The Serpent | 77carnation; and if it sinks into that sphere, it has lost its soul.” No simple resolu-
tion can resolve this tension once and for all in a way that would apply to every
situation. The only thing that can be done is to repeatedly check, on an ad hoc
basis, that one is conforming to the manner and tempo of the religious even when
immersed in the political. Even Gandhi is not always successful at this, tipping
occasionally to one side, occasionally to the other—Buber faults him for not see-
ing that the quasi-anarchist proposal of his political rival, Chittaranjan Das, for
India to form a system of nested autonomous village communities that would
network into larger delegated decision-making bodies, “was a political vision that
supplemented his own religious one.”^62 Buber also doubts that Gandhi can be
successful in his polemics against “modern civilization.” Technology, like politics
itself, cannot simply be eschewed—instead, it must be hallowed.
Ultimately, Buber has recourse again to the prophets, his best models, who
stood for justice and opposed the kings with “the firebrands of religio-political
words.” They did this not because they had a blueprint for God’s kingdom but
because the situation demanded a response: “One should, I believe, neither seek
politics nor avoid it, one should be neither political nor non-political on princi-
ple. ... There is no legitimately messianic, no legitimately messianically- intended,
politics. But that does not imply that the political sphere may be excluded from
the hallowing of all things. The political ‘serpent’ is not essentially evil, it is itself
only misled; it, too, ultimately wants to be redeemed.” Although Buber has yet to
adopt the term “theopolitical” (he comes close with the “religio-political words”
of the prophets), this is the core of the position that he will elaborate in all his bib-
lical writings—and a radical refutation of Schmitt’s attempt, following Thomas
Hobbes, to base the authority of the Leviathan on a messianic formula. On the
one hand, we seem to have come a long way from an endorsement of anarchism;
Buber explicitly denies that theology can ever serve the purpose of legitimating
a polity, or a politics. On the other hand, if it is true that “in public life (as else-
where) it is possible and necessary to employ religious instead of political means;
to win others through helping them to open out,” a politics of consonance of ends
and means must be adopted. For Buber, that politics remains the one he inherited
from Landauer, which seeks to create community by maximizing freedom and
equality simultaneously, focusing on process as much as on goal. It is not under-
standable except as an anarchism.
Notes
- Hans Mommsen, The Rise and Fall of Weimar Democracy, trans. Elborg Forster and
Larry Eugene Jones (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 11. - Ibid., 71.
- Klaus Tanner, “Protestant Revolt against Modernity,” in The Weimar Moment: Liberal-
ism, Political Theology, and Law, ed. Leonard Kaplan and Rudy Koshar (Lanham, MD: Lexing-
ton Books, 2012), 5–6.