6 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
intellectual trajectory and a shift in emphasis and angle, and part 1 of the book
(chapters 1–3) is devoted to this project.
As noted already, for Schmitt political theology went hand in hand with a
critique of liberalism. Parliamentary representation allegedly fractures society
into interest groups, removing questions of ultimate significance from public
debate and thus transforming political contestation into technocratic manage-
ment.^25 Such a critique formed a crucial component of the “conservative revolu-
tion” against the new republic, which charged that such a party-state could never
deliver general justice. The Lutheran theologian Emanuel Hirsch wrote in 1919
that “the more democratic a state is today, the more dependent it tends to become
on large economic monetary powers, and the less social justice can be expected
from it.”^26 It is important to remember, however, that the Weimar Republic was
born not just of Germany’s defeat in the Great War but also through the suppres-
sion of the November Revolution. The specter of leftist radicalism haunted both
the supporters of the short-lived republic and its reactionary opponents. This fact
has less impact than it should on discussions of Weimar intellectual life, and very
little on questions of political theology. The communist and anarchist critiques
of liberalism and capitalism seem to lie on the opposite end of the spectrum from
the conservative bent of political theology—all political, and not at all theologi-
cal. Efforts to link them have focused on a few logical points of intersection, such
as the relationship between revolution and messianic hope in thinkers like Wal-
ter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch.^27 Moreover, historians were more inclined to focus
on the left while the Soviet Union still existed and Marxism remained a global
force. The fact that liberalism is still with us, while communism is a memory,
may partially explain why the conservative critique of liberalism by thinkers like
Schmitt seems relevant again, even to contemporary scholars who identify as
leftists.^28 But the last word has not been said on the theological-political problem
and the left, especially if one takes into account the intellectual-cultural environ-
ment of the Weimar period in which both right and left concerned themselves
with such issues as Gemeinschaft (community) versus Gesellschaft (society), or-
ganism versus mechanism, the nature of the Vo l k, and the role of religious au-
thority in political life.^29
My attempt to situate Buber’s theopolitics simultaneously in these two Wei-
mar contexts, the left and political theology, begins in chapter 1 by examining his
relationship to Landauer, who was murdered by counterrevolutionary troops at
the very start of the period, and then moves on to Buber’s place in the currents of
Weimar, in chapter 2. Thus I begin in the Wilhelmine era, focusing on the Buber-
Landauer friendship. This relationship is well known, and usually characterized
as fruitful for both. I examine this friendship both to recontextualize some of
Buber’s early “nonpolitical” work and to determine where Buber and Landauer
agreed and disagreed politically. Their careers followed similar trajectories: an
initial burst of political activity (anarchism for Landauer, Zionism for Buber),