Leo Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy was a Russian novelist and moral philosopher whose religious conversion in his fifties transformed him from the author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina into a radical Christian anarchist. What Then Must We Do? and The Kingdom of God Is Within You developed a philosophy of non-violence and non-resistance to evil that directly influenced Gandhi, who in turn influenced Martin Luther King.

Tolstoy rejected the institutional church, private property, and state power, arguing that the Sermon on the Mount contains an anarchist social vision incompatible with any form of coercion. Excommunicated by the Russian Orthodox Church in 1901, he spent his final decades preaching a radical ethic of love and simplicity that attracted disciples worldwide. Wittgenstein read him obsessively during the First World War. His What Is Art? remains one of the most provocative challenges to aesthetic theory ever written.