The True Front | 21tail any kind of final, idyllic “overcoming of power-relations.” On the contrary,
Landauer argued in a work commissioned and published by Buber himself that
“no revolution will ever achieve its goals.”^12 In his 1947 work Paths in Utopia,
Buber praises Landauer for declining to formulate “the absolute goal,” for under-
standing that “all true socialism is relative,” and for his insight that “socialism is
not the invention of anything new but the discovery of something actually pres-
ent, of something that has grown.”^13 As Buber explains, Paths in Utopia is struc-
tured progressively, unfolding a core idea from its beginnings: “In the history of
utopian socialism three pairs of active thinkers emerge, each pair being bound
together in a peculiar way and also to its generation: Saint-Simon and Fourier,
Owen and Proudhon, Kropotkin and Gustav Landauer.”^14 Buber here places Lan-
dauer at the end of an intellectual lineage that includes the classical anarchist
theorists Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865) and Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921),
arguing that he makes essential improvements on this line of thought, from with-
in it.^15 He also, however, designates this line of thought as “socialism” or “utopian
socialism.” Buber is aware that “socialism” is a term that, like “democracy,” al-
lows for variants, and the purpose of Paths in Utopia is to discern a particular
line within that term. Despite the fact, however, that those whom he treats in the
book’s central chapters all referred to themselves as anarchists, and used “an-
archism” and “socialism” interchangeably (from Proudhon on this is a defining
trait of “utopian socialism” as against its “scientific” cousin, Marxism), he de-
clines to use this term himself but alternates between assorted alternatives. This
sets the precedent for all the vagaries in the secondary literature, which reference
Buber’s “social philosophy” rather than his political thought, or his “decentral-
ized federalism” or espousal of “anocracy” rather than his relationship to anar-
chism.^16 Meier-Cronemeyer may have been right to suggest that Buber was afraid
to be tarred with the anarchist brush, hoping to have more success with utopian
socialism.^17
If, however, there is little to no difference between Buber and Landauer on
the plane of political and social theory, then this deserves greater recognition.
In the end, such recognition might lead one to remove Landauer from the list
of anarchist authors rather than add Buber to it. Yet for scholars to argue that
Buber has no politics, or to take him at his word in distinguishing his politics
from anarchism, without investigating his relationship to Landauer and other
anarchist thinkers, is to take sides unwittingly in a dispute among socialists.
Moreover, there is a sense in which terminology is destiny. There is an anarchist
“canon,” in which William Godwin (1756–1836), Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin
(1814–1876), and Kropotkin, along with Alexander Berkman (1870–1936), Rudolf
Rocker (1873–1958), and Emma Goldman (1869–1940), number among the clas-
sics. For the most part, this canon receives little academic attention as compared
to its Marxist “big brother,” and it is studied today primarily by those personally