Redemption and Utopia. Michael Löwy
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harmony; and a utopian current which aspires to a radically new future, to a state of things that has never existed before. The proportion between the two tendencies may vary, but the messianic idea crystallizes only on the basis of their combination. They are inseparable within a dialectical relationship that Scholem draws out so admirably:
Even the restorative force has a utopian factor, and in utopianism restorative factors are at work. … The completely new order has elements of the completely old, but even this old order does not consist of the actual past; rather, it is a past transformed and transfigured in a dream brightened by the rays of utopianism.5
According to the felicitous expression of the great historian of Messianism, Sigmund Mowinckel, in the Jewish tradition ‘eschatology is a reinterpretation of the mythology of primordial time’.6
The Hebraic concept of Tikkun is the supreme expression of this duality in Jewish messianism. For the cabbalists – notably Isaac Luria and the Safed school – the Tikkun re-establishes the great harmony that was disturbed by the Breaking of the Vessels (‘Shevirat Ha-Kelim’) and later by the fall of Adam. As Scholem notes, ‘the Tikkun, the path to the end of all things, is also the path to the beginning’. The Tikkun implies ‘restoration of the original harmony’; in other words, ‘the re-institution, the re-integration of every original thing’. The coming of the Messiah is the accomplishment of Tikkun, the Redemption is the ‘return of all things to their original contact with God’. This ‘World of Tikkun’ (‘Olam Ha-Tikkun’) is, therefore, the utopian world of messianic reform, of the removal of the blemish, the disappearance of evil.7
In libertarian thought, there is clearly an analogous duality between restoration and utopia, which was noted by Mannheim.8 For Mikhail Bakunin, Georges Sorel, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Gustav Landauer, revolutionary utopia was always accompanied by a deep nostalgia for aspects of the pre-capitalist past, the traditional peasant community, or the artisan economy. Landauer went so far as to offer an explicit apology for the Middle Ages. In reality, the majority of the great anarchist thinkers integrated a romantic attitude towards the past into the core of their thinking.
The parallel can be drawn even further. In an article written in 1904, the anti-militarist writer Georges Darien complained about the ‘religious nature of Anarchism’, whose doctrine he defined in the following terms: (i) There was once a Golden Age, which disappeared with the birth of authority, (ii) We must return to that Golden Age, and for that a revolution is desirable, (iii) Once the revolution has been carried out, there will be a general interruption in life on earth, (iv) After that, the Golden Age will return.9 This is, of course, a caricature, yet it does relate to an aspect of anarchist prophecy. For his part, in Economy and Society, Max Weber argued that anarcho-syndicalism was the sole form of socialism in Western Europe that could claim to be ‘the real equivalent to a religious faith’.10
Contrary to what is generally thought, a romantic-nostalgic dimension has been present in all anti-capitalist revolutionary thought – including Marxism. In the case of Marx and his disciples, this dimension was tempered by their admiration for industry and for the economic progress that capital brings. But in the anarchists, who in no way shared that industrialism, the same dimension manifested itself with a particular, even unique, intensity and fire. Of all the modern revolutionary movements, anarchism (along with Russian populism) was undoubtedly the one in which utopia had the most powerful romantic and restorative charge. In this respect, Gustav Landauer’s work was the supreme expression of the romantic spirit of libertarian utopia.
It is perhaps here that the analogy between Jewish messianism and anarchism is the most significant, fundamental and decisive; it alone would suffice to create the possibility of a privileged spiritual link between the two. We shall return to this idea later in the text.
(2) According to Gershom Scholem, for Jewish (as opposed to Christian) messianism, redemption is an event which necessarily takes place on the historical stage, ‘publicly’ so to speak, in the visible world; redemption is not conceivable as a purely spiritual process, within the soul of each individual, which results in an essentially inward transformation. What type of ‘visible’ event is it? In the Jewish religious tradition, the arrival of the Messiah is a catastrophic eruption: ‘Jewish messianism is in its origins and by its nature – this cannot be sufficiently emphasized – a theory of catastrophe. This theory stresses the revolutionary, cataclysmic element in the transition from every historical present to the Messianic future.’11
There is an abyss between the present and the future, between current decline and redemption: moreover, in many talmudic texts there appears the idea that the Messiah will come only in an era of total corruption and guilt. This abyss cannot be overcome by just any ‘progress’ or ‘development’: only revolutionary catastrophe, with colossal uprooting and total destruction of the existing order, opens the way to messianic redemption. The secularized messianism of nineteenth-century liberal Jewish thought (the neo-Kantian philosopher Hermann Cohen, for example), with its idea of uninterrupted progress and gradual perfection of humanity, has nothing to do with the tradition of the prophets and the Haggadists, for whom the advent of the Messiah always implies a general upheaval and a universal revolutionary tempest. As Scholem so aptly puts it: ‘The Bible and the apocalyptic writers know of no progress in history leading to redemption … it is rather transcendence breaking in upon history, […] struck by a beam of light shining into it from an outside source.’12 Along the same line, Max Weber had already noted in Economy and Society that the Jewish people always lived in ‘mute, faithful and questioning expectation’ for the Great Day on which Yahveh ‘by an act that might come suddenly at any time but that no one could accelerate … would transform the social structure of the world, creating a messianic realm’.13
Scholem himself suggested the analogy between that structure of meaning and modern revolutionary doctrines: ‘Messianism in our age proves its immense force precisely in this form of the revolutionary apocalypse, and no longer in that of the rational utopia (if one may call it that) of eternal progress as the Enlightenment’s surrogate for Redemption.’ In Scholem’s eyes, the inheritors of that Jewish tradition are those he calls ‘the most important ideologists of revolutionary messianism’ of our century: Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse.14
None the less, without denying the more general scope of that comparison, it seems to me that the most striking parallel is with libertarian thought (including that of Walter Benjamin and the young Ernst Bloch). Indeed, the revolutionary/catastrophic aspect of emancipation is most obvious in the anarchists: ‘Destructive passion is a creative passion’, wrote Bakunin. On the other hand, as Mannheim again noted with reference to Gustav Landauer, the abyss between every existing order (‘Topie’) and Utopia was most sharply defined in the anarchists. A qualitative differentiation of time contrasted epochs pregnant with meaning and epochs devoid of meaning: any possibility of progress or evolution was denied, and revolution was conceived as an eruption into the world.15
(3) In the Jewish (notably biblical) tradition, the Et Ketz, the Time of the End, brings general, universal and radical change. Et Ketz does not mean an improvement of everything hitherto experienced on earth, but rather the creation of a wholly other world.16 The advent of the Messiah, ba’akharit hayyamim, at the end of days, will establish (or re-establish) an age of harmony between man and God, between man and nature, and among men. These are the well-known images of Isaiah 11:8, which show the child playing with the asp, or of Isaiah 2:4, which proclaim eternal peace: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more (‘lo essa goy el goy cherev ve lo ilmedu od milchama’).17
Here the correspondence with revolutionary utopias relates both to the absolute, radical nature of the transformation and to the actual content of the new (or restored) world. However, of all the socialist movements, the one that most sharply rejects any idea of improvement in the established order is, in fact, anarchism.
(4) One of the main aspects of generalized eschatological subversion is the overthrow of the powers of this world. To restate the famous words of the prophet