62 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
new constitution of 1919 a document of ‘western liberal’ thinking.... [T]here
was a broad consensus in the [19]20s regarding the rejection of the new political
order.”^3 This consensus held for intellectuals as much as for the general public; it
comprised religious socialists like Karl Barth and Paul Tillich as well as national-
ists and authoritarians like Friedrich Gogarten and Wilhelm Stapel, for whom
“models of legitimization based on religion and metaphysics had a de facto dele-
gitimizing effect for the parliamentary democracy of Weimar.”^4 On the Catholic
side stood Carl Schmitt, the most prominent anti-liberal intellectual of the time
(although, to be sure, his orthodoxy was suspect, he was eventually excommuni-
cated for remarrying, and he was only one pole of a Catholic spectrum that con-
tained significant variety).^5 Although most of the “political theology” discourse
came from Protestant sources, it was Schmitt who initiated the trend with his
Politische Theologie (1922). The Catholic Center Party, a well-established group
compared to the hastily formed and regionally divergent Protestant parties, fo-
cused primarily on its old agenda of securing the autonomy of the ecclesiastical
hierarchy to determine its internal cultural program. As for the Jews, they were
caught on the horns of an ideological dilemma: stereotyped as left-wing radicals
but also as primary forces behind the new Republic. The visibility of Jews in the
Republic, the flowering of Jewish culture during this period, and the desire of
Jews for equal civil and political rights fed the ire of the anti-Republican major-
it y.^6 The figure of “the Jew” came to stand in for modernity itself: “‘The Jew’ be-
came the standard negative symbol in the cultural criticism of the political right
against modernity. The Judenfrage displayed Jews as the deputies of modernity in
a culture war against modernity.”^7
How does Buber fit into this picture? He was a religious critic of liberal po-
litical thought, but also a Jew, and no conservative. Although as a Zionist he saw
the Jewish future in Palestine, he himself remained in Germany.^8 He did not
publish in Hebrew for years and did not visit Palestine until 1927.^9 Politically, he
was perhaps closest to the religious socialists, represented by the Swiss Protestant
Leonhard Ragaz. He contributed to the Blätter fur Religiösen Sozialismus and re-
viewed Ragaz’s work Weltreich, Religion und Gottesherrschaft for the Frankfurter
Zeitung.^10 Buber also cited Ragaz in an epigraph to his own brief “theses” on re-
ligious socialism: “Any socialism whose limits are narrower than God and man
is too narrow for us.”^11 Here he had comrades, Jewish and Christian, who saw the
sovereignty of God as a guarantor of human freedom and sociality. The religious
socialist position distinguished itself from two main opponents: a secular valori-
zation of the autonomy of the political sphere from any religious or ethical stric-
tures, and a conservative political theology that conceived of God’s monarchy
as a model for an autocratic system of earthly governance. This latter position,
paradoxically, also proclaimed the autonomy of the political from religion, as it
required the gravitas of the divine to serve earthly politics. From the perspective