The Serpent | 63of religious socialism, the new political theology was not merely a matter of the
reassertion of the previous “alliance of throne and altar,” since it sought to divin-
ize the political itself.
The foremost representatives of both these tendencies, Max Weber and Carl
Schmitt, were, like Buber, present in Munich during the revolution of 1919—We-
ber to deliver his famous lecture Politik als Beruf (Politics as a Vocation) to an
audience of left-wing students, and Schmitt to work in the censorship section
of the regional martial-law administration.^12 A focus on their arguments for the
autonomy of the political reveals that the relation of ends and means, a primary
focus of Buber and other religious socialists, was not “merely” an “ethical” ques-
tion but the consummate political question of the time. “Socialism must know,”
Buber wrote in 1928, “that the decision as to how similar or dissimilar the end
which is attained will be to the end which was previously cherished is depen-
dent upon how similar or dissimilar to the set goal are the means whereby it is
pursued.”^13 This claim raises the larger issue of whether politics and the political
should be defined as a sphere of life with its own rules, alongside aesthetics, reli-
gion, ethics, and so on.
The idea that politics is a craft demanding special knowledge is as old as
Plato’s inquiry into the arête, or excellence, of the statesman. But the idea of the
autonomy of politics, the claim that politics issues its own laws to itself, may be
much younger. Machiavelli is said to have emancipated politics from its subor-
dination to ethics or religion, enabling it to be studied in its own right. Political
theorists might, then, be defined as those who follow in Machiavelli’s footsteps,
presupposing the autonomy of politics at the foundation of their work. There is
a logical slippage here, however. Acknowledging that politics is a craft, like ship-
building or medicine, that demands a particular talent or excellence is not yet to
declare it autonomous, because it fails to articulate the telos, or purpose, of poli-
tics. Both Plato and Aristotle, in different ways, do subordinate politics to a telos,
namely the Good. With Machiavelli, however, the move that allows his laserlike
focus on political technique is precisely the refusal to articulate any task for poli-
tics beyond the desire of the prince to “maintain his state,” that is, to continue
being a prince. The virtù of the prince, then—a complex term for Machiavelli,
but an integral one, which partially draws on the classical philosophical meaning
of arête—becomes identified with whatever techniques do in fact maintain the
state. In line with what Weber called the rationalization of every sphere of human
life, this isolation of the technique of politics can then be maintained as the sine
qua non for the existence of political science as a scholarly discipline. This claim
serves as the foundation for many shades of political “realism,” including Weber’s
own distinction between a politics founded in an ethics of responsibility, which
pays political science its due, and one rooted in an ethics of conviction, which
naïvely allows for comprehensive conceptions of the good to determine political