270 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
state when they relate to each other in authoritarian and hierarchical ways. Social
revolution seeks to identify and transform these ways; political revolution results
from such a process, rather than catalyzing it. In Landauer’s voluntarist formula:
“Socialism is possible and impossible at all times; it is possible when the right
people are there to will and to do it; it is impossible when people either don’t will
it or only supposedly will it, but are not capable of doing it.”^119 Willing does not
guarantee immediate, total success; Buber and Landauer do not forecast the end
of all coercion. There are ways we coerce one another unknowingly. “Revolution”
to usher in a wholly new society is therefore not the essential task; rather, this new
society must be constantly prefigured:
To test day by day what the maximum of freedom is that can be realized to-
day; to test how much “State” is still necessary to-day, and always to draw the
practical conclusions. In all probability there will never—so long as man is
what he is—be “freedom” pure and simple, and there will be “State,” i.e. com-
pulsion, for just so long; the important thing, however, is the day to day ques-
tion: no more State than is indispensable, no less freedom than is allowable.
And freedom, socially speaking, means above all freedom for community, a
community free and independent of State compulsion.^120Such a struggle may not be assumed to be an invisible, “quietist” one. If the gap
between the maximum of realizable freedom and the existing state of affairs is
great enough, then the effort to close it will appear in the form of a “radical”
activism. Such an activism should not automatically be considered unrealistic or
utopian, and it certainly should not be treated as a chiliastic effort to immanen-
tize the eschaton. This is what was at issue between Buber and Scholem, which is
why it was so significant that Scholem left political anarchism out of his defini-
tion of anarchism. Political anarchism claims that while there may still be un-
discovered coercion in a decentralized, nonhierarchical society, the achievement
of such a society is for this precise reason not “utopian.” If society operates at an
extreme of indecency, then even the pragmatic effort to achieve a decent society,
with no aim at final perfection, has a radical cast. Yet this effort nonetheless falls
under the shadow of the Kingdom.
Resentment and Power: Nietzsche, Anarchism, and Theory
Landauer’s anarchism was part of the first great wave of the Nietzsche craze in
Germany, an attempt to reconcile Nietzsche’s emphasis on individualism and
will with the struggle for a just community. This was to ignore Nietzsche’s dis-
dain for the anarchists and socialists of his time, whom he considered overly hos-
pitable to secularized Christian resentment. It also meant developing a positive
anarchism, an anarchism without resentment and unsatisfied with “critique,”
that adopted Nietzsche’s drive to affirmation and sought to actualize itself in real
projects. Landauer’s murder prematurely ended this effort. The era of “classi-