<blockquote>
"No society can possibly be built upon a denial of individual freedom. It is contrary to the very nature of man. Just as a man will not grow horns or a tail, so will he not exist as man if he has no mind of his own. In reality even those who do not believe in the liberty of the individual believe in their own."- Gandhi</blockquote>
'He would have agreed with the nineteenth-century doctrine 'that government is best which governs least. … [T]his Jeffersonian maxim was central to Gandhi's thinking. "A society organized and run on the basis of complete nonviolence..'<blockquote>
'[Gandhi] was assaulted and nearly lynched by a white mob … but [he] refused to prosecute his assailants. It was, he said, a principle with him not to seek redress of a personal wrong in a court of law. … [T]he distrust of the apparatus of government was almost as deeprooted in [Gandhi] as in Tolstoy. He would have agreed with the nineteenth-century doctrine 'that government is best which governs least. … [T]his Jeffersonian maxim was central to Gandhi's thinking. "A society organized and run on the basis of complete nonviolence," he stated repeatedly, "would be the purest anarchy. … That State is perfect and non-violent where the people are governed the least." And again: "The ideally non-violent State will be an ordered anarchy. That State will be the best governed which is governed the least." '</blockquote>
Mohandas K. Gandhi was born October 2, 1869, in Porbandar, a port town in Western India on the shores of the Arabian Sea...
...
Jim Powell reports in his book
The Triumph of Liberty that
<blockquote>around 1907, Gandhi campaigned in South Africa against laws that prevented Indians from traveling, trading and living freely, and a friend gave him a copy of [Henry David Thoreau's] Civil Disobedience, which he read while imprisoned for three months in Pretoria. He acknowledged that Thoreau's
<blockquote> ideas influenced me greatly. I adopted some of them and recommended the study of Thoreau to all my friends who were helping me in the cause of Indian independence. …
Until I read that essay, I never found a suitable English translation for my Indian word
Satyagraha.</blockquote></blockquote>
...
The intellectual historian George H. Smith puts the matter very similarly. "Gandhi's hatred of State oppression," he writes, "was as passionate and deeply-felt as any contemporary libertarian." Smith quotes Gandhi as having said that "any man who subordinates his will to that of the State surrenders his liberty and thus becomes a slave."
According to Smith,
<blockquote>Many analysts have pointed out that Gandhi was in the anarchist tradition and that his anarchism was strongly individualistic. In contrast to the supposedly Oriental view that the individual counts for nothing, Gandhi argued that "the individual is the one supreme consideration." "No society," Gandhi wrote, "can possibly be built upon a denial of individual freedom. It is contrary to the very nature of man. Just as a man will not grow horns or a tail, so will he not exist as man if he has no mind of his own. In reality even those who do not believe in the liberty of the individual believe in their own."</blockquote>
Smith's own judgment is unequivocal. "By any reasonable libertarian standard — the same standard we apply to a Sam Adams, a Thomas Paine, or a Lysander Spooner," he writes, "Mohandas Gandhi qualifies as heroic." Smith acknowledges that "in the enormous corpus of Gandhi's writings, we find no systematic treatise on political theory. Yet scattered throughout letters and articles we find unmistakable indications of his anarchist tendencies." Gandhi, Smith maintains, "was predominantly libertarian in his outlook." Throughout his career as an activist, Gandhi was guided by his "vision of an anarchist society."
Nor is this all. "Gandhi repeatedly called himself an anarchist," Smith writes,
<blockquote> He refused positions of political power … he called for the abolition of the Indian Congress after independence … he criticized Nehru's government … he desired the abolition of the Indian military and the maintenance of, at most, a minimal police force. … his entire social program revolved around establishing decentralized "village republics" which would use social sanctions to maintain order and which would be free of State control. … Gandhi was a vigorous opponent of imperialism … war (including World War II), censorship, and virtually every other kind of State intrusion."</blockquote>
- Jeff Riggenbach,
Does Gandhi Deserve a Place in the Libertarian Tradition? February 02, 2011