The Most Important Man You Don’t Know

By Charles Euchner

A shy and slight man, nearing 80 years old, toils away in a row house in East Boston. He’s wearing black, as usual—not as a fashion statement, but because it’s easy. He taps on his computer and answers his phone. At his feet sits his black Great Dane, Caesar. In his dark office, where floor-to-ceiling bookcases block the sunlight and manuscripts cover the tables, he seems to disappear. It’s an appropriate image. Gene Sharp is probably the most important person you’ve never heard of.

Sharp gets calls from dissidents across the globe, seeking permission to translate one of his books to use in their political campaigns. Sometimes he travels to international conferences. Last spring he went to one on Mohandas Gandhi’s 1930 salt march, the defining moment of India’s campaign for independence.

Gandhi, Henry David Thoreau, Leo Tolstoy, and Martin Luther King Jr. wrote the most soaring rhetoric of nonviolence. But scholars generally agree that Sharp has done more than anyone to document how nonviolence works as a strategy of political action.

Sharp’s work helped script the peaceful uprisings that have defined the last generation in Eastern Europe, China, Burma, Latin America. In 1991, when Boris Yeltsin climbed atop an armored vehicle at the Russian Federation headquarters in Moscow to face down the putsch, one of Sharp’s pamphlets was seen fluttering nearby.

For nearly three decades, Sharp toiled at Harvard’s Center for International Studies. He also taught at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, where he is an emeritus professor. He lived on grants, and in 1983 he founded his own research group, the Albert Einstein Institution. Dazzled by his vision of revolutionary change, some of the best young minds in social science flocked to work with him.

UNDERSTANDING POWER

Throughout his childhood in Ohio, Sharp and his family moved often. His father, a stern Presbyterian minister, changed congregations regularly. Gene didn’t make many friends. He remembers playing with his dog, joining in softball games, and exploring the neighborhood. And reading. The Sharps finally settled in Columbus.

During World War II, Gene read newspaper reports of the conflict in Europe and the Pacific, dramatic accounts of Dresden and Hiroshima, and early reports of concentration camps and torture. He wondered what caused people to fight wars. At Ohio State, Sharp wrote an honors thesis on war. He joined a study group on civil rights at the YMCA and took part in an early sit-in at a luncheonette.

“There was only one man on duty,” he said. “There were 10 of us, an interracial group. Finally, they called the police, and amazing for Ohio at that time, [the police] were all African American. So we weren’t arrested. But we didn’t get served.”

After graduation, in 1949, Sharp went to London to be a reporter for Peace News, a 15,000-circulation weekly. Scholars at the Institute of Philosophy in Norway invited him to come to Oslo to study nonviolent action. He interviewed everyday people who resisted the Nazis simply by refusing to follow orders. He began compiling a typology of nonviolence.

He went to Oxford, where he tried to place nonviolence into a larger theory of power. Reading the classics of political theory, he found little satisfaction. Only Thomas Hobbes understood the underlying dynamic of power. In Hobbes’ Leviathan, the Sovereign trembles in fear that the masses will rise in revolt.

Power, Sharp realized, is a relationship. No government—even one with vast armies of soldiers and bureaucrats, control of the media and economy—can survive unless the people obey. The central imperative of nonviolent action is to withdraw consent from the regime until it accepts the demands of the people. If enough people refuse to obey the state, the state will lose its power.

BACK AT OHIO STATE

Sharp returned to Ohio State to get a graduate degree in sociology. He spent hours in the basement of the library, reading British and Indian newspaper accounts of Gandhi’s nonviolent campaign for Indian independence. The yellowing newspapers told Sharp something that confused—even scared—him. Conventional wisdom held that nonviolence requires moral purity. It was considered synonymous with pacifism and the Christlike imperative to turn the other cheek. By refusing to meet violence with violence, activists demonstrated righteousness. That moral superiority aroused the public conscience.

But the newspapers told a different story. Using nonviolence did not require a pure moral spirit. The people in the Indian independence movement were not just the righteous few, but the flawed many. They used nonviolence because it worked, not because it was morally pure.

“The people used these methods in a very disciplined way [but] didn’t believe in them ethically,” Sharp said. “They were not basing their action on the moral superiority. I was at first a bit shocked.”

He asked himself, “Should I write this down?” To acknowledge that nonviolence is not necessarily a moral strategy seemed, in a way, illicit. But that’s what the evidence of Gandhi’s movement showed. The importance of Sharp’s insight was huge. Democratic revolutions do not need to wait for a morally pure generation. Anyone, anytime, can adopt a strategy of nonviolent revolution.

A PRAGMATIC STRATEGY

Sharp decided to spend his life documenting and analyzing the methods that ordinary people could use to resist repressive regimes. He wanted to say everything that needed to be said about nonviolence as a pragmatic strategy. Over the years, Sharp put this knowledge in the hands of oppressed people everywhere—in the nations of the old Soviet empire, in dictatorships from Asia to Africa to Latin America, in the Middle East. His works became how-to guides for achieving freedom and democracy.

In their zeal to destroy a bad regime—and to get even—activists are tempted to use violence against the government. But violence usually doesn’t work because it plays into the regime’s strength. Even when violence succeeds in overthrowing the regime, one group of tyrants simply replaces another. Repression and resentment begin a new cycle. To develop an effective strategy, activists need to identify the government’s weak spots and attack them. Using the right combination of nonviolent methods, activists can weaken their opponents.

Sharp embodies the academic ideal of careful competence. He eschews colorful expressions in favor of precision. He makes few grand claims for his work. But he believes his ideas about nonviolence could transform basic theories of power. That’s not, he said, because of his own brilliance as a theorist. It’s because he discovered a fundamental truth of politics and worked more than half a century to document it.

A THEORY OF POLITICS

Friendly critics lament that Sharp has not submitted his work—a massive collection of articles, arranged by topic—to rigorous academic testing. Colleagues have drawn up ambitious research agendas, which have languished. But Sharp believes in his ideas. He thinks he has developed a whole new theory of politics.

The theory can be stated simply: Power, even in the most closed and brutal dictatorship, depends on consent. Ordinary people can band together to withdraw their consent. Movements succeed when they refuse to resort to violence, since the regime always possesses superior instruments of violence. Ergo, the future of democracy and freedom depends on nonviolence.

Ironically, the military understands Sharp’s work best. “I’ve basically given up on [peace activists],” he said. “They think you get rid of war by refusing to take part and protesting. No! You get rid of war when people have something else they can do more effectively.”

Robert Helvey, a career military man, recruited Sharp to help train Burmese activists in their underground campaign against the military government. Sharp wrote the document that became From Dictatorship to Democracy, a concise restatement of his other work. The 88-page primer has been translated into dozens of languages. Some of his most eager readers are dictators and their henchmen. That’s a good thing, he said. “They’ll know what they’re up against. They will know that so many dictatorships have been brought down with the aid of these methods.

“They will have to be careful, because if they kill too many people it will weaken them. That will reduce the dangers to the demonstrators. That will mean more people will have the guts to go out and demonstrate. And the regime will reduce the degree of their brutality.”

AN ANONYMOUS STAR

Gene Sharp’s work will inspire democracy movements and scholars for generations to come. But the man behind the work remains an enigma.

Sharp never married because, he said, he wanted to devote his energy to his work. “I probably could never have had my life if I had married with children to support,” he said.

Asked how his best friends would describe him, he at first said he has “no best friends.” Then he laughed. A friend, he conceded, might answer, “I think I knew him somewhere.”

After prodding, he gave the final verdict: “‘He’s passionate, stubborn, persistent.’”

Sharp has always insisted on doing things his way. He does not want to charm donors or adjust the Einstein Institution’s agenda for them. A donor who kept the organization going for 20 years left after a disagreement. Recounting the incident, Sharp shrugged. These days, Sharp is almost all alone. The institute moved last year from Harvard Square to his row house. The staff now consists of just him and an assistant. A Salvadoran family living on the third floor helps with household chores.

Sharp’s only interest besides his studies is orchids, which he tends in a makeshift greenhouse on the top level of his house. Sometimes, he acknowledged, they get neglected.

Sharp is healthy but he knows his time is limited. He travels, but he’s more interested in completing his writings than explaining them to audiences. When he finally stops working, the Einstein Institution will probably expire.

In the U.S., Sharp remains anonymous. He doesn’t get invited to parties or conferences like other academic stars. Helvey, who says Sharp’s theories of nonviolence transformed his view of how the world works, laments Sharp’s anonymity. “He is more famous in 15 other languages than English,” he said.

In his 1973 masterwork, the three-volume Politics of Nonviolent Action, Sharp documented 198 methods of nonviolent action. “Someone recently told me there are three or four other ones that occurred in the last few years,” he said. “I’ll have to add them.”

Originally published in Ohio State Alumni Magazine, May 9, 2009.