20 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
movement” (of which Zionism was one part) as a potential vehicle for this real-
ization, there is little to no daylight between the two men’s political outlooks?
This was especially true after 1916, when in the wake of Landauer’s denunciation
of Buber’s war politics, Buber began to stress the dangers of nationalism and im-
perialism attendant on the Zionist effort.
It is not that Mendes-Flohr plays down these affinities. For example, he shows
that Buber’s 1918 essay Der Heilige Weg (The Holy Way) “indicates a considerable
debt to Landauer, in particular to his political anarchism,” and he notes that “the
very first essays that mark this volte-face focus on the problem of the state.”^2
Nonetheless, later scholars have hesitated to fully develop these indications, and
politics is underplayed in the secondary literature. Not only do scholars hesitate
to describe Buber as an anarchist; some find it difficult to even admit that he
has a politics at all.^3 Maurice Friedman, for example, bases his claim that Buber
was “neither a pacifist nor an anarchist like Gustav Landauer” on an exchange
in August 1963 between Buber and a young student of the kibbutz movement,
Hermann Meier-Cronemeyer.^4 Having read Buber’s work Paths in Utopia (1947),
and his essay “Society and the State” (1951), Meier-Cronemeyer wrote to ask Bu-
ber why he did not refer to his politics of “the social principle” as “anarchism.”
Was it fear of the dubious reputation of the term? Buber responded that the term
“anarchism” did not speak to him because “it means an overcoming of relations
of power—which is impossible as long as the nature of man is what it is.”^5
One could argue that this is ample evidence to justify Friedman’s claim that
Buber is not an anarchist, since he never explicitly avows anarchism, and on at
least this one occasion he disavows it.^6 One historian of anarchism, Peter Mar-
shall, agrees: “Buber ultimately parted company with the anarchists by arguing
that the State can in some circumstances have a legitimate role.”^7 However, as
another historian of anarchism, George Woodcock, has shown, there has been
an increasing tendency over the years for anarchists to embrace the view “that
human beings are improvable but not... perfectible. We must accept the prob-
ability of imperfection and limit anti-sociality where it impinges on the lives of
others.... The more we build and strengthen an alternative society, the more the
state is weakened.”^8 By these lights, the precise view in the name of which Buber
disavowed anarchism is declared to be anarchism.^9 Acceptance of this wider un-
derstanding of anarchism, developed partially under the influence of renewed
readings of Landauer himself, explains why other scholars since the 1970s have
felt little need to justify calling Buber an anarchist.^10 In uncritically accepting
Buber’s distinction between his own politics and anarchism, however, Friedman
continuously describes Buber’s political orientation using awkward euphemisms
and neologisms, such as “the politics of the social principle.”^11
Yet Buber himself set the precedent for these vague, cumbersome labels. He
knew well, for example, that Landauer understood his own anarchism not to en-