be written from the point of view of the defeated. This book tries to apply that method.
Through a paradox that is more apparent than real, it is precisely because they were the defeated, because they were outsiders going against the tide of their era, and because they were obstinate romantics and incurable utopians, that, as we approach the end of the twentieth century, their work is becoming increasingly relevant and meaningful.
It goes without saying that the romantic and messianic generation contained the most diverse and contradictory political and ideological currents. The aim of this book is not to resolve its debates or to take a stand in the controversies, but rather to understand the overall movement, its genesis in Central Europe at an historical and social conjuncture of crisis and renewal for both the Jewish tradition and German culture. Written within the framework of the sociology of culture, it analyses the development of a new social category, the Jewish intelligentsia, and the conditions that favoured the dawning within that group of a twofold spiritual configuration of romantic utopia and restorative messianism. The key concept, which may open up new and still largely unexplored possibilities for the sociology of culture, is that of elective affinity – a concept which appeared in the works of Goethe and Max Weber, but which I have formulated differently in this analysis. In studying the works of more than a dozen authors, both known and unknown, famous and obscure, revered and forgotten, I do not intend to sketch the history of their ideas, nor to present a short philosophical monograph on each of them; rather, I shall attempt to reconstruct an entire socially-conditioned cultural universe in its multidimensional unity. This approach seeks to throw new light on a broad expanse of modern European culture by identifying a subterranean network of correspondences linking several of the most creative intellects. I shall also try to account for the eruption, within a magnetic field polarized by libertarian romanticism and Jewish messianism, of a new concept of history, including a new perception of temporality at variance with evolutionism and the philosophy of progress.
The author who formulated this heretical concept – this new mode of perceiving history and time – in the deepest, most radical and subversive way was Walter Benjamin. For that reason, and because all the tensions, dilemmas and contradictions of the German-Jewish cultural universe were concentrated in his person, he takes centre stage in this essay. He is, in effect, at the heart of the messianic-romantic generation; and his thinking, though slightly out-of-date and strangely anachronistic, is also the most topical and the most charged with utopian explosiveness. His work clarifies the thinking of the others within the group; and they in turn illuminate his work, in a two-way game not of endlessly reflecting mirrors but of mutually questioning looks.
I would like to end this Introduction on a personal note. Having been a sort of wandering Jew myself, born in Brazil of Viennese parents, variously resident in São Paulo, Ramat-Aviv and Manchester, and now settled (permanently?) in Paris for the last twenty years, I also saw in this book a way of rediscovering my own cultural and historical roots.
My family came from Vienna, but my father’s side (Löwy) was originally from the Czechoslovakian province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. No relation, as far as I know, to Julia Löwy, Franz Kafka’s mother: the name was fairly common among Jews of the Empire. On my mother’s side of the family, the origin of Löwinger is Hungarian. No relation either, as far as I know, to Joseph Löwinger, the Budapest banker and father of Georg Lukács.
Although I do not have famous ancestors, I nevertheless feel intimately implicated or summoned by my cultural heritage and by the lost spiritual universe of Central European Judaism – that extinguished star whose broken and dispersed light still travels through space and time, continents and generations.
As I read certain of Walter Benjamin’s texts, while also exploring the Gustav Landauer Archives at the library of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, I had the intuitive feeling that I was touching upon a much vaster subterranean whole. I drew up the outline of a research project and submitted it to the late Gershom Scholem at a meeting in December 1979. A first version in article form was completed in 1980 and corrected by Scholem; it was published in 1981 in the Archives de Sciences sociales des Religions no. 51 as ‘Messianisme juif et utopies libertaires en Europe centrale (1905–1923)’ [Jewish Messianism and Libertarian Utopias in Central Europe (1905–1923)]. In October 1983, a first version of the chapter on Walter Benjamin appeared in Les Temps modernes as ‘Le messianisme anarchiste de Walter Benjamin’ [Walter Benjamin’s Anarchist Messianism].
I continued my research with the aid of the Buber Archives at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; the Lukács Archives in Budapest; the Archives of the Institute of Social History in Amsterdam; the Hannah Arendt Archives at the Library of Congress (Washington, D.C.); the unpublished papers of Walter Benjamin, which are preserved at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris; the Archives at the Leo Baeck Institute in Jerusalem and New York; and through meetings with Ernst Bloch (1974), Gershom Scholem (1979), Werner Kraft (1980), Pierre Missac (1982), and Leo Löwenthal (1984).
Finally, I derived great benefit from the assistance, encouragement and criticism I received from my colleagues at the Groupe de Sociologie des Religions [Department of the Sociology of Religion] – notably from Jean Séguy and Danièle Hervieu-Léger – as well as from Rachel Ertel, Rosemarie Ferenczi, Claude Lefort, Sami Nair, Guy Petitdemange, Eleni Varikas, Irving Wohlfarth, Martin Jay, Leo Löwenthal and the late Michel de Certeau.
I would like to thank Miguel Abensour in particular, whose suggestions and critical advice were invaluable to me in editing the final version of this text.
On the Concept of Elective Affinity
A century after Auguste Comte, sociology continues to borrow its conceptual terminology from physics or biology. Is it not time to break away from this positivist tradition and to draw upon a spiritual and cultural heritage that is broader, richer in meaning and closer to the very texture of social facts? Why not use the vast semantic field of religions, myths, literature and even esoteric traditions to enrich the language of the social sciences? Did not Max Weber borrow the concept of ‘charisma’ from Christian theology, and Karl Mannheim that of ‘constellation’ from classical astrology?
This book is a study in elective affinity. The expression has taken an unusual path: it has gone from alchemy to sociology by way of Romantic literature. Its patrons have been Albertus Magnus (in the thirteenth century), Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Max Weber. In my own use of it, I have tried to integrate the various meanings that the term has acquired over the centuries. By ‘elective affinity’ I mean a very special kind of dialectical relationship that develops between two social or cultural configurations, one that cannot be reduced to direct casuality or to ‘influences’ in the traditional sense. Starting from a certain structural analogy, the relationship consists of a convergence, a mutual attraction, an active confluence, a combination that can go as far as a fusion. It would be interesting, in my opinion, to try to build on the methodological status of the concept as an interdisciplinary research tool which could enrich, qualify and make more dynamic the analysis of the relationship between economic, political, religious and cultural phenomena.
Let us begin by briefly reconstructing the strange spiritual itinerary of this expression, so as to capture all its accumulated richness of meaning. The idea that a visible or hidden analogy determines the predisposition of bodies to unite dates back to Greek Antiquity, notably to the Hippocratic formula ‘like draws to like’ (omoion erchetai pros to omoion; simile venit ad simile). However, the term affinity as an alchemical metaphor does not appear until the Middle Ages. Its first source is probably Albertus Magnus, according to whom if sulphur combines with metals, it is ‘because of its natural affinity’ for them (propter affinitatem naturae metalla adurit).
