on the Mount, caused him in later life to become a fervent Christian anarchist and anarcho-pacifist. His ideas on nonviolent resistance, expressed in such works as The Kingdom of God Is Within You, were to have a profound impact on such pivotal twentieth-century figures as Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.