Geoffrey Ostergaard


Geoffrey Ostergaard was a senior lecturer at Birmingham University and an anarcho-pacifist.
He wrote on worker's control in his book The Tradition of Worker's Control. He also wrote Resisting the Nation State: The Pacifist and Anarchist Tradition.
He was one of a number of writers who contributed to the development of anarcho-pacifist thought and action during and shortly after the Second World War; others included Herbert Read, Alex Comfort, Nicolas Walter, David Thoreau Wieck, Dorothy Day, and Paul Goodman. Drawing on Gandhism, he argued that nonviolence offered a way to reconcile political principles with tactics and to envision of a society without organized coercion.
Ostergaard is probably best known for his two books on the Gandhian movement of the 1960s and 1970s in India. The Gentle Anarchists and Nonviolent Revolution in India. He wrote articles in the magazine Anarchy and Freedom and in Peace News. He had close contacts to the War Resisters' International.