The Nonviolent Personality
by Giuliano Pontara
translated by Maria (Marijke) Keet
Back cover
At the beginning of the new century, the culture of peace finds itself facing many and difficult challenges. This booklet surveys some of these challenges and the characteristics that a mature culture of peace should have in order to respond to them. Particularly, it investigates what type of person is more apt to be a carrier of such a mature culture of peace: the nonviolent personality. Finally, it addresses the question regarding the factors that in the educative process tend to impede and favour, respectively, the development of moral subjects equipped with a nonviolent personality.
The original Italian version was written by Giuliano Pontara, emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Stockholm, and published in 1996, but its message is certainly not outdated and perhaps even more important in the current climate. Why this is so, and why it is useful to have a more widely accessible version of the booklet available, is motivated in the introduction by Maria Keet.
Table of contents
Introduction
Foreword to the English edition
Preface
1. Several major challenges to a culture of peace
1.1 Today’s political violence
1.2 The victims and the mechanisms of post-modern wars
1.3 Ethnic separatism, nationalism, and fundamentalism
1.4 Cowboy ethics and the return of the Nazi mentality
1.5 Totalitarian capitalism and structural exploitation
1.6 Water and the thirsty of the world
1.7 What prospects for future generations?
2 Several basic features of a mature culture of peace
2.1 Which peace?
2.2 Education for peace
2.3 Which changes?
2.4 Our responsibility
3 The nonviolent personality
3.1 Democracy and nonviolence
3.2 Ten characteristics of the nonviolent personality
3.3 Two general hypotheses
4 Education and the nonviolent personality
4.1 Violence toward children
4.2 Violence on TV and violence in life
4.3 The moralistic-rigid education
4.4 Schools and nonviolent personality
Notes to the translation
Biographical sketches
Bibliography
Index
Where to get it
I still have a few printed copies left, and you also can download the pdf (or this low bandwidth version [pdf, 287KB]) or download the ePub version for easier screen reading.
Elsewhere
- A blog post introducing the NVP booklet in 2011
A note about the tech
Yes, this page is plain HTML with CSS. I used Komodo Edit 12 to write it. It's been a while since I chose this stylesheet and tweaked it a little, which I found on the Open Source Web Design site. The booklet? I wrote it in LaTeX with TeXShop, and Wordreference made looking up words easier.
For comments:
send an email to me.