AGAINST POLITICAL THEOLOGY, FOR “RELIGIOUS” POLITICS

Schmitt’s (Reference Scheuerman1922) Political Theology centers around an analogy between God and the human sovereign: Just as a voluntarist deity sustains the universe’s natural laws through miracles, so too a human sovereign sustains the state’s juridical laws through inscrutable acts of will.^{Footnote 10} Thus against liberal theorists like John Locke, Immanuel Kant, and his German contemporary Hans Kelsen, Schmitt insists that liberal jurisprudence cannot be a closed system whose edicts have intrinsic normativity and correspond to a timeless reason ([1922] Reference Schmitt2005, 14).^{Footnote 11} Moreover, as Schmitt would argue ten years later in The Concept of the Political, once any rational and normative grounds for legal order have been eliminated, a people’s unifying bond can be neither rational nor normative. It must be willed. Schmitt refers to this way of constructing in-group solidarity as “the political,” a way of relating to others that divides the world into “friends” and “enemies” ([1932] Reference Schmitt2007, 26). Thus in contrast to liberalism’s “art of separation” (Walzer Reference Susser1984), in which different spheres of society—the religious, aesthetic, economic, legal, cultural, and scientific—retain a degree of autonomy, Schmitt’s “total state” subordinates all realms of human existence to politics ([1932] Reference Schmitt2007, 24–5, 38, 72). And in this way, “the political” provides him with what the sociologist David Martin has called a “secular metaphysic”: It reproduces for political solidarity the moral absolutism of religious faith (Reference Martin1978, 90).

Buber responds to Schmitt by rejecting the analogical thinking underlying political theology, first through a philosophical critique, and then more substantially through a new reading of the Hebrew Bible. The “political,” Buber insists in his 1936 essay “The Question to the Single One,” appears not in moments of violence between friends and enemies but in the concrete organization of societies. It has no existential meaning. Yet Buber neither rejects nor quarantines politics. Instead, he seeks out a new, morally defensible concept of the political, one bound up in an orientation toward the world that he calls “religious” ([1936] Reference Buber and Smith1957).

Buber takes Schmitt seriously not only as a philosophical but theological opponent, arguing that Schmitt’s “political” can only be understood in light of a religious institution: the “trial by combat” or “duel” ([1936] Reference Buber and Smith1957, 73).^{Footnote 12} In a duel, the outcome—who lives or dies—is understood to reflect divine will; in effect, the disputants make God into their judge. It is precisely this logic, Buber argues, that is at work in Schmitt. Though Schmitt uses the language of secular political theory, his secret intent is to scale up the “trial by combat” from interpersonal struggles to those of states. “Every classic duel is a masked ‘judgment of God,’” Buber writes. “That is what Schmitt, carrying it over to the relation of peoples to one another, calls the specifically political” (ibid., 74). Thus the political is not merely a vitalist celebration of violence. It is a whole theology of bloodshed. It lends war a divine sanction.

Buber offers three arguments in response, which, taken together, point toward an alternative concept of the political. His first is methodological. Schmitt holds that the specifically political appears at times of “the most intense and extreme antagonism” between foes ([1932] Reference Schmitt2007, 29). In those moments, conflict has its own meaning; it is irreducible to any reason, value, or justification. For Buber such a view is unworkable. It suggests something absurd: that politics only truly exists “in times in which the common life is threatened, not in times in which it experiences its stability as self-evident and assured” (Buber [1936] Reference Buber and Smith1957, 74). Schmitt, in other words, would reduce politics to transient periods of war and emergency. According to Buber, by contrast, the true site of the political must be found in what is “lasting” (74).

Second, Buber argues that Schmitt’s theory suffers from an internal contradiction. The political manifests in struggles between “friends” and “enemies,” which Schmitt notes may be “domestic” and “internal,” as for example rebels in civil war ([1932] Reference Schmitt2007, 46–7). Yet as Buber points out, rebels generally seek to transform, not dissolve, their state. And if that is the case, then there must be concrete political structures and institutions over which the conflict is being fought ([1936] 1957, 74). Thus by Schmitt’s own criteria, it cannot be that the political is defined by conflict alone. It must reflect something more permanent.

Finally, Buber takes aim at the friend–enemy distinction itself. Schmitt had arrived at this idea by comparing it with other oppositional pairs: “beauty” and “ugliness” in aesthetics, “good” and “evil” in morality, and so forth ([1932] Reference Schmitt and Feuchtwanger2007, 26–7). But what Schmitt failed to recognize, Buber argues, is that each of these pairings actually implies yet another pair of concepts. Behind the beautiful–ugly distinction, for example, is a contrast between “form” and “formlessness.” So too with the political. Enemies and friends do not fight over nothing; their hostility takes place against a more fundamental juxtaposition between “order” and “absence of order.” ^{Footnote 13} Thus it is only when a challenge arises to what political life should look like that an “enemy” emerges. And it is this “dynamic of order” that is the “real principle of the political” (Buber [1936] Reference Buber and Smith1957, 75).

Buber concludes by returning to the religious plane and attacking Schmitt’s “theological associate” Friedrich Gogarten, an important scholar of religion in the first half of the twentieth century and one of the founders, along with Karl Barth, of “dialectical theology.”^{Footnote 14} Gogarten, Buber argues, was correct to reject the religious individualism of thinkers like Søren Kierkegaard. Where he erred was by adopting the opposite, collectivist extreme: that “the ethical is valid as the ethical only by its connection to man’s political being” (ibid., 76). For Buber, such a perspective abdicates individual moral responsibility. If our decisions receive their meaning solely from political interests, we cannot distinguish between the state’s good and the moral good in a broader sense. Thus although “Gogarten may speak in theological terms,” Buber contends, he gives free reign to a Machiavellian mentality (76). He lends religious imprimatur to Schmitt’s celebration of violence.

Buber’s alternative to Schmitt’s political is a new but equally all-encompassing ethos: the “religious.” To begin with, the religious is not merely one Weberian sphere of value among many; it potentially interpenetrates all of them. “If communal life were parceled out into independent realms, one of which is ‘the spiritual life,’” Buber had written in I and Thou, this would “rob the spirit completely of reality” ([1923] Reference Buber and Smith1958, 50–1). A genuinely “religious” person, therefore, cannot live a double (or triple) life. She cannot be a caring mother in the evening, a back-stabbing politician in the morning, and an apathetic consumer in the afternoon. While she can perform many roles, all of them must be informed by the same wellspring of value. At the same time, the religious is not anti-political. Politics, Buber insists, should neither be rejected nor sequestered from other parts of human life; it should be morally transformed and redeemed.^{Footnote 15} Thus in a sense, what Buber articulates is a kind of inverted rendering of political theology: While Schmitt’s “total state” is one that “no longer knows anything absolutely nonpolitical,” Buber’s ideal polity is one that no longer knows anything absolutely non-“religious.” “If ethical problems receive their relevance from the political realm,” Buber writes, “they cannot also receive them from the religious, not even [as in the case of Gogarten] if the political has a religious basis” ([1936] Reference Buber and Smith1957, 76).

Yet by what means can political life be neither sequestered nor abandoned but still infused with a moral ethos? What does this “religious” orientation look like? In places, Buber seems to answer in a sociological key. “To the political sphere,” he writes in a later essay on community, “there was always opposed the organic, functionally organized society as such, a great society built of various societies” ([1949] Reference Buber and Hull1958, 131).^{Footnote 16} But at other times, he hints at a different and deeper strain: “There is no separate sphere of ethics in Judaism” (Reference Buber and Hort1946, 9). Or as he puts it in his book Moses: “The tradition of the pyramid faces that of the campfire” ([1946] Reference Buber1965, 28).

THE PYRAMID AND THE CAMPFIRE

In Moses, first published in 1946, Buber develops his “religious” politics by contrasting Israel’s nomadic ethos—an ardent hostility to dependence on the will of others—with the despotism of the Egyptian state. The Book of Exodus teaches that “The Lord makes a distinction between Egypt and Israel” (11:7). For Buber, this is not merely a difference in culture but a deep contrast in values and orientation. Egypt represents the summit of centralized and coercive civilization. Having subdued the Nile and its populace, the Egyptian state exhibited its total domination through monumental architecture: “As the pyramid culminates in its apex, so the Egyptian state culminates of almost mathematical necessity in the Crown, the ‘red flame’, which is addressed in the pyramid texts as living Godhead” ([1946] Reference Buber1965, 21). The pyramid for Buber thus symbolizes a perfectly realized political theology, a Schmittian “total state.” All parts of the society are subordinated to its interest, embodied in the person of the pharaoh; and it is from this interest alone that they derive their value and meaning: “In the last resort everybody received from the King the function which made him a man” (21).

Against Egypt’s domineering concept of the political, nomadic Israel offered an emancipated alternative. Historically, nomads represented a physical hazard to the state, persisting in the hinterlands beyond the reach of its laws. Yet as the political scientist James Scott (Reference Schmitt2009) has shown, their more profound threat was to its governing ideology. By refusing to accept any kind of structured hierarchy, and flourishing nonetheless, nomads were living refutations of the state’s Hobbesian insistence that freedom from violence requires total domination. Thus for Egypt and other ancient civilizations, the nomad was a figure of both fear and desire. Buber quotes with fondness a Sumerian hymn that speaks of the one “who knows no submission…who has no house in his lifetime,” as well as an Egyptian source that refers to “the miserable stranger…He does not dwell in the same spot, his feet are always wandering. From the days of Horus [that is, from the most ancient past] he battles, he does not conquer, and is not conquered” ([1946] Reference Buber1965, 25).

It is this intense nomadic antipathy to dependence on human will, Buber argues, that Abraham and his descendants inherited, linking life under arbitrary authority to the most profound unhappiness. Indeed such a deep place did the nomadic ethos carve out in Israel’s collective memory, Buber notes, that it surfaces even in the ritual agricultural offering, the first-fruits prayer in Deuteronomy: “My father was a wandering Aramean…” (26:5). Thus by the time it begins its sojourn in Egypt, embryonic-Israel has acquired a visceral aversion to any political system rooted in domination, an idea which informs how Buber understands Moses’ years as a shepherd in Midian. Only by leaving Egypt could Moses recover the nomadic ethos that Israel had lost through its long years of slavery: “A man of the enslaved nation, but the only one not enslaved together with them, had returned to the free and keen air of his forbearers” ([1946] Reference Buber1965, 38).^{Footnote 17}

In this task, however, Moses encounters a problem. Nomadic societies—small, insular, united by blood—permit a “fluid” non-domination to coexist with a “strong collective solidarity” (28). But what happens in settled life? The Israelites might be able to sustain a nomadic ethos through their Sinai journeys. Yet their destiny is not to migrate as pastoralists but to settle as farmers; not to wander forever in the wilderness but to inherit a land flowing with milk and honey. And of course this is not merely Israel’s challenge. It reflects a general problem: How can the nomadic ethos be reproduced in civilization? By what means can its skepticism about human authority and its insistence on freedom from domination find a place in settled human societies, suffused as they are with economic exploitation, social hierarchy, and vast disparities of power? Buber offers his answer—“theopolitics”—in Kingship of God.

THEOPOLITICS AND THE KINGSHIP OF GOD

By subjecting themselves to God’s exclusive kingship, Buber argues, the nascent Jewish people uncovered a novel means of realizing non-domination: When all human beings are fully dependent on God’s will, no human being is dependent on merely human will. And such an orientation, Buber insists, constitutes not a rejection of politics but a “theopolitics.”^{Footnote 18} This theopolitics, I will now show, is Buber’s “religious” alternative to Schmitt’s political. By inverting political theology, it extends the nomadic ethos into settled civilization.

Kingship, which like Buber’s critique of Schmitt in “The Question to the Single One” appeared in 1936, is written in the formal and scholarly mode of Weimar academia, but Buber’s normative aims show through in his methodology. The “historical facts” behind Biblical happenings, he writes, are less important than the experience of participants—their “inner truth” (Reference Buber and Glatzer1967, 117). For only if ancient Israelites experienced themselves as actually living under divine rule—not as a metaphor or ideal, but in concrete cognitive and emotional fact—could something of this experience be conceptualized, recovered, and repurposed. Buber’s approach, therefore, is to peel back the layers of the text, to find, concealed beneath strata of redaction, editorializing, and ideological sediment, the “spontaneous forms, not dependent upon instructions, of a popular preservation by word of mouth of ‘historical’ events” ([1946] Reference Buber1965, 15).

His core finding is this: For a substantial period during their early history, the Israelites experienced God as their king. Of course, the idea of the deity as “king” is hardly new, something Buber acknowledges. Yet in his formulation, it takes on a shape that is both radical and uncanny. To begin with, Buber argues that divine rule in ancient Israel was understood to be exclusive and direct. No one was permitted to serve as God’s intermediary; none could share in God’s sovereignty: “‘You shall be for Me a kingly domain’, ‘there was then in J’shurun a King,’” Buber writes, citing Exodus and Deuteronomy respectively, “This is exclusive proclamation also with respect to a secular lordship: the Lord does not want, like the other kingly gods, to be sovereign and guarantor of a human monarch. He wants Himself to be the Leader and the Prince” ([1936] Reference Buber and Scheimann1967, 136).

Buber’s unusual Hebrew translation here, where “mamlekhet kohanim,” usually “kingdom of priests,” is rendered instead as “kingly domain,” points to a second aspect of his thesis: God’s kingship was not understood at all in a metaphorical sense.^{Footnote 19} To describe the deity as “king” is usually intended as a figurative shorthand for its role as law-giver, judge, and cosmological architect. A human king, by contrast, sits on a throne, hears out disputes, and leads his troops in battle. Though elevated from his people, he dwells among them, something commonly assumed to be beneath a monotheistic creator-God (cf. Harvey Reference Gudopp2009). And yet this, Buber contends, was exactly how ancient Israel understood divine rule, that is, as “kingship of God”:

God’s throne was the ark of the covenant and His palace the tent of meeting. When Israel traveled, God’s tent-palace traveled with them. When Israel made war, God’s ark-throne was brought to the front lines. The deity, Buber thus insists, was the nation’s king [melekh] in every sense of the word: its counselor, decision-maker, arbiter, and field marshal (ibid., 102).^{Footnote 20}

This leads to the final and most critical implication of divine kingship for Buber: its politics—or rather, theopolitics. God’s rule, he stresses, was experienced as a palpable part of Israelite psychology. But—and critically—this did not precipitate a quietist turn away from political life. On the contrary, precisely because God’s sovereignty was thought to extend into every human domain, politics, too was understood to be a legitimate form of “religious” expression. “There is in…[pre-monarchic] Israel no externality of ruler-ship,” Buber writes, adding “for there is no political sphere except the theo-political” (136).

In this way, Buber is careful to preempt the tendency of Michael Walzer (Reference Susser2012) and others to read an anti-political message into Hebrew scripture. Ethics and politics are best understood not as opposing value spheres but as different manifestations of a unified effort to work through the implications of divine rule:

If politics refers to the collective affairs of a people, the premonarchial Israelites practiced politics. They conquered territory and built cities; they lived under laws and redistributed wealth. They embodied “a tendency toward actualization which can be no other than a political one” (ibid., 118). That they did so under divine sovereignty in no way detracts from their political character. In this sense, Buber’s target is simultaneously Pauline Christianity and Weber’s division of value spheres. The God of Israel, he writes, “is not content to be ‘God’ in the religious sense. He does not want to surrender to a man that which is not ‘God’s’….He makes known His will first of all as constitution—not constitution of cult and custom only, also of economy and society.” Having made this veiled reference to Economy and Society, Weber’s magnum opus, Buber concludes his analysis with a final shot at his predecessor: “The separation of religion and politics which stretches through history is here overcome…” (119).

Here we arrive at theopolitics’ foremost contribution: transposing the nomadic ethos into settled life. For the nomad, there is no greater slavery than dependence on another’s arbitrary will. And it is precisely freedom from dependence that theopolitics achieves. Human beings, by making themselves mutually and fully dependent on God, become mutually and fully independent of one another. Thus counterintuitively, it was precisely the Israelites’ extreme allergy to domination that led them to embrace absolute divine rule: “[The] intractableness of the human person, the drive of man to be independent of man, but for the sake of a highest commitment, already appears in the Sinai covenant” (138). Under such an arrangement, power, reserved to the deity, cannot be exploited by men for their own aims. And when power is exercised, it is understood as having been done so by God in the form of divine law. Its use is not interpreted as arbitrary.^{Footnote 21}

At the same time, theopolitics tames and channels an anarchic tendency within nomadism that is not only antinomian, but antisocial:

For a people that has jointly and equally accepted the “yoke” of God’s kingship, divine law’s coercive force is not recognized as coercion ([1944] Reference Buber and Witton-Davies1960, 99). Yet the result, Buber insists, is not anarchy, “not a negative freedom, a disorderly lawlessness,” but a “firm, bold standing under the one authority” ([1936] Reference Buber and Scheimann1967, 25).

THEOPOLITICS’ ACHIEVEMENTS AND LIMITS

Throughout his scriptural commentaries, Buber illustrates how theopolitics infused the institutions and ethos of Israelite society. He concludes, however, by stressing its intrinsic limitations.

Buber offers two examples of how theopolitics shaped Israel’s institutions: the Sabbatical year [Shmita] and the Jubilee [Yovel]. The Sabbatical extends the logic of the Sabbath [Shabbat] from communal to territorial life. Just as human beings rest one day out of seven, the land of Israel itself is made to “rest” one year out of seven. Proactive cultivation of the soil is prohibited, and a special holiness—that is, kedushah, or the status of being “separated” or “reserved” for God—attaches to any produce that does grow. The Jubilee, in turn, broadens the logic of the Sabbatical from years to decades: At the conclusion of seven Sabbaticals, the land not only rests but also is restored to its original holders.

On one level, the Sabbatical and Jubilee for Buber are primarily symbolic institutions. For an agricultural society subject to famines, neglecting an entire year’s crop requires real faith in the deity’s control of nature. And by publically promulgating the “postulate that God owns all the land,” it builds confidence in the “real and direct rule of God” ([1946] 1965, 179).

Yet on another level, Buber notes, these institutions produced a tangible yield: As the fiftieth year begins, all slaves are freed. Slavery, of course, is the nomad’s nightmare, a total dependence on the arbitrary will of another. What both the Sabbatical and the Jubilee offer, therefore, is not only a token reminder of God’s kingship but a concrete expression of its power: A return to a condition of non-domination between man and man. People, these practices insist, “ought not to thrust one another aside, they ought not to impoverish one another permanently or enslave one another.” They should be made “free and equal again and again, as they were at the beginning” (181). And so the Sabbatical cycles effectively furnish a “renewal of the Covenant” both in symbol and sociopolitical substance (179). Not only the agricultural produce but also the national community as a whole becomes “reserved” for God—a “Holy People” [Goy Kadosh] (181).

Buber further elicits theopolitics’ institutional form via a contrast with its ancient counterpart: the Greek polis. He begins magnanimously, referring to the polis as “antiquity’s most beautiful creation” (Reference Buber and Scheimann1967, 115). Yet we soon see that this compliment is actually a slur. The polis, he continues, acquired its beauty only through the minds of modern philosophers; in search of utopia, they fabricated an aesthetic ideal belied by historical fact. What is presented as a model of equality and democracy was actually a deeply unequal society, one whose way of life depended on a vast slavery (115–16).^{Footnote 22} And while the slaves were sometimes freed, this was done “occasionally and temporarily, superficially and imperfectly,” only to be “revoked by force through political upheavals.” Buber’s intended contrast is clear. Where in ancient Israel the law codified “the idea of rhythmic adjustment” in socio-economic status, in the polis we find “legal statics…interrupted only by occasional crises.” Where the Torah’s central “social concept” is the equality of all human beings under God, Greek philosophy preaches a “radical inequality.” And where Judaism’s watchwords are kindness [hesed], righteousness [tzedakah], and justice [mishpat], in Greek thought “virtue” itself was a term reserved “solely for the aristocrats, that is, the well-to-do” (116).^{Footnote 23}

Buber locates the greatest embodiment of the theopolitical spirit in the figure of Gideon from the Book of Judges. Judges is an early prophetic work that recounts Israel’s history following the conquest of the land but prior to the monarchy. Its narrative follows a cyclical pattern: the people sin; they are punished with defeat by foreigners; they repent; God sends a charismatic leader—a “judge” [shofet]—to lead them in battle; and this judge, having vanquished Israel’s enemies, relinquishes his leadership, at which point the cycle begins again. Buber’s interest in the text stems from this last stage. Historically, individuals have often converted their success as military leaders into political power. Yet Israel’s judges repeatedly declined to take this step. They did not seek power, and they refused to accept it when offered.^{Footnote 24}

What makes Gideon (a judge) a special figure for Buber is that he frames his refusal in explicitly theopolitical terms. Gideon is approached by the masses who offer him both kingship and dynastic rule: “Rule over us, both you and your son, and your son’s son also” (Judges 8:22). At first, Gideon’s reply simply mirrors the request: “I will not rule over you, neither shall my son rule over you.” But he concludes with what amounts to a rebuke: “The Lord shall rule over you” (8:23). For Buber, this statement captures the essence of the theopolitical spirit: Kingship itself, as an institution, is reserved to God alone. No human being, now or in the future, is entitled to dominion over another human being, for dominion itself is a province of the divine. In this way, Buber writes, Gideon “dares to deal seriously with the rulership of God” ([1936] Reference Buber and Scheimann1967, 59). His “No”—an “unconditional No for all time and historical conditions”—concretizes the “immediate, unmetaphorical, unlimitedly real” kingship of God (59, 93).

Schmitt is never explicitly cited in Kingship. But when the book is read through Buber’s critique from “The Question to the Single One,” his fingerprints are all over the text. Israelite theocracy, Buber notes, is often presented as “hierocracy,” rule not by God but a priestly class. Consequently, it is conceived in terms exactly opposed to theopolitics: Because the leader claims God’s authority, “the power over men is fundamentally at its strongest” (59). Yet Buber, making a veiled reference to Schmitt, insists that this interpretation is fundamentally flawed, reflecting a reading of Hebrew scripture in “the grip of political theories” (25). Real theocracy is precisely the opposite of hierocracy, precisely the inverse of political theology. In place of an all-powerful sovereign modeled on the deity is the actual deity whose power, reserved to it alone, need never be felt. In place of a “political” solidarity defined by violence is a theopolitical one defined by peaceful equality. And in place of a dependence on the will of other human beings—monarchs, Pharaohs, landlords, and taskmasters—is a total dependence on the will of God that is also a total freedom from men. For Buber, therefore, Schmitt’s political theology resembles less the Bible’s monotheism than the pagan despotisms on Israel’s borders—each one a “union of power between god and man,” led by “divinized” princes exercising absolute power over their people (89).

Theopolitics is thus Buber’s answer to political theology. It is the alternative, “religious” politics hinted at but never spelled out in his attack on Schmitt in “The Question to the Single One.” Given that both that essay and Kingship appeared in 1936, it is safe to assume that Buber worked on both at the same time. And it is reasonable to believe that he saw the two works as complementing each another: One, a critique of Schmitt at the level of philosophy; the other, a critique at the level of Biblical exegesis. Thus by joining collective solidarity to individual nondomination, he draws a roadmap for realizing the “true original nomad faith” even in the midst of settled civilization ([1944] Reference Buber and Witton-Davies1960, 43). Human beings, he insists, are capable of organizing themselves under a distinctly political form of “rule” (that is, arche, as opposed to a-arche or “anarchy”) without relying on violence. Indeed whenever he invokes the term “anarchy” in Kingship, it is not as praise but pejorative.^{Footnote 25}

Yet at the very instant that he answers Schmitt, Buber poses another dilemma. The upshot of divine rule is its counterintuitive combination of freedom and submission: Total dependence on God guarantees total non-dependence on human beings; the “more purely it occurs, the less it wishes to compel obedience” ([1936] Reference Buber and Scheimann1967, 148). But for exactly this reason, Buber notes, it is also highly unstable. Lacking coercion, its efficacy rests entirely on the vigorous theopolitical spirit of its participants. So long as every person acts as if God is sovereign, God effectively is sovereign; so long as divine rule sustains itself in thought, it sustains itself in fact. But once the theopolitical spirit fades, so too does the reluctance to dominate. Thus for the unaffected egoist, divine rule offers not a call to equality but a way of escaping responsibility. Indeed precisely because he is “sheltered” by theopolitics’ prohibition on human power, he finds himself a fox in his community’s chicken coop: He can exploit whomever he wishes (148).

Buber thus concludes that direct divine kingship, for all of its promise, ultimately fails as a viable political system. His source is the Book of Judges itself. Switching from an historical to a sociological key, he argues that although divine rule “envisions a community as voluntariness,” in fact it “degenerate[s] into a moderately sanctioned disorder” (148). As the unbelieving egoists grow in number, conflicts arise. Lacking a “unified and superior earthly government,” it becomes impossible to “maintain order and civilization.” Israel is “plunged again and again into anarchy” (84). And so the people, exhausted by war, their faith in divine leadership diminished, “rebel against the situation.” They take what for Buber is the most pivotal step in the history of political theory: Requesting—and receiving—a human king (162).^{Footnote 26}

THE SECULARIZATION OF POLITICS

Theopolitics proved impossible to sustain. Weary of incessant war, the Israelites again ask for a human king. And God, recognizing a change in the people’s spirit, grants it. As Buber argues in his Reference Buber and Witton-Davies1944 book The Prophetic Faith, this moment marked a world-historical shift not only for the Jewish people but for politics in general. When a human being ascended the throne in Israel, it instantly secularized politics, granting it a Weberian disconnect from other human domains. Moreover, it set into motion a process whereby those domains—religion, aesthetics, morality, economics, and society—each acquired autonomy.

Israel’s request for a king is repeated and finally granted in the First Book of Samuel. The question is why. In Judges, Gideon denies the people’s offer of the throne in forceful terms, a denial that extends not only to himself and his descendants, but seemingly to all of Israel, for all time. In Samuel, the people petition the prophet, the prophet consults with God, and God immediately approves. But if God did not change, what did?

The answer, Buber argues, is the people of Israel, and in particular, the strength of their theopolitical spirit. As they flee Egypt, traverse the Sinai, and conquer Canaan, the Israelites, in Buber’s view, conceive of themselves as living under direct divine rule. God’s kingship permeates every aspect of their lives. War, politics, economics, morality, and cultic sacrifice: All are woven together through a religious orientation. As they transition into settled life, however, this feeling begins to fade. Without the divine presence continually in their midst—God’s palace-tent and ark-throne—the Israelites gradually forget their deity. Their loyalties fracture. For agricultural fertility, they sacrifice to the gods of the soil [baalim]. For festive celebration, they consort with their neighbor’s idols (Buber [1936] Reference Buber and Smith1967, 95–8). To be sure, the God who delivered them from Egyptian bondage retains their loyalty in moments of crisis—in repelling foreign incursions and punishing tribal misdeeds. And He keeps an altar at Shiloh overseen by a cult of loyal priests. Yet Israel’s religious orientation undergoes an invisible but profound transformation. Previously, God was understood as the subject of binding obedience and a wellspring of indeclinable obligation. Divine word was law—at every moment, and in every human sphere. Now, God is regarded like any other pagan deity: A source not of responsibility but of power, an object which, through a properly worded incantation or an unblemished offering, can be pressed into service. God, in short, is redefined as useful and useable. He is recognized for “his power of victory, not his sovereignty” (Reference Buber and Hull1964b, 751).

It is in this context, according to Buber, that Israel’s request for a king should be understood. With the divine reduced to its utility, recognition of its kingship becomes contingent, isolated to those spheres in which it has instrumental value. And so when deity can no longer prove its value—when Israel suffers defeat in battle, for example—a new king must be found to replace it (751). “Give us a king to judge us like all the nations” the Israelites petition Samuel. Such a request, the biblical text informs us, “displeases” him (Samuel 8:6). But in responding to Samuel’s concerns, God indicates just how far Israel has strayed from the theopolitical spirit. “Listen to the voice of the people in all that they say to you,” God says to his prophet, “For they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me, that I should not be king over them” (8:7).

Nonetheless, God’s answer also has another implication for Buber: Israel’s kings will be radically different from those the world has known. They will be kings not in place of, but under God (Reference Buber1964b, 751–2). In the ancient Near East, the king was a semi-divine figure. Regarded as either the deity’s viceroy or a kind of god himself, he held absolute sway over the human realm. Heaven was God’s domain; the earth was his ([1936] Reference Buber and Scheimann1967, 86). What this meant practically was that human kings were thought to legitimately exercise coercive power. Even without divine sanction, they could fight battles, force labor, and punish criminals. No check existed on their authority. What God implies by approving the people’s request, for Buber, is therefore that Israel’s kings must be different. Though responsible for economics and war—capable, as Samuel warns the people, of “taking your fields” and “conscripting your sons”—they are to conduct state affairs mindful of the deity’s ultimate dominion (Samuel 8:14, 8:16). And while sharing the title of “king,” their role is to be more like that of a permanent judge: Instruments of divine will, aware that the power they wield is not their own. They are to be human kings, but in a theopolitical spirit.

Its uniqueness notwithstanding, this novel approach to kingship collapsed almost as soon as it began. And what it bequeathed to history was not a new model of human rule, but a world-historical rupture: the secularization of politics. In principle, the monarchy was meant to strengthen Israel’s theopolitical spirit. In practice, it rent a fissure in its lifeworld, dividing the political sphere from the religious.

Buber’s central example is Solomon. Fulfilling his father David’s pledge, Solomon builds a temple to God in Jerusalem and delivers an oration designed to recommit the people to divine law. But the address, while offering a stirring affirmation of monotheism—“He is God, there is no other”—is equally notable for what it leaves out: any reference to God as king (1 Kings, 8:60). And, as Buber notes, it also has a conspicuous way of referring to the divine–human relationship. Deuteronomy enjoins every person to “be whole with the Lord your God” (18:13). Solomon, by contrast, concludes his oration with subtly different appeal: “Let your heart be whole with the Lord our God” (1 Kings, 8:61). For Buber, this shift in emphasis—from the self in its undivided entirety to the heart alone—presages a broader psychological and institutional realignment: A movement away from the unity of all human domains under God’s rulership and toward a plurality of value spheres, the “religious” and “political” in particular.

Thus in a deeper sense, what Solomon’s oration reflects is the dissipation of the theopolitical spirit. “There already blows here,” Buber writes, “the air of a political life in which the ruach [spirit] of God no longer reigns…[and] a time when the temple-mount and the citadel-mount, religion and politics, are separated” ([1936] Reference Buber and Scheimann1967, 117). Before the monarchy, God rules as the “sole owner of all land” and the “sole sovereign of the community.” With its advent, God is demoted, reassigned as a feudal chieftain in charge of “spiritual” and “religious” affairs. Although the deity remains in liturgy the Lord, “creator of heaven and earth,” His sovereignty extends no further than Israel’s hearts. It stops short of its palaces and city gates: “There is here an acknowledgment of the Lord of the heavens and the Lord of the cult too, but there remains no place for God as the leader of the people, and indeed Solomon did not need this. The functions of the Lord are to be reduced so that they do not bind the king” ([1944] Reference Buber and Witton-Davies1960, 83). By doing this, Buber argues, Solomon awarded a victory to political theology and began the secularization of politics. But he also created an opening for the prophetic stance.

THE PROPHETIC STANCE

Israel’s prophets, according to Buber, voice the theopolitical spirit in the midst of profane politics. They stress the reality of God’s kingship and the inauthenticity of political theology. And they serve as gadflies to both king and populace, reminding the former that his power is not truly his own, and the latter that no human being is entitled to dominate another. Yet the advent of the prophetic stance, Buber emphasizes, represents less a fall from utopia than a response to unavoidable loss. And precisely because it is practiced under nonideal conditions, it offers what he believes to be a model for our own time: It keeps alive the “anarchic psychic foundation [anarchischer Seelengrund]” of theopolitics without insisting—dangerously and unfeasibly—on its direct realization.

The prophet’s fundamental teaching is the “undivided human life.” To bar the deity from any sphere of human activity, he proclaims, is wicked and idolatrous—a rebellion against God’s kingship ([1946] 1965, 199). And so his charge is to reverse this trend, to realize “the unity of religious and social life in the community of Israel,” and substantiate “a ruling by God that shall not be culturally restricted but shall comprehend the entire existence of the nation” (186). He attempts to reintegrate awareness of the Torah’s basic charge—to seek kindness, righteousness, and justice—into “the whole life, the whole civilization of people, economy, society, and state,” as well as the “whole individual, his emotions, and his will…his life at home and in the marketplace, in the temple and in the popular assembly” (1967, 195–6). What he asks for, in short, is not only wholeness of the heart but of the entire human being. “The prophets,” Buber writes, “never differentiate between the spiritual and the temporal, between the realm of God and the realm of man. For them, the realm of God is nothing more than the realm of man as it is to be” (119).

Yet in completing his task, the prophet confronts a formidable obstacle: The corrupting tendencies of kingship itself. In theory, the Israelite monarch’s power is not his own; his hands are tied by God’s law; and his person is demythologized, presented not as a demigod but a human being through and through. But once in power, he transgresses his limitations. With an army of soldiers dependent on his command, he forgets his dependence on God. Exercising the power to punish, he takes no notice of that power’s real origin. And although his arm, bearing a Torah scroll, is literally bound by divine statute, he experiences no penalty for overreaching.^{Footnote 27} Thus while paying lip-service to the invisible God, in truth he deifies himself, testing, overstepping, and ultimately annihilating the line separating him from the pagan kings. “The possessors of power and property,” Buber notes, “naturally resist the demand for the integral fulfillment of divine truth and justice; they therefore try to limit the service of God to the sacral sphere, and in all other spheres recognize his authority merely by words and symbols” (196).

The prophet's role vis-à-vis the king, therefore, is to continually affirm God's kingship, reject political theology, and so infuse the king himself with the theopolitical spirit. Having no power but his voice, no title but his name, and no claim to authority but his charisma, he must nonetheless face down the greatest power in the land. And while he cannot challenge the monarchy as such, he can remind the enthroned of where real kingship lies: “The Lord is the true vanguard, the true champion, the true leader, the true king. That is the nabi [prophetic] attitude” (Buber Reference Buber2000, 134). The prophet thus serves as a necessary foil to the monarch. A relentless gadfly to human power, he takes on the “commission of the Lord’s representative which is not fulfilled by the kings in Israel” ([1944] Reference Buber and Witton-Davies1960, 67, cf. Avnon Reference Avnon1998, 93).

In this sense, the prophet also epitomizes what Buber, in his writings on existentialism and ethical phenomenology, holds to be an inescapable truth of the human condition: A person chooses neither his hour, nor his society, nor his polity. He finds himself enmeshed in norms, economic structures, social dynamics, and political institutions that he did not create and cannot fully escape. Confronted with this reality, people often react in one of two ways. A first group embraces it. They celebrate the world as it is, exult in its facticity, and reconcile themselves to its ways and values. To paraphrase Hegel, they rejoice in the present, attuning their rationality to accommodate its governing rationality. A second group revolts against it. Finding their world a site of unpunished injustice and unchecked immorality, they turn their backs. To preserve the beauty of their souls, they retreat into anti-political quietism or thought’s internal exile.

Buber’s prophet takes a third path. “The prophets,” he writes “do not fight the state as state,” but the “state that lacks a divine, a spiritual element.” Because they are “faithful to the Jewish concept, they cannot deny the world as it exists, cannot turn away from it; they must endeavor to permeate it with spirit, the spirit of true community” (Reference Buber and Scheimann1967, 118–9). Recognizing the ineluctability of his hour, the prophet neither refuses nor embraces it. He takes stock of the world, scrutinizes its flaws, and measures its needs. Rejecting the inevitability of domination, he seeks to diminish it—on a real, objective, and structural level—in all his social roles. And he accepts it as a test and challenge—indeed a “higher form of challenge” than any possible under immediate divine rule (Reference Buber1964b, 735). He embodies the theopolitical spirit in a post-theopolitical age.

PROPHETS IN THE PRESENT

—Hebrew Bible, Book of Numbers (11:27–29)

This article has offered a new reading of Martin Buber’s political thought. Though Buber is not often read for his insights about politics, running through his oeuvre is an overlooked, original, and important critique of political theology. And though Buber was an unsystematic thinker, a close reading of his scriptural commentaries reveals that he found an alternative in the Hebrew Bible’s earliest political theory: the kingship of God—what he called “theopolitics.”

As originally conceived, theopolitics is principled and uncompromising. It teaches that no human being, at any time, in any sphere of activity, has the right to make another dependent on her will. Theopolitics’ history, however, teaches that this has been unworkable. It tells of a people who tried to sustain a radical egalitarianism, who cyclically fallowed their fields and freed their slaves, then backslid into idolatry, had stretches of real success, but ultimately failed, succumbing to egoistic defection, the craving for security, and the all-too-human need for a tangible semiotics of political power. It tells of both the promise and paradox of direct divine rule: The same voluntariness that guarantees its freedom also makes it uniquely fragile. It persists in practice only as long as it persists in its adherents’ minds. These were the circumstances, Buber argues, that gave rise to human kings. And ascending alongside them were the prophets. These individuals promulgated the theopolitical spirit while accepting its institutional impracticality; they refused as idolatrous any comparison of God and human sovereign while affirming the reality of worldly power. In concluding this article, I will argue that it is this prophetic stance, with certain modifications, that Buber believes we should adopt in our own time.

To be a prophet in the present requires living in deep moral tension. As a matter of normative principle we affirm that no person is entitled to make another person dependent on her will. But as a practical necessity, we accept such forms of power. Company managers need to assign work to their subordinates; military commanders need to order their soldiers; parents sometimes need to say “no” to their children. Our task is thus not to impose theopolitics. As Buber writes of Elijah, “he serves his God as a nomad, but he has no nomadic ideal” ([1944] Reference Buber and Witton-Davies1960, 80). Rather than overthrow the secular state with the modern equivalent of direct divine rule (anarchy), we criticize human authority in every sphere of activity. We provide a clear and steady voice for the theopolitical spirit, reminding persons and institutions alike that they have no inherent right to power and of the wrongfulness of domination. We censure and chasten, rebuke and reprimand. This, Buber insists, is the “nabi [prophetic] attitude—with or without the application of the term” (Reference Buber and Glatzer2000, 134).

Of course, this is by no means the extent of Buber’s political program. He writes, for example, about how the state’s role can be gradually scaled back to make room for more organic and spontaneous forms of social organization, like the kibbutz ([1949] Reference Buber and Hull1958, 104, cf. 40).^{Footnote 28} He deeply opposes all forms of imperialism, xenophobia, and “hypertrophic” nationalism ([1921] Reference Buber and Mendes-Flohr1983, cf. Gordon Reference Feller2008). Moreover, he acknowledges that there are important differences between the Biblical age and our own. Israel’s prophets had to contend with kings who, in their vast dominion, were always in danger of succumbing to self-deification. People in our time must vie not only with Schmittian “total states” but with far more depersonalized hierarchies: the market’s “immutable laws,” bureaucracy’s rationalizing forces, and the fetters of inequality. As Buber writes, in a veiled reference to Weber, such “dogmas of gradual process” imply that exploitation today is as immutable as in pre-modernity ([1923] Reference Buber and Smith1958, 57). They leave no room for the belief that domination can be diminished.

Yet despite these differences, Buber argues that our responsibility today is essentially the same: To voice the theopolitical spirit in a society that always risks burying it beneath layers of dependence; to reject political theologies of all stripes; and to reinforce the belief that every human being “is placed in freedom, and that every hour in which he, in his current situation, feels himself addressed is an hour of genuine decision” (Reference Buber and Glatzer1967, 219). Thus while we may superficially sustain the distinction between value spheres, deep down we breathe the theopolitical spirit. “No factory and no office is so abandoned by creation,” Buber writes, that it is insulated from the possibility of a “sober and brotherly glance,” from an awareness of “faces and names and biographies,” from the treatment of each individual not as a “number with a human mask but as a person” ([1929] Reference Buber and Friedman1957, 37–8). And as foils, not to kings, but to naturalizations of all kinds, we constantly reaffirm the basic theopolitical message: That interpersonal exploitation is not a necessity, but a choice; that true freedom is not lordship over others, but mutual non-domination; and that “destiny is not a dome pressed tightly down on the world of men,” but lives shared together in genuine solidarity ([1923] Reference Buber and Smith1958, 57).

In this way, Buber also gives us a vantage to question contemporary applications of political theology more broadly. When theorists today invoke theological ideas, it is almost never to support Schmitt’s state theory but rather to advance emancipatory and egalitarian aims antithetical to his politics (Agamben [2011] Reference Agamben2013; Badiou Reference Badiou2003; Raschke Reference Pianko2015; Reinhard , Santner, and Zižek Reference Reinhard, Santner and Žižek2005; Robbins Reference Raschke2011; Santner Reference Reinhard, Santner and Žižek2011). Indeed it is precisely the promise of harnessing the power of religious rhetoric without its accompanying metaphysical commitments that has made political theology attractive to a wide range of postmodern thinkers grasping for new sources of normativity. Buber, seemingly, would be sympathetic to these efforts. But as should now be plain, his project differs from them at its core. Adopting the mode of political theology entails theorizing analogically from religion, assigning theological concepts to tasks traditionally reserved for moral and political ones: The sovereign’s power becomes like God’s power (Schmitt [1922] Reference Scheuerman2005); the state’s “general will” becomes like the deity’s “general will” (Rousseau [1762] Reference Ratzabi2010); the American people’s presence in politics becomes like the divine presence “hovering” over the universe (de Tocqueville [1835] Reference de Tocqueville2000, 1.1.4). Yet what Buber learned from both Hebrew scripture and recent history is that we are not gods. We are creatures in flesh and blood. And neither freedom from domination nor solidarity with others can be achieved by feigning divinity. Thus instead of using theological language to support preconceived ideas, Buber looks to the Hebrew Bible to ground his normative views. His concept of theopolitics arises from ethically attentive exegesis, not philosophical rumination. It reflects an enduring lesson of Israel’s nomadic ethos: That our hope, in the end, lies not with the philosopher’s pen or the sovereign’s sword, but in the hard, daily task of ethical life. Political theory may help to guide these labors; only we can work for their success.

In an early essay on Hasidism, Buber observes that despite the movement’s association with mysticism, this “magical element” was in truth peripheral. Like Israel’s prophets, its “old/new principle” was primarily practical: The absence of God’s presence did not entail the end of God’s meaning (Reference Buber and Hort1946, 70). Hasidism recognized that we can no longer rely on miracles for salvation. We must take responsibility for our own destiny.^{Footnote 29} And yet what Hasidism also perceived is that our destiny in an important sense is God’s destiny. “You think I am far away from you,” says the Hasidic deity, in Buber’s words, “but in your love for your neighbor you will find Me” (Reference Buber and Scheimann1967, 212). When we live the spirit of theopolitics in all our relationships, we effectively restore a condition of divine sovereignty (1946, 70). We drain our social relations of coercion. We realize God’s purpose without God’s presence. And this, for Buber, is ultimately the point.