Martin Buber's Theopolitics

Conclusion

The Narrow Ridge, the Razor’s Edge

We made certain declarations but no attention was paid to them. In politics one is

judged by one’s successes.

—Martin Buber

Dimensions of Theopolitics

Conclusions typically contain balance sheets, assessments of what is living and
what is dead in an object of historical study, and other such summarizing ef-
forts. But for now these judgments may be left to readers. Instead of issuing such
verdicts, I consider a few directions in which future thinking on Buber and theo-
politics might turn. Some of these represent issues I intend to address in future
work. All represent problems that I hope others will take up and grapple with.
First, Buber’s thought was intensely concerned with Gemeinschaft, with
“true community,” in the sense that romanticisms both left and right gave to that
term. Buber’s Gemeinschaft has often been thought of in terms of his I-Thou re-
lationship; here we considered it in terms of the theopolitical demand to embody
an anarchist kingdom of priests and a holy nation. Either way, though, the ideal
of political community has historically made liberals very nervous. Liberalism,
after all, can be said to begin with a denial of this ideal, and disputes between
various forms of liberalism and communitarianism continued to animate po-
litical theory through recent decades. Liberalism thinks of itself as being about
recognizing and acknowledging the conflicts that persist—and should persist—
in society, under conditions of reasonable pluralism. In response to these peren-
nial conflicts, which stem from basic human differences that cannot be wished
away or suppressed by nontotalitarian means, liberalism offers structures and
frameworks through which these differences may be mediated. It reserves its ide-
alizations for these frameworks themselves, which are represented as flawed, but
decent and potentially perfectible, mechanisms to allow members of society to
nonviolently exercise their freedoms, to exchange reasons and elaborate norms
while being protected from the excesses of their own neighbors.^1 Yet despite what
anti-liberals like Schmitt might say about liberalism’s denigration of the political,