Dalam “Persoalan Mendasar Patriotisme dan Kekuasaan”, Leo Tolstoy mengajukan kritik radikal terhadap institusi negara dan gagasan patriotisme yang selama ini dianggap suci. Menurutnya, patriotisme bukanlah kebajikan, melainkan bentuk kebutaan moral yang dipelihara oleh para penguasa demi melanggengkan kekerasan, perang, dan penindasan. Tolstoy menelanjangi bagaimana rakyat dimanipulasi untuk mendukung kekuasaan yang justru merugikan mereka sendiri, dengan dalih perlindungan, nasionalisme dan cinta tanah air. Buku ini adalah seruan moral sekaligus politik untuk membebaskan diri dari hipnotis patriotisme dan menekankan tentang perlunya solidaritas kemanusiaan yang melampaui batas negara dan bangsa. Ditulis pada pergantian abad ke-20, namun tetap relevan hingga hari ini, buku ini menawarkan visi berani tentang dunia tanpa dominasi koersif negara—sebuah dunia di mana keadilan, kerja sama, dan kedamaian tidak lagi ditentukan oleh siapa yang menguasai, tetapi oleh semangat persaudaraan antarmanusia.
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.
