Redemption and Utopia. Michael Löwy
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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 of capital and the State as the economic and political obstacles to the realization of socialism – but also an ‘internal’ transformation of social life through the communitarian restructuring of human relations. The new organic whole, based on regeneration of the ‘cells’ of the social fabric, will be the rebirth (not the return) of the organic commune, under the form of a decentralized federation of small communities.26 This concept of socialism presents obvious affinities with anarchist thinking, but Buber also discovered it in certain writings of Marx – on the Paris Commune and on the Russian rural communes – and even of Lenin (on the soviets).
As Emmanuel Levinas correctly notes in his introduction to the French edition of Paths in Utopia, Buber’s utopian socialism is, in the final analysis, based upon his philosophical anthropology: man’s future relationship with his fellow human beings is defined according to the model of the ‘I and Thou’, which makes it possible to conceive a collectivity without ‘powers’.27
In spite of its secular and realistic form, Buber’s libertarian utopia is no less charged with messianic energy. His introduction to the book draws a distinction between two forms of nostalgia for justice: messianic eschatology, as the image of a perfect time, the culmination of creation; and utopia, as the image of a perfect space, a living-together based on justice. For utopia, everything is subject to man’s conscious will; for eschatology – insofar as it is prophetic and not apocalyptic – man plays an active role in redemption: a convergence between the two is, therefore, possible. The age of the Enlightenment and modern culture gradually stripped religious eschatology of its influence, but it did not disappear altogether: ‘The whole force of discarded messianism is now making its way into the “utopian” social system.’ Imbued with a hidden eschatological spirit, true utopia could gain a prophetic dimension, a ‘character of proclamation and appeal’.28
As a religious Jew, Buber was radically opposed to the orthodox rabbinical establishment and invoked Jesus or Spinoza as much as he did Jeremiah. His source of inspiration was what he called subterranean Judaism (to set it apart from official Judaism): the prophetic, the Essenic-early Christian, and the cabbalist-Hasidic.29 As a Zionist, Buber was from the beginning critical of the politics of the movement’s leadership, and after his arrival in Palestine in 1938 he became one of the main organizers of Ihud (Union), a Jewish-Arab fraternization movement which advocated the establishment of a bi-national state in Palestine. As a cultural nationalist, Buber always maintained a humanistic-universal utopian goal. In an (unpublished) lecture from April 1925, he said of the messianic prophecy of the Old Testament: ‘Its aim is not emancipation of a people, but the redemption of the world; the emancipation of a people is but a sign and a pathway to the emancipation of the world.’30 Finally, while being inspired by mysticism and messianism, Buber still sought to implement his spiritual ideal on earth, within the concrete life of society.
Franz Rosenzweig, founder of the Frankfurt-based Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus (Free House for Jewish Studies) – where Martin Buber, Gershom Scholem, Erich Fromm, Ernst Simon and Leo Löwenthal all taught during the 1920s – was the author of one of the most important modern attempts at a philosophical renewal of Jewish theology: Der Stern der Erlösung (The Star of Redemption), which was first published in 1921. The roots of this book are undeniably romantic, as Günther Henning so accurately perceived: ‘Rosenzweig, more than any other, translated the objectives of romanticism into a systematic philosophy of religion.’31 Paul Honigsheim mentioned Rosenzweig and his cousin Hans Ehrenberg (a Jew who converted to Protestantism) – together with Lukács and Bloch – as typical examples of the neo-romantic, anti-bourgeois German intelligentsia craving for religion.32 Born into a culturally assimilated milieu, Rosenzweig began by questioning the world-view of the Aufklärung. At first, his religious aspirations made him consider following the example of his cousin and converting to Christianity (1909–13); ultimately, he turned to Judaism, but his hesitation between the Synagogue and the Church gives clear testimony to the fact that his spiritual itinerary was linked to the more general movement of religious restoration within the German culture of the time.
Before the war, Rosenzweig had written a work on Hegel and the state, under the direction of Friedrich Meinecke. The First World War brought on a deep crisis in Rosenzweig, and he broke completely with rationalist philosophy, historicism and Hegelianism.33 It was in the trenches of the Balkan front that he began to write Der Stern der Erlösung (The Star of Redemption), which was completed in 1919.
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