34 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
single institution—the church, the state, the lords, the village organization, the
guilds, the various local or regional political assemblies—could claim to define
communal life. Each person could belong simultaneously to any or many of these
institutions, which overlapped so that the totality of society formed a Gesellschaft
der Gesellschaften, a society of societies. Of course, “there was also feudalism,
clericalism, inquisition, and oppression. To those I can only say: I know, but.. .”^93
Rather than a reactionary will to restoration, both Kropotkin and Landauer wish
to infuse contemporary struggles with a vision of something achievable, because
it once existed.
Much of Revolution addresses the questions and problems of writing his-
tory. Landauer tends to assume that writing history is inevitably activist; he is
skeptical of claims to objectivity and thinks that when we call up the past, we
also intervene in it, in the service of our contemporary interests. Leaning on
Fritz Mauthner’s critique of language, Landauer becomes a sophisticated critic
of historical categories, which he sees as literary in nature and beholden to the
arbitrary narratives he rejects. Landauer takes the longest possible view of hu-
man history, from which vantage point the history we “know about”—recorded
history—seems very short indeed: “Since humanity is many thousands of years
old... how can we not regard those who have shared the last few millennia with
us as contemporaries?”^94
Thus Landauer treats historical figures as though they were currently living
allies and enemies, fighting in (or against) the one revolution that has stretched
out over the past few centuries. The “obnoxious... sinister... terrible” Martin
Luther comes in for special condemnation, as the man who fought Rome (the
church) only to revive Rome (the society). The Reformation sought to end scho-
lasticism, clericalism, and narrow-mindedness, but it only “laid the foundation
for the acceptance of the absolute power of the princes, and hence for the original
forms of the modern state.... [Luther] radically separated life from faith and
substituted organized violence for spirit [in his fight against the Peasants’ War].”^95
Yet it turns out that the revolutionaries too are contaminated by this privatiza-
tion of spirit. They come to see goodwill toward their enemies as powerlessness,
forgetting that “there is no creation without community, spirit, and love.”^96 Hence
the succession of merely political revolutions, seeking to change only who holds
which power-positions, while abandoning the effort to revolutionize all of life—
what Landauer considers the true revolution.^97
No single individual has an outsized role in the millennia-spanning story
of Landauer’s Revolution. But if, for the sake of drama, Martin Luther can be
said to be the villain of the piece, then Étienne de La Boétie (1530–1563) is with-
out a doubt the hero. La Boétie was a judge, poet, and author of Discours sur la
servitude volontaire (Discourse on Voluntary Servitude), which, according to his
great friend Michel de Montaigne, he wrote when he was only sixteen years old.^98
La Boétie’s question, as Landauer sees it, is how “an entire people, consisting of