Introduction | 7followed by withdrawal from active life and a focus on mystical-philosophical
concerns, followed in turn by renewed political activity after a prolonged period
of study.^30 I stress the simultaneity of their varied endeavors, which are often
treated separately. Buber edited Die Gesellschaft, his series of social-psychological
monographs, at the same time that he labored on his first anthologies of Ha-
sidic writings, while Landauer edited Fritz Mauthner’s Sprachkritik [Critique of
Language] and translated Meister Eckhart into modern German while he was in
prison for publishing his radical newspaper, Der Sozialist. Neither man saw his
life as compartmentalized into political and aesthetic spheres.
This approach avoids the temptation to view the 1916 disagreement between
Buber and Landauer over the First World War in terms of aestheticism or mys-
ticism on the one hand (Buber) and a keen sense of the political on the other
(Landauer). Although Landauer did in fact shock Buber by accusing him of aes-
theticism, both men combined these elements in their thought. The disagreement
between them reflects not any strict separation between aesthetics and politics,
but rather different ways of conceiving the mutual involvement of these catego-
ries, in both theory and practice. In this view, Buber’s new intellectual trajectory,
under Landauer’s inspiration, does not climax in 1923 with I and Thou; rather, it
runs from Der Heilige Weg [The Holy Way] of 1919 through the collaboration with
Rosenzweig on the Bible translation and the Frankfurt Lehrhaus in the 1920s
(which also saw his editorship of the interfaith journal Die Kreatur) and culmi-
nates in Kingship of God (the subject of chapter 3). Martin Kavka recently ex-
pressed the hope that a philosophical critique of I and Thou might “contribute to
the claim that I and Thou should not be taken as the mature expression of Buber’s
t hought.”^31 My own brief is not philosophical but historical; I seek to show what
might result from decentering I and Thou as the keystone of Buber’s work, rather
than treating everything that comes before it as an anticipation and everything
that comes after it as an elaboration.^32 I seek to enable a new conversation, not to
replace I and Thou with Kingship of God in yet another deterministic narrative.
Buber and Bible Scholarship, Buber and the Bible
Buber reveals his ambivalence toward the ivory tower of his time in the preface to
the first edition of Kingship of God. Acknowledging a significant debt to the great
sociologist Max Weber, both to his written work and to “conversation with the
extraordinary man,” Buber relates this anecdote:
I shall never forget—it was about 1910—after a lecture on Jewish piety which I
had delivered before Heidelberg students, Max Weber, requested by the young
people to open the discussion, stepped up to me and asked me whether it were
agreeable to me if he spoke now; he could, to be sure, offer “only science about
religion and not religion.” Also my book here is not intended to express faith,
but a knowledge about it; it asserts admittedly that one can possess a knowledge