Between Prophecy and Apocalypse: Buber, Benjamin, and Socialist Eschatology

• Published date: 01 June 2021
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591720939044
• Date: 01 June 2021
• Author: Asher Wycoff
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591720939044

Political Theory

2021, Vol. 49(3) 354 –379

© The Author(s) 2020

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DOI: 10.1177/0090591720939044

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Article

Between Prophecy and

Apocalypse: Buber,

Benjamin, and Socialist

Eschatology

Asher Wycoff1

Abstract

Martin Buber’s political thought has enjoyed renewed attention lately,

particularly his concept of “theopolitics,” a type of political practice that

recognizes God as the ultimate political authority. In Buber’s biblical

exegesis, theopolitics is a condition of everyday life in premonarchical Israel,

but following the installation of the monarchy, it becomes a specialized

activity of prophets, consisting chiefly in divinely commanded intercession

against state actions. Buber suggests that a version of this prophetic activity

is manifest in present-day socialist cooperatives, especially the kibbutzim.

Indeed, for Buber, these cooperatives can be seen as laying the groundwork

for messianic redemption. This essay probes some potentially troubling

implications of Buber’s theopolitical framework, taking objections raised in

Walter Benjamin’s correspondence as an entry point. A central concern for

Benjamin is Buber’s nationalist articulation of Jewish identity, which appears

all the more problematic when considered in tandem with the teleological

view of history evident in Buber’s framework.

Keywords

eschatology, Martin Buber, messianism, political theology, socialism, Walter

Benjamin

1Department of Political Science, The Graduate Center, CUNY, New York, NY, USA

Corresponding Author:

Asher Wycoff, Department of Political Science, The Graduate Center, CUNY, 365 Fifth

Avenue, Ste. 5202, New York, NY 10016, USA.

Email: awycoff@gradcenter.cuny.edu

939044PTXXXX10.1177/0090591720939044Political TheoryWyco

research-article2020

Wycoff 355

In his postwar treatise on socialism, Paths in Utopia, Martin Buber posits a

provocative dichotomy. All socialist movements, he writes, can be categorized

under one of “two basic forms of eschatology”: the “prophetic” or the “apoca-

lyptic.”1 Prophecy is the province of utopian socialists, whose efforts at social

renewal take the form of voluntary communities, and who thus privilege

human agency in the redemption of the world. Apocalypse, meanwhile, is the

province of Marxist socialism, a doctrine of grand historical tendencies, the

reality of which is revealed to preordained revolutionary agents at decisive

moments. Buber’s prophecy–apocalypse distinction refracts Engels’s distinc-

tion between utopian and scientific socialisms through a theological lens,

inverting the value judgment to favor the former over the latter. If “prophetic”

socialist projects often fail, at least their failures are less catastrophic and their

achievements less ambiguous than those of “apocalyptic” socialism. In the

epilogue to Paths, Buber locates the best hope for “an experiment that [will]

not fail” in the kibbutzim. The postwar choice for socialists, he concludes, is

not between Washington and Moscow, but between Moscow and Jerusalem.2

Buber’s political thought has attracted renewed attention in the past

decade, as many find in his “theopolitics” a radical corrective to the poten-

tially reactionary formulations of “political theology.”3 Particularly attractive

in this reading is Buber’s “prophetic” emphasis on human agency and atten-

dant libertarian impulse toward voluntary cooperation. While Buber presents

his socialist theopolitics as a form of eschatology, he is neither a “reaction-

ary” who wants to return to a prelapsarian state4 nor a dogmatic revolutionary

bent on curing all the world’s ills in one stroke.5 His “prophetic” utopian

socialism achieves its ends through voluntary association and nondomination

rather than revolutionary terror. From a present-day vantage point, three

decades after the end of the Cold War, this type of voluntary, decentralist

socialism can appear quite attractive.

Some of Buber’s contemporaries did not share this appreciation. Walter

Benjamin, for instance, greatly disliked Buber’s politics, a disposition he ini-

tially held on the basis of Buber’s support for Germany in World War I and

that would only deepen over the next two decades. In his personal correspon-

dence, Benjamin proclaims an “insurmountable mistrust” of Buber, which he

attributes to Buber’s ostensible capitulations to nationalism and appropria-

tions of racial terminology.6 Absent attention to this private animosity, the gulf

between Benjamin and Buber could understandably be missed. Although the

two authors’ methods and writing styles differ unmistakably, if one takes them

independently as theological-political authors, it is clear they overlap in theo-

retical priorities and influences. Both Buber and Benjamin develop sophisti-

cated theologies of history informed by eclectic syntheses of socialist, German

romantic, and Jewish messianic concepts, and both share a commitment to