66 | Martin Buber’s Theopolitics
who did, however, he treated them with great respect and even befriended them.
Such figures, including the sociologist Robert Michels and the playwright Ernst
Toller, leaned more toward anarchist syndicalism or Tolstoyan thought than
Marxism.
Despite his friendly relationships with such figures, however, Weber consid-
ered the anarchist quest for a society free from domination as the very paradigm
of utopianism in politics. In fact, he may have based his famous description of the
“ethics of conviction” on Michels.^21 Weber believed that an anarchist society was
both impossible, because contrary to human nature, and undesirable, because in
eliminating Herrschaft, a primary source of human excellence, it would create a
bleak world of passionless Nietzschean “last men.” But he admitted that this was
a value judgment and that he could not dismiss anarchism on the basis of reason.
Rather, he shifted the grounds of disagreement to the ethics of practice. Weber
described an anarchist committed to revolution no matter what the short-term
consequences of revolutionary actions might be, in contrast to a sober politician
concerned primarily with taking responsibility for such short-term consequenc-
es. This contrast reaches its sharpest point when it touches the question of vio-
lence. Here Weber reaches the borders of politics, explaining that if his student
audience ignored the distinction between ends and means, they would exit the
realm of the political:
In the last analysis the modern state can only be defined sociologically in terms
of a specific means which is peculiar to the state, as it is to all other political
associations, namely physical violence. “Every state is founded on force,” as
Trotsky once said.... If there existed only social formations in which violence
was unknown as a means, then the concept of the “state” would have disap-
peared; then that condition would have arisen which one would define, in this
particular sense of the word, as “anarchy.”^22For Weber, the state is the only locus of the political. The political is defined by
the deployment of the means of violence by associated groups of people; the state
then claims a monopoly over this means, concentrating the “legitimate” use of
such violence in one particular association. Here Weber’s “polytheism” manifests
in the form of a clash between secularism and the ethics of conviction: “Anyone
who makes a pact with the means of violence, for whatever purpose—and every
politician does this... is becoming involved... with the diabolical powers that
lurk in all violence.”^23 To attempt to create a society consisting only of formations
“in which violence was unknown as a means” would be to attempt “anarchy.”
This, of course, is what many in Weber’s original audience of student radicals,
inspired by Landauer and his comrades, had been attempting—for Weber, they
were seeking a kingdom “not of this world.”^24
This specific goal links Buber and Schmitt to central themes of Weberian
thought. Both were concerned not just with the immediate question of the Bavar-