Martin Buber's Theopolitics

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baum, replace him with Friedrich Naumann, founder of the German Democratic Party, whom
he called a “representative German politician,” yielding only when Birnbaum threatened to
invite Kurt Eisner instead. Owen and Strong, “Introduction,” xxxv.

25. KG 136.


26. Although “The Question to the Single One,” originally a November 1933 lecture, is Bu-
    ber’s only explicit critique of Schmitt, decades later he attacks “teachers of the law... who. . .
    defined the concept of the political so that everything disposed itself within it according to the
    criterion ‘friend-enemy,’ in which the concept of enemy includes ‘the possibility of physical
    killing.’ The practice of states has conveniently followed their advice.” Buber, “The Validity and
    Limitation of the Political Principle,” PW 216.


27. Schmidt, “Die theopolitische Stunde. Martin Bubers Begriff der Theopolitik, seine
    prophetischen Ursprünge, seine Aktualität und Bedeutung für die Definition Zionistischer
    Politik,” in Die theopolitische Stunde: Zwölf Perspektiven auf das eschatologische Problem der
    Moderne (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2009), 205–225.


28. Buber lacks the commitment to formal legalism that anti-liberals like Schmitt saw as typi-
    cally Jewish—neither halakha, nor constitutional law, nor neo-Kantian moral law. In his talk at
    the 1936 antisemitic conference he convened titled “Judaism in Legal Studies,” however, Schmitt
    claimed: “The remarkable polarity of Jewish chaos and Jewish legality, of anarchistic nihilism and
    positivistic normativism, of crudely sensualistic materialism and the most abstract moralism, now
    stands so clearly... that we can count on it as a decisive scientific basis.” Cited in Raphael Gross,
    Carl Schmitt and the Jews: The “Jewish Question,” the Holocaust, and German Legal Theory, trans.
    Joel Golb (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), 74 (italics in original).


29. Whether Schmitt read Buber is not known. Ludwig Feuchtwanger sent Schmitt a
    lengthy review of KG he had written anonymously; Schmitt’s reply implies that he read
    Feuchtwanger’s essay carefully (“Über Martin Buber kann ich nicht mitsprechen, doch habe
    ich Ihre Kritik aufmerksam und mit Nutzen gelesen”). Carl Schmitt/Ludwig Feuchtwanger:
    Briefwechsel 1918–1935, ed. Rolf Riess (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2007), 377–379, 381–382. I
    thank Thomas Meyer for directing me to this source. It was Buber who, as part of his series
    Die Gesellschaft, first published Franz Oppenheimer’s Der Staat, which Schmitt singles out
    for condemnation in 1932 as “the best example” of “the polarity of state and society,” which
    has as its aim “the destruction of the state”; Carl Schmitt, Concept of the Political, expanded
    ed., trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 76. Schmitt also read
    Landauer’s German translation of Kropotkin’s history of the French Revolution, to which he
    refers several times in the footnotes to Die Diktatur.


30. Leo Strauss, “Notes on Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political,” in Concept of the Po-
    litical, 113. Strauss is quoting Schmitt himself in the latter part of this sentence: “I have pointed
    out several times that the antagonism between the so-called authoritarian and anarchist theo-
    ries can be traced to these formulas”; Schmitt, Concept of the Political, 60.


31. Carl Schmitt, Political Romanticism, trans. Guy Oakes (New Brunswick, NJ: Transac-
    tion Publishers, 2011), xv.


32. Schmitt averred that “the intention of this book has not been ignited by the current
    discussions on dictatorship, violence and terror,” and pointed to his previous considerations of
    decision and law in Gesetz und Urteil (1912) and Das Wert des Staates (1914); Dictatorship, x lv.


33. Schmitt, Dictatorship, xliii.


34. Schmitt, Die Diktatur 146; Schmitt, Dictatorship 1 27. N.B.: Schmitt uses kommissar and
    kommission throughout these discussions. English translations of Buber often speak of “com-
    mission” as well, but he uses Auftrag, and the commissioned one is Beauftragter. This is politi-
    cally significant, as previously noted.


35. Schmitt, Roman Catholicism and Political Form, trans. G. L. Ulmen (Westport, CT:
    Greenwood Press, 1996), 65. Schmitt holds that “American financiers, industrial technicians,