4 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
thereby indicating the legitimacy of a political thought (liberal or otherwise)
that was not traceable to revelation. Yet Buber does not seem to fall into either
camp. To be sure, his valorization of “dialogue” has tempted many to classify
him among the liberals. This judgment, however, is hasty and mistaken. In many
ways, theopolitics can seem just as illiberal and “decisionist” as political theol-
ogy; it reflects the same era of crisis and uses a similar vocabulary.^13 At the same
time, it invokes the divine in a way that seems to disqualify it from being politi-
cal philosophy. I propose that Buber’s theopolitics constitutes a different type of
answer, then, to political theology: an anarchist one. Where political theology
deploys the power of the divine in the service of the authoritarian state, theo-
politics denies any possibility of truly legitimizing institutional human power. If
political theology borders on the fascistic, theopolitics is its anarchistic antipode.
My suggestion to link theopolitics with anarchism may seem counterintui-
tive. Anarchism, also known as libertarian socialism, is usually understood as
a current of nineteenth-century European radicalism. Anarchists declared war
on every oppressive social structure, chief among them the state, capitalism, and
organized religion. This uncompromising stance put them at odds with com-
munists (who wanted a workers’ state to overcome capitalism) and liberals (who
saw the unfettered operations of capitalist markets as “free” and did not consider
private concentrations of power to be as threatening as government), as well as
conservatives (who wanted to defend all the great pillars of law and order, from
the family to the church to the state). There have always been strong streams of
religious anarchism, however, running alongside the antireligious mainstream;
Leo Tolstoy and Mahatma Gandhi, at various times, exemplified the trend. Reli-
gious anarchists typically distinguish between the essential truths to be found in
their traditions and the oppressive attempts by human beings to institutionalize
those truths.
Buber’s mentor in anarchism was his closest friend of twenty years, the activ-
ist, writer, and critic Gustav Landauer (1870–1919), to whom the Prussian secret
police in 1893 gave the title “most significant agitator of the radical-revolutionary
movement in all of Germany.”^14 Despite this accolade, and despite Landauer’s
prominent role in the November Revolution (the wave of leftist revolt that swept
Germany in 1918 and 1919), he has often been treated as apolitically as Buber.
He has been called “impractical” and “excessively romantic” even by proponents
of revolutionary change, and “saintly, unpolitical, and inept” by its opponents.^15
Landauer’s comrade during the uprising of the Bavarian Council Republic, Er-
ich Mühsam, defended him against such charges, calling him “a strong, fear-
less spirit, always ready to act” who could not be absorbed “in a sweet brew of
bourgeois-ethical love for everyone and everything” (an anticipation of Schwar-
zschild’s description of Buber’s own political fate).^16 Of course, as an anarchist,
Mühsam was himself subject to the same criticisms as all those involved in what