eschatological future, set Jewish religious thought apart from Christianity. In a letter he wrote in 1926, Buber formulated the thesis in terms that are not too dissimilar from Ernst Bloch’s utopia of Not-yet Being:
According to my belief, the Messiah did not come at a determinate point in history: his arrival can only be the end of history. According to my belief, world redemption did not take place nineteen centuries ago; we are living in an unsaved (unerlösten) world, and we are waiting for redemption, in which we have been called upon to participate in a most unfathomable way. Israel is the human community that bears this purely messianic expectation … this belief in the still-to-be-accomplished and must-be-accomplished Being (Noch-nicht-geschehn-sein und Geschehn-sollen) of world redemption.15
How did Buber articulate his messianic faith with his socialist/libertarian utopia? In 1914 he, like many German-Jewish intellectuals, was carried away by the ‘patriotic’ drive to war; but little by little, under the influence of events and the harsh criticisms of his friend, Gustav Landauer, he changed his position.
It was through a polemic in 1916–1917 with Hermann Cohen – the champion of ‘state consciousness’ (Staatsbewusstsein) – that Buber crystallized his own political-religious views. After having supported imperialist Germany at the beginning of the First World War (as Cohen himself had done), Buber now rejected the cult of German nation-statehood advocated by the neo-Kantian philosopher from Marburg: ‘Humanity – and to say that, Professor Cohen, is now more than ever the duty of every man living in God – is greater than the state.’ Buber summed up his differences in a biting sentence: ‘Cohen,… whether he is aware of it or not, wants the State to subjugate the Spirit; as for me, I want the Spirit to subjugate the State.’ This subjugation would be completed in the messianic era, which would ultimately make it possible for a higher form of society to supersede the state dialectically: the separation between the people (principle of creativity) and the state (principle of order) would be maintained only ‘until the Kingdom, the Malkhut Shamayim, is established on earth; until, through a messianic form of the human world, creativity and order, people and State, merge in a new unity, in the Gemeinschaft of salvation’.16
As the European revolution gathered momentum between 1917 and 1920, Buber clarified, radicalized and developed his vision. In ‘Die Revolution und Wir’, an article published in 1919 in his magazine Der Jude, he insisted on the necessity for Jews to contribute to the revolution of Mankind – that is, to the rebirth of society through a spirit of community. He voiced his solidarity with the revolutionary tide that was rising in Central Europe: ‘Situated in its camp … not as profiteers but as comrades in the struggle, we salute the revolution.’17 More than ever, there was an anti-State dimension in Buber’s writings: in the previously mentioned article ‘Gemeinschaft’, written in 1919, he appealed to Kropotkin, Tolstoy and Landauer in condemning State tyranny, that ‘homonculus which drinks blood from the veins of communities’, that clockwork puppet which seeks to replace organic life.18 In a homage to Gustav Landauer, published shortly after his assassination in April 1919, Buber wrote: ‘He rejected mechanical, centralist pseudo-socialism, because he longed for a communitarian, organic and federalist socialism.’19 From this perspective, Buber criticized Bolshevism and instead showed a sympathy for the neo-romantic ‘guild socialism’ developing in England at that time, and for the kibbutzim that were starting to be formed in Palestine.20
In a major essay published in 1919, ‘Der heilige Weg’ (‘The Holy Way’), which he dedicated to the memory of Landauer, the central axis was the unity between messianism and communitarian utopia. In Buber’s mind, community with God and community among human beings were inseparable from each other, so that ‘its [Judaism’s] waiting for the Messiah is a wait in expectation of the true community’. Their achievement would depend upon men:
So long as the Kingdom of God has not come, Judaism will not recognize any man as the true Messiah, yet it will never cease to expect redemption to come from man, for it is man’s task to lay the foundation for (begründen) God’s power on earth.
He called this task active messianism, which did not wait passively for the arrival of the Messiah but sought to ‘prepare the world to be God’s kingdom’. Buber did not recognize Jesus as the Messiah, but regarded him as a true Jewish prophet for whom the future Kingdom of God was identical to ‘the perfection of men’s life together’; in other words, ‘the true community, and as such, God’s immediate realm, His basileia, His earthly kingdom. … The Kingdom of God is the community to come in which all those who hunger and thirst for righteousness will be satisfied.’21 In a lecture that he gave in Frankfurt in 1924 (minutes of which can be found at the Buber Archives in Jerusalem), Buber set out in a particularly striking way this relationship between community and messianism: ‘Gemeinschaft is a messianic, non-historical category. To the extent that it is historical, its messianic character shows through.’ Analysing the Russian Revolution, he argued that the soviets were true communes (Gemeinden) on which ‘revolutionary community-being’ should have been constructed; but the course of events had led to their weakening, with the centralizing tendency of the state gaining as a result. State action, even if revolutionary, cannot bring messianic redemption (Erlösung); only the community is the genuine precursor and annunciator of the Kingdom of God, whose essence is ‘the fulfilment of creation in a Gemeinschaft’.22
Buber’s concept of the Kingdom of God is also charged with libertarian meaning. In the major work he wrote in 1932, Königtum Gottes [The Kingdom of God], he spoke like Scholem and Benjamin of anarchist theocracy: biblical theocracy, as the direct power of God, rejected all human domination and found its spiritual foundation in anarchism.23 Thus, Buber’s political philosophy can be defined (in the words of a recent essay by Avraham Yassour) as ‘a communitarian religious socialism tinged with anarchism’.24 His ideas were very close to those of Gustav Landauer, although, unlike his friend, he was not actively involved in revolutionary politics. He outlined his goal of libertarian socialism in various articles between 1917 and 1923, and later, more systematically, in Paths in Utopia (1945).
In this latter work, Buber presented a highly original formulation of the communitarian paradigm, reinterpreting the whole of the socialist tradition – utopian (Fourier, Saint-Simon, Owen) as well as anarchist (Proudhon, Kropotkin, Landauer) and Marxist (Marx, Engels, Lenin) – and assessing the various attempts to put it into practice, from isolated commune experiments through the Russian Revolution and the soviets to the ‘exemplary non-failure’ of the kibbutzim.
Buber’s point of departure was a radical critique of the modern capitalist State, which had ‘broken the structure of society’. The new, advanced capitalist centralism succeeded in what the former despotic state had failed to accomplish: the atomization of society. Capital wanted to have nothing but individuals facing it, and the modern state was placing itself in the service of capital by gradually stripping group life of its autonomy. Medieval society had been richly structured, with an interlocking network of local and work communities. But the essence of the community was ‘gradually emptied by the constraints of the capitalist economy and state’, which disintegrated organic forms and atomized individuals. However, ‘we cannot, nor do we want to, return to primitive agrarian communism or to the corporate state of the Christian Middle Ages’. Our task is to build the communitarian socialism of the future ‘with the materials we have today, whatever their resistance’.25
According to Buber, socialist utopia seeks above all to replace the state with society. But this requires that society should no longer be, as it is today, an aggregate of individuals without any internal cohesion between them, ‘because such an aggregate could be maintained again only through a “political” principle, a principle of domination and coercion’. The true society capable of replacing the state must be rich – that is, it must be structured by the free association of communities. The advent of such a society implies not only ‘external’ change – the elimination
