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doi:10.1017/S0003055418000680

Theopolitics Contra Political Theology: Martin Buber’s Biblical Critique of Carl Schmitt CHARLES H. T. LESCH

Vanderbilt University

his article recovers Martin Buber’s important but neglected critique of Carl Schmitt’s political theology. Because Buber is known primarily as an ethicist and scholar of Judaism, his attack on Schmitt has been largely overlooked. Yet as I reveal through a close reading of his Biblical commentaries, a concern about the dangers of political theology threads through decades of his work. Divine sovereignty, Buber argues, is absolute and inimitable; no human ruler can claim the legitimate power reserved to God. Buber’s response is to uncover what he sees as Judaism’s earliest political theory: a “theopolitics,” where human beings, mutually subject to divine kingship, practice non-domination. But Buber, I show, did not seek to directly revive this religious vision. Instead, he sought to incorporate the spirit of theopolitics, as embodied by Israel’s prophets, into modern society. The result is a new and signiﬁcant perspective on liberal democracy and political theology.

“Underneath the new forms of living of the people-becomesettled, which plants ﬁg trees, lays out vineyards, builds towns, and learns to treasure the value of guaranteed security, there persists the old, nomadicizing resistance against the dependency of an autocratic man and his clan.”

—Martin Buber, Kingship of God ([1936] 1967, 161)

“It says (Exodus 32:16): ‘And the tablets were the work of God, and the writing was God’s writing, engraved on the tablets’; read not ‘engraved’ [harut] but ‘freedom’ [heirut].”

—Pirkei Avot [Ethics of the Fathers] (6.2)1

olitical theology—the study of how theological ideas intersect with politics, law, ethics, and economics—has taken on new urgency. For centuries, it was expected that the Enlightenment’s secularizing processes would disenchant nature, rationalize society, and privatize the “sacred.” Yet “public religions” (Casanova 1994) continue to sway world affairs. The Western model of pluralism, toleration, and human rights faces growing pressure from movements with mythological and religious undercurrents (Galston 2018; Müller 2016). States and extremist groups justify heinous acts of violence by recourse to theological doctrines and apocalyptic expectations (McQueen 2018). And within liberal

Charles H. T. Lesch, Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of Political Theory, Vanderbilt University, charles.lesch@vanderbilt. edu. Versions of this article were presented at the annual meetings of the American Political Science Association, the Association for Jewish Studies, and the Association for Israel Studies. I am grateful to the participants in these events for their questions and critiques, and would like to extend special thanks to Nancy Rosenblum, Peter Gordon, Michael Rosen, Michael Sandel, Aspen Elizabeth Brinton, Alexander Lewis Kaye, Steven Klein, and Shaul Magid for their comments. Finally, I owe a signiﬁcant debt of gratitude to Leigh Jenco and three anonymous APSR reviewers for their invaluable insights and guidance. Received: January 9, 2018; revised: March 23, 2018; accepted: August 21, 2018. 1

All Hebrew translations in this article, aside from Buber’s, are my own.

democracies, significant questions have arisen over the place of religious discourse in the public sphere (Audi 2011; Eberle 2002; March 2009; Rawls [1999] 2002; Smith 2010; Stout 2004; Weithman 2006) and the feasibility of building social solidarity on purely secular and rational foundations (Habermas [2005] 2008; Lesch 2018, forthcoming). One way theorists have responded to these challenges is by turning to political theology’s most prominent, and controversial, exponent: Carl Schmitt. “All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state,” Schmitt famously wrote, “are secularized theological concepts, not only because of their historical development…but also because of their systematic structure” ([1922] 2005, 36). From its inception, Schmitt’s theory was highly influential both within and beyond the Weimar intellectual scene.2 Thinkers as diverse as Walter Benjamin, Leo Strauss, Hans Blumenberg, Jacob Taubes, and Jacques Derrida engaged with his ideas. And today his thought remains influential for a host of social, legal, and normative theorists (Agamben [2003] 2005; Böckenförde 1976; de Vries 2002; Esposito [2013] 2015; Kahn 2012; Kalyvas 2008; Lefort 2006; Mouffe 2000; Posner and Vermeule 2010; Reinhard et al. 2005; Santner 2011). Yet basic questions about political theology remain unanswered. Is Schmitt right that apparently secular political ideas and institutions are deeply entwined with religion? If so, what is the nature of this entanglement? And even if we reject Schmitt’s controversial political theory—a state overseen by a quasi-divine sovereign and bound together by a solidarity of us versus them—might there still be something troubling about his method of conceptualizing political ideas via theological ones? In this article, I offer one way of answering these questions by recovering an important but overlooked critique from one of political theology’s earliest opponents: Martin Buber. Buber is almost never read for his political theory, with most interpreters focusing instead on his ethics of “I” and “Thou” and pioneering work on 2 For studies of this influence, see Balakrishnan (2000), Dyzenhaus (1997), Kennedy (2004), McCormick (1997), Müller (2003), and Scheuerman (1999).