Buber’s theopolitics was refined and elaborated during the course of the 1920s, culminating in the publication ofKingship of Godin 1932. This work was itself originally intended to be merely the first installment in a trilogy onDas Kom-mende, the Coming One of Israelite messianism, but the rise of the Nazis and the flight to Palestine interrupted Buber’s work on this project, and parts of it appeared instead in Buber’s separately-issued biblical works, including Moses, The Prophetic Faith, and Two Types of Faith.The 1920s were bookended for Buber by the murder of his friend Landauer on May 2, 1919 by reactionary Frei-korpstroops under contract from the SPD, and the publication of his aforemen-tioned eulogy for his friend in 1929; in between, Buber taught at theLehrhaus, published I and Thou, and embarked upon the new translation of the Bible with Rosenzweig. There is another figure on whom Buber reflects at the
begin- Ibid., 112. More could be said about the role of violence in Buber’s picture, since he presents military defense as a primary function of the ancient Israelite charismatic leader. Here, however, I can only refer to Buber’s own mobilization of theopolitics in the service of a radical critique of mainstream Zionism, and also note this Buber-inspired remark of Martin Luther King Jr. in op-position to a conception of non-violence that, like Weber’s, would exclude those committed to it even from strikes, boycotts, or other direct action:“I must confess that I am not afraid of the word‘tension.’I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive non-violent tension that is necessary for growth…Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue.”King,“Letter from Birming-ham Jail,”inWhy We Can’t Wait(New York: Signet Classic, 2000), 67–68. Buber is referred to explicitly a few pages later.
84 Samuel Hayim Brody
ning and the end of thenextdecade: Mahatma Gandhi. If Landauer’s anarchism raised the question of the borders of the political for Buber, Gandhi’s work posed it in its truly theopolitical form, as a puzzle:
So far as Gandhi acts politically, so far as he takes part in passing parliamentary resolu-tions, he does not introduce religion into politics, but allies his religion with the politics of others. He cannot wrestle uninterruptedly with the serpent; he must at time get along with it because he is directed to work in the kingdom of the serpent that he set out to de-stroy…The serpent is, indeed, not only powerful outside, but also within, in the souls of those who long for political success…There is no legitimately messianic, no legitimately messianically-intended, politics. But that does not imply that the political sphere may be excluded from the hallowing of all things. The political‘serpent’is not essentially evil, it is itself only misled; it, too, ultimately wants to be redeemed.⁶⁸
This reflection, with its image of politics as a serpent (redolent of Schmitt’s dis-cussion of Leviathan), is echoed nine years later in Buber’s famous letter to Gan-dhi:“You once said, Mahatma, that politics enmesh us nowadays as with ser-pent’s coils from which there is no escape however hard one may try. You said you desired, therefore, to wrestle with the serpent. Here is the serpent in the full-ness of its power! Jews and Arabs…”⁶⁹ The Zionist project served as Buber’s arena for the contemporary conflict between theopolitics and political theology;
Buber saw Gandhi react against the political-theological form of Zionism, and he attempted to enlist him in the service of the theopolitical form.
The eulogy for Landauer relates an anecdote that can serve as a microcosm for many of these points.“I was with [Landauer] and several other revolutionary leaders in a hall of the Diet building in Munich”:
The discussion was conducted for the most part between me and a Spartacus leader, who later became well known in the second communist revolutionary government in Munich that replaced the first, socialist government of Landauer and his comrades. The man walked with clanking spurs through the room; he had been a German officer in the war.
I declined to do what many apparently had expected of me—to talk of the moral problem;
but I set forth what I thought about the relation between end and means. I documented my view from historical and contemporary experience. The Spartacus leader did not go into that matter. He, too, sought to document his apology for the terror by examples. ‘Dzertshin-sky,’he said,‘the head of the Cheka, could sign a hundred death sentences a day, but with an entirely clean soul.’ ‘That is, in fact, just the worst of all,’I answered.‘This“clean”soul you do not allow any splashes of blood to fall on! It is not a question of“souls”but of
re- Buber,“Gandhi, Politics, and Us,”inPointing the Way, 129, 137.
Buber,“Letter to Gandhi,”inPointing the Way, 145.
Is Theopolitics an Antipolitics? 85
sponsibility.’My opponent regarded me with unperturbed superiority. Landauer, who sat next to me, laid his hand on mine. His whole arm trembled.⁷⁰
The anecdote shows that Buber and his interlocutors distinguished between an abstract“moral problem”and the consummate political question of “the rela-tionship between end and means.”Weber, citing Trotsky approvingly, had de-fined violence as the means that defines the state and thereby the political itself;
here, the Spartacist leader echoes this line.⁷¹ Buber, by contrast, seems to be ar-guing something other than “what many apparently had expected” of him, namely that purity of means are required to guarantee purity of soul. Rather, he claims that a consonance of ends and means belongs, precisely, to the politics ofresponsibility.He is unable to convince his opponent of this claim; the last line indicates that the martyred Landauer at least shared his outlook, but it also links it to Landauer’s fate.
The career of the Bavarian Revolution is defined by several stages: the pres-idency of Eisner ends in electoral defeat and assassination, following which a period of turbulence sees the establishment of not one but two“Bavarian Coun-cil Republics,”the first of which is associated with Landauer and the anarchists, and the second with the Communists. The latter had a habit of treating the for-mer as though they were political children, insufficiently grounded in the recog-nition of the necessity for violence and party leadership; they referred derisively to the“Bavarian Coffeehouse Republic.”⁷² Typical of this type of criticism is the claim that anarchists are too bohemian, which is to say that they mix up their aesthetics with their politics; they are unable to see and practice the pure poli-tics. This judgment is echoed by a number of historians; Landauer himself is called“impractical”and“excessively romantic”even by proponents of revolu-tionary change, and “saintly, unpolitical, and inept” by its opponents.⁷³ Like
Martin Buber,“Recollection of a Death,”inPointing the Way, ed. and trans. Maurice Fried-man (New York: Schocken Books, 1974), 119.
Buber does not identify this figure, but it is most likely Eugen Leviné (1883–1919), who served in the German army in World War 1, joined the KPD (the Communist Party of Germany), and is said to have ordered the shooting of hostages by the Red Guards towards the end of April 1919, when hostage-taking failed to prevent Friedrich Ebert from ordering the destruction of the Second Council Republic and the reinstatement of Johannes Hoffmann as Minister-President of Bavaria in May.
Gabriel Kuhn,“Introduction”to Erich Mühsam,Liberating Society from the State and Other Writings: A Political Reader(Oakland: PM Press, 2011), 20 n60.
“Impractical romantic anarchism,”James Joll,The Second International, 1889–1914 (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), 64;“excessively romantic,”George Woodcock,Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 363;“saintly, 86 Samuel Hayim Brody
Weber, these historians, even when they are unsympathetic to communism, are able to characterize the Communist revolutionaries as politically“realistic,” be-cause the Communists recognize the necessity of the state and of state violence.
The anarchists, who deny this necessity, seem to come from an extra-political world, defined as aesthetic or religious. Some have taken this critique to heart, and taken up the epithet“antipolitical”as a badge of honor; a contempo-rary edition of Landauer includes two volumes calledAntipolitik.⁷⁴
What Buber’s theopolitics claims is that these historians are unwittingly a party to the conflicts they attempt to objectively describe. In taking the side of
“realism,”in allowing politics its autonomy, they fall in with one of the oldest forms of idol-worship, and take the part of Messiah against God. This is by no means surprising, since the party of realism has almost always outnumbered the theopolitical faithful. It is even possible to be committed to realism in a ro-mantic way, exalting one’s own probity and willingness to make hard choices;
Goethe himself exaltedSchwerer Dienste tägliche Bewahrung,“daily achievement of difficult tasks,”and a young romantic could make a slogan from these words as well as from any others of that poet.⁷⁵One can do the same with Weber’s “Pol-itics means slow, strong drilling through hard boards.”⁷⁶What is necessary is to define the exact nature of what is being praised and what condemned, and this is what Buber and Schmitt are each attempting to do in their opposing ways.
Is theopolitics an antipolitics? Yes, if“politics”is an autonomous realm that prescribes itself its own laws. No, if one recalls with Walzer that“antipolitics is a kind of politics,”in this case one oriented towards the realization on earth of the kingship of God in the form of a human community whose self-conception is that of God’s subjects. In Buber’s view this community—which is always emerging and never quite fully present in the world, though itcould be—is called“Israel.”
It is, much like Augustine’s city of God, not to be confused with any group of people that may call themselves by this name, and its work is always a theopo-litical work. There is much more to be said about the role of this concept in Bub-er’s understanding of biblical history, and his application of it to contemporary
unpolitical, and inept,”Amos Elon,The Pity of It All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch, 1743–1933(New York: Picador, 2002), 351.
Gustav Landauer,Antipolitik. Ausgewählte Schriften, Band 3.1, ed. Siegbert Wolf. Hessen: AV Verlag, 2010.
As indeed Buber himself did, proclaiming that“no revelation is needed other than this”;
Maurice Friedman,Martin Buber’s Life and Work: The Early Years, 1878–1923(Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988), 20. The line occurs in the seventh stanza of Goethe’s“The Testa-ment of the Ancient Persian Faith”, from theWest-östlicher Diwan, where it is italicized.
“The Profession and Vocation of Politics,”369.
Is Theopolitics an Antipolitics? 87
Zionist politics. But for now, this is where the discussion of Buber’s relationship to the borders of the political may come to a close.
88 Samuel Hayim Brody