God against Messiah | 115For the ancient Israelites, theopolitics may have meant alternating between
a family-centered, tribal home life and a collective existence as “Israel,” a nation
ruled by an invisible king. But Buber never entertains the notion that modern
Jews should attempt to reconstitute themselves into tribes. Instead, it seems that
he believed that the anarchist vision of Landauer, of a decentralized network of
internally democratic local councils, could come to form the modern version of
a Jewish theocratic politics. The mission of his Zionism then became an effort to
counteract the political-theological tendency, which risked repeating the ancient
monarchical mistake (even if it too attempted to update its vision, substituting a
liberal parliamentary system for the House of David). Buber addressed the issue
head-on in his Zionist polemics, but he also considered it important to keep tell-
ing his biblical story. In part 2, we will see how Buber told the stories of Moses, of
Samuel and Saul, and of the prophets of Israel, further elaborating his vision of a
Judaism simultaneously anarchic and theocratic.
Notes
- KG 139. “Die soziologische »Utopie« einer Gemeinschaft aus Freiwilligkeit nichts an-
dres als die Immanenzseite der unmittelbaren Theokratie.” Buber, Königtum Gottes (Berlin:
Schocken, 1932.), 144. Citations are usually to SM unless otherwise noted. - Francis Oakley, Kingship: The Politics of Enchantment (Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publish-
ing, 2006), 4. For a counterclaim that most humans have lived without states, see James C.
Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), ix. - Oakley, Kingship, 5.
- Cited in KG 165n15, 170n11, 170n21, 171n31.
- John P. McCormick has argued that Schmitt provides “a blueprint for the permanent
supersession of [the liberal-legal parliamentary components of the Weimar constitution] by
[the democratic-plebiscitary presidential components.]... [This] may not be ‘Nazi’ in 1932, but
certainly is fascist.” McCormick, “Identifying or Exploiting the Paradoxes of Constitutional
Democracy? An Introduction to Carl Schmitt’s Legality and Legitimacy,” in Legality and Le-
gitimacy, by Carl Schmitt, trans. and ed. Jeffrey Seitzer (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2004), xlii. - We should bear in mind Buber’s desire to obtain an official position at the Hebrew Uni-
versity, and his need to produce a scholarly work worthy of habilitation. This need sharpened
after the first edition, with the Nazi rise to power. - KG 13.
- Buber, Königtum Gottes, IX. The word Erkenntnis can be rendered as “insight,” “un-
derstanding,” or “comprehension,” all perhaps having less “hard” scientific connotations than
“knowledge” does in English. However, Scheimann writes that Buber approved his translation;
Scheimann, “Translator’s Foreword,” 10. - KG 14.
- Ibid. In one of these notes, presumably added for the 1956 third edition, Buber writes
that the second volume, Der Gesalbte, “was half finished in 1938 and had already been set up in
type when the Schocken Press, Berlin, which published the work, was officially dissolved. For
many years external and internal causes hindered continuation of the work; not until recently
could it be resumed. Sections from the still uncompleted second volume have been printed in