Introduction | 13A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009),
363; “saintly, unpolitical, and inept,” Amos Elon, The Pity of It All: A Portrait of the German-
Jewish Epoch, 1743–1933 (New York: Picador, 2002), 351.
- Cited in Gabriel Kuhn and Siegbert Wolf, introduction to Gustav Landauer, Revolu-
tion and Other Writings: A Political Reader, ed. and trans. Gabriel Kuhn (Oakland, CA: PM
Press, 2010), 29. Mühsam also defends Landauer from strains of “proletarian” anarchism that
derided Landauer’s poetic and spiritual preoccupations as bourgeois; Ulrich Linse, “‘Poetic
Anarchism’ versus ‘Party Anarchism’: Gustav Landauer and the Anarchist Movement in Wil-
helmian Germany,” in Gustav Landauer: Anarchist and Jew, ed. Paul Mendes-Flohr and Anya
Mali, with Hanna Delf von Wolzogen (Berlin: Walter De Gruyter, 2014), 62–63. - Elon, Pity of It All, targets Mühsam as well. For “coffeehouse republic,” see Gabriel
Kuhn, introduction to Erich Mühsam, Liberating Society from the State and Other Writings: A
Political Reader, ed. and trans. Gabriel Kuhn (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2011), 20n60. - Leonard Kaplan and Rudy Koshar, eds., The Weimar Moment: Liberalism, Political The-
ology, and Law (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012). - “Weimar” serves as a synecdoche for the whole German-speaking world of the interwar
period. - Two important recent exceptions: Gregory Kaplan, “Power and Israel in Martin Bu-
ber’s Critique of Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology,” in Judaism, Liberalism, and Political Theol-
ogy, ed. Randi Rashkover and Martin Kavka (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014),
155–177; and Nitzan Lebovic, “The Jerusalem School: The Theopolitical Hour,” New German
Critique 105, 35.3 (Fall 2008): 97–120. - Critical references to Buber are scattered throughout Gershom Scholem’s recollections
of the prewar and early Weimar periods. For example, he uses the term Bubertät (“Buberty”)
to denote “the effusive imitations of Buber by the great master’s disciples,” implying that af-
finity for Buber needed to be overcome to reach maturity; Scholem, From Berlin to Jerusalem:
Memoirs of My Youth, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1980), 60. Herzl himself had
supposedly once made a similar play on the Bub (lad) in Buber’s name, claiming that “Buber is
not a surname but a comparative.” - The locus classicus for this view of Buber’s career remains FMD. Recently, Israel Koren,
Mystery of the Earth: Mysticism and Hasidism in the thought of Martin Buber (Boston: Brill,
2010), denies any “turn” and argues that Buber’s work as a whole belongs to the Jewish mysti-
cal tradition. Michael Zank already disagreed with an earlier expression of this position. See
Koren, “Between Buber’s Daniel and His I and Thou: A New Examination,” Modern Judaism
22 (2002): 169–198. Zank also acknowledges that Mendes-Flohr’s position remains the view of
most scholars but disagrees with its view of I and Thou as “the end-point of a development rath-
er than a point of departure”; Zank, “Buber and Religionswissenschaft: The Case of His Studies
on Biblical Faith,” in NPMB 61–82. With Guy Stroumsa, Zank reads I and Thou as a work of
Religionswissenschaft, academic study of religion, rather than as a philosophical magnum opus;
Guy Stroumsa, “Presence, Not Gnosis: Buber as a Historian of Religion,” in MBCP 25–47. - Buber’s earlier thought came under harsh attack by Rosenzweig in 1914 for its “atheistic”
and liberal tendencies, although Buber probably did not see the critique until many years later.
Franz Rosenzweig, “Atheistic Theology,” in Philosophical and Theological Writings, trans. and
ed. Paul W. Franks and Michael L. Morgan (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2000), 10–24. - Leo Strauss, “Preface to Spinoza’s Critique of Religion,” in Jewish Philosophy and the Cri-
sis of Modernity: Essays and Lectures in Modern Jewish Thought, ed. Kenneth H. Green (New
York: SUNY Press, 1997), 137. - Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, trans. Ellen Kennedy (Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988).