The Serpent | 67ian Revolution but also with the challenge posed by anarchism and non-violence
to the existence and coherence of the “political sphere.” Their approaches form
mirror images: Schmitt tried to solve the problem by assimilating the kingdom
of God to Weber’s political; Buber by proclaiming that, at least for the people
Israel, “there is no political outside the theopolitical.”^25 For both Buber and
Schmitt, the anarchist vision would become a seminal influence—a resource for
the former, a bête noire for the latter—which each would articulate within the
field of Weberian political concerns. Schmitt’s Politische Theologie had its origins
in a festschrift for Weber, whereas Buber’s theopolitics, first fully articulated in
Königtum Gottes, admits its debts not just to Economy and Society, with its fa-
mous sociology of domination, but also to Weber’s magisterial representation
of Israelite life in Ancient Judaism. The relationship between anarchism and the
kingdom, or kingship, of God, stands behind each thinker’s grappling with the
nature of representation, the role of charisma in authority, the state of emergency,
the nature of secularization, the ethics of political decision making, and the po-
litical significance of rationalization and technicity in modernity. But whereas
Weber always insisted that one had to choose either secular politics and polythe-
ism or the otherworldly anarchist kingdom of God, Schmitt and Buber rejected
this choice, in opposite ways. For Schmitt, a “secularized” theology was at work
behind and for the legitimation of secular politics and domination; whereas for
Buber, the kingship of God was always actually this-worldly, embracing and en-
compassing political life, as long as that life remained anarchistic.
The Charis above Every Law: Anarchy, Legitimacy,
and Theology in Buber and Schmitt
Although Schmitt does not explicitly deal with Buber, and Buber rarely deals
with Schmitt, they fit into each other’s worldviews as perfect foils.^26 In his study
of Buber’s polemic against Schmitt in “The Question to the Single One” (1936),
the intellectual historian Christoph Schmidt argues that Buber’s use of the term
“theopolitical” serves as a Jewish Erledigung, or “closure,” of political theology,
parallel to Erik Peterson’s attempt to do the same from the vantage point of Ca-
tholicism.^27 Schmidt finds that Buber uses “theopolitics” only to define the prop-
er relationship between the religious and the political; “political theology” would
then describe what theopolitics becomes if it betrays its proper task. The dis-
agreement is about legitimacy, not legality.^28 From Buber’s point of view, Schmitt
epitomizes the excesses of modern power politics; from Schmitt’s point of view,
Buber at first appears to epitomize an antipolitical tendency to remove personal
strife from society and to transform politics and government into “administra-
tion,” by eliminating domination.^29 Leo Strauss once noted that for Schmitt, “the
ultimate quarrel occurs not between bellicosity and pacifism (or nationalism and
internationalism) but between the “authoritarian and anarchistic theories.”^30 If