The Law of Love

Tolstoy draws a distinction between love as an emotion (which fluctuates, depends on circumstances, and cannot be commanded) and love as a law (which is a standing orientation of will toward the good of others, regardless of feeling). The Gospel commandment to love your enemies does not require that you feel fondly toward them — that would be psychologically impossible and a demand for hypocrisy. It requires that you act toward them as you would act toward yourself, that you do not harm them, that you regard their suffering as equally real and equally important as your own.

The law of love is incompatible with the use of force as a social organising principle. Force treats other human beings as means to be manipulated, obstacles to be removed, or threats to be neutralised — in every case, it refuses the recognition of their full humanity. Love, by contrast, begins with precisely that recognition and then proceeds to act accordingly. Tolstoy argues that every institution that relies on force — not just armies and prisons but the whole apparatus of property law, contract enforcement, and economic coercion — violates the law of love and therefore corrupts those who participate in it.

The standard objection to ruling by love rather than force is that it would not work — that people, left without coercion, would not cooperate and would take advantage of those who refuse to retaliate. Tolstoy does not deny that this objection has short-term force. But he argues that its long-term premise is false: the history of all coercive societies shows that force does not produce genuine cooperation but only the appearance of it, backed by fear. The communities in which love genuinely operates — families, tight-knit communities, the best human relationships — are not held together by fear of punishment. They demonstrate that love works. The question is only whether it can be extended further.

The law of love is the positive counterpart of non-resistance in Tolstoy's ethics. His late essay "The Law of Love and the Law of Violence" (1908) is the most concise statement of the principle and its social consequences.