Cesar Chavez and the Common Sense of Nonviolence

Cesar Chavez and the Common Sense of Nonviolence. By José-Antonio Orosco. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008. viii, 143 pp. $24.95, isbn 978-0-8263-4375-8.)

José-Antonio Orosco's text is an attempt to provide intellectual and philosophical categories to César Chavez's written reflections on his organizing activities. Orosco's central argument is that Chavez was a "community intellectual" (a combination of Antonio Gramsci's "organic intellectual" and Saul Alinsky's "radical community activist") involved in the "production of knowledge" and an "original thinker and a social theorist" who "developed a 'philosophy of nonviolence' . . . significantly distinct from the work of [Mahatma] Gandhi [positive-reaction] and [Martin Luther] King [civil disobethence]" and "more appropriate ... for social justice in America": a social theory of "Radical Democracy" (pp. 3-6, 30-31, 85, 96).

Orosco argues that Chavez's social theory of...