Buber’s Theopolitics as an Act of Resistance

This study claims that only by revisiting Buber’s entire oeuvre does one fully grasp his position on the relation between politics, religion, and ethics. I argue that Buber’s writings in the thirties are an act of resistance against national socialism and that his consistent political resistance before, in, and after this period appears in many of his writings. Buber was as a political thinker, not only in his exegesis, but also in his dialogical philosophy, in his view on Judaism and Zionism, in his translation project with Rosenzweig, and in his creative reinterpretation of Hasidism. Rereading these interrelated writings allows us to rediscover Buber as a political thinker whose humanist and social concept of religion allowed him to resist a politics disconnected from a dialogical ethics.