The Kingdom of God Is Within You

by Leo Tolstoy, Constance Garnett (translator), Patrick Maxwell (introduction)

“Tolstoy’s purpose is the discovery of truth.” —Isaiah Berlin

The Kingdom of God Is Within You, an influential Christian anarchist philosophical work, faced an initial ban in Russia and found publication in Germany in 1894. This culmination of Tolstoy’s three decades of contemplation presents a unique societal structure based on a Christian interpretation centered on universal love.

Inspired by Luke 17:21, the book explores nonviolent resistance, pivotal for Tolstoyan followers of nonviolence and Christian anarchism. Tolstoy discusses the principle of nonviolent resistance in response to violence, asserting that Jesus Christ’s directive to “turn the other cheek” means renouncing all forms of violence, including self-defense and revenge.

In his autobiography, The Story of My Experiments with Truth, Mohandas Gandhi expressed how Tolstoy’s book deeply impacted him, considering it one of the three most significant modern influences in his life.

This Warbler Classics edition includes a new introduction that contextualizes Tolstoy’s relentless search for truth and his yearning for a practical understanding of how to live according to the principles set forth in the New Testament.

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) was a Russian writer and philosopher best known for his monumental novels, including War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Born into an aristocratic family, Tolstoy later embraced a simple life and a spiritual and moral philosophy that influenced his later works. His advocacy for nonviolent resistance and Christian anarchism, as expressed in The Kingdom of God Is Within You, left a lasting impact on social and political thought.

Patrick Maxwell is a writer and journalist, based as a historian at New College, Oxford. He writes regularly for The Big Issue and TheArticle magazine as a literary critic, and as a correspondent on foreign and domestic policy. He is also a conductor and a singer.

253 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 31, 2024

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.