Gene Sharp, the “Machiavelli of nonviolence,” has been fairly described as “the most influential American political figure you’ve never heard of.”1 Sharp, who passed away in January 2018, was a beloved yet “mysterious” intellectual giant of nonviolent protest movements, the “father of the whole field of the study of strategic nonviolent action.”2 Over his career, he wrote more than twenty books about nonviolent action and social movements. His how-to pamphlet on nonviolent revolution, From Dictatorship to Democracy, has been translated into over thirty languages and is cited by protest movements around the world. In the U.S., his ideas are widely promoted through activist training programs and by scholars of nonviolence, and have been used by nearly every major protest movement in the last forty years.3 For these contributions, Sharp has been praised by progressive heavyweights like Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky, nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize four times, compared to Gandhi, and cast as a lonely prophet of peace, champion of the downtrodden, and friend of the left.4
Gene Sharp’s influence on the U.S. activist left and social movements abroad has been significant. But he is better understood as one of the most important U.S. defense intellectuals of the Cold War, an early neoliberal theorist concerned with the supposedly inherent violence of the “centralized State,” and a quiet but vital counselor to anti-communist forces in the socialist world from the 1980s onward.
In the mid-1960s, Thomas Schelling, a Nobel Prize-winning nuclear theorist, recruited 29-year-old Sharp to join the Center for International Affairs at Harvard, bastion of the
— source nonsite.org | Marcie Smith | Dec 29, 2019