Martin Buber's Theopolitics

The True Front | 49

Even in 1919, in a city in the grip of a revolution, at a revolutionary council as
the guest of a revolutionary leader, Buber was expected to handle “the moral
problem,” which his interlocutors imagined to be separate from the political
questions at hand. But he and Landauer knew otherwise: “The true front runs
through the licentious soldiery, the true front runs through the revolution, the
true front runs through the heart of the soldier, the true front runs through the
heart of the revolutionary.” The ones who fight on the true front are the ones ac-
cused of weakening their own side, but “those are the men who keep alive the
truth of the battle.”
Buber lamented the continuing lack of understanding of Landauer, even af-
ter ten years of continuous publication on his behalf: “Landauer fought in the
revolution against the revolution for the sake of the revolution. The revolution
will not thank him for it. But those will thank him for it who have fought as he
fought, and perhaps some day those will thank him for whose sake he fought.”
Not by way of the past Passion, which appears disastrous, would Landauer be
judged, but by the path of future salvation, the path of victories on the true front.
In the next chapter, I turn to Buber’s own contribution to this path, the idea
of theopolitics. Throughout the 1920s, Buber struggles to define the relation be-
tween religion and politics in a way that can provide support for Landauer’s hope:
“without domination: _____.”

Notes

1. FMD 93–126.


2. Ibid., 108–109.


3. Gilya Gerda Schmidt, Martin Buber’s Formative Years: From German Culture to Jewish
   Renewal, 1897–1909 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995), 118; Howard Sachar, A
   History of Israel: From the Rise of Zionism to Our Time (New York: Knopf, 1986), 180.


4. MBEY 193; cf. MBLY 400–401.


5. Martin Buber, Briefwechsel aus sieben Jahrzenten, Band III: 1938–1965 (Heidelberg:
   Lambert Schneider, 1975), 597–599, 608 (hereafter Briefwechsel III).


6. Buber may be read as avowing anarchism in his neglected 1904 essay on Landauer.
   Mendes-Flohr, however, argues that there Buber “celebrated Landauer’s anarchism as a meta-
   physical solipsism.... The emphasis here is on a personal, aesthetic anarchism.” FMD 110.


7. Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (Oakland, CA: PM
   Press, 2010), 574.


8. George Woodcock, Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements ( To r o n-
   to: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 421–422.


9. The claim that Buber criticizes the “too-sweeping anarchist position” of Kropotkin fails
   to see that Buber has simply adopted Landauer’s critique of Kropotkin, which is itself an anar-
   chist critique; Bernard Susser, Existence and Utopia: The Social and Political Thought of Mar-
   tin Buber (London: Associated University Presses, 1981), 186n56. Susser nevertheless employs
   the useful term “anarcho-theocratic” to describe the politics of Buber’s biblical works. Ibid.,
   178n54.


10. PC 173; GLPU 14; Wolf-Dieter Gudopp, Martin Bubers dialogischer Anarchismus (Bern:
    Herbert Lang, 1975); Stephen Eric Bronner, ed., Twentieth Century Political Theory: A Reader