Socialism With Freedom
Paths in Utopia.
by Martin Buber. and R. F. C. Hull.
Macmillan. 152 pp. $3.00.

Martin Buber is professor of social philosophy at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, but we have so far had very little of his writing on social questions available in English. This book, which was completed in the spring of 1945 and appeared in Hebrew in the following year, now enables the English reader to form a much clearer and fuller conception of Buber’s social outlook than has hitherto been possible from the fragmentary suggestions contained in his religious and philosophical works. It should receive careful study, for it is an important contribution to that re-examination of the meaning of socialism which has been so important a concern in recent years.

In form, this is a historical study of the “utopian” and “scientific” elements in socialism during the past century and a half, from Saint-Simon to the contemporary Palestinian kibbutz. But it is not the least interesting aspect of Buber’s thesis that he shows how misleading these catchwords can be. Marxian socialism, with its vision of the withering away of the state and the establishment of the perfect society in history, is certainly strongly charged with utopianism, while the socialism conventionally called Utopian is seen to contain elements, which, Buber insists, are as un-utopian and realistic as anything social philosophy has to show. His rehabilitation of such “utopians” as Proudhon and Landauer is really impressive, and seems to fall in with a contemporary trend, as evidenced by Henri de Lubac’s Proudhon: The Un-Marxian Socialist.

But the basic purpose of this book, as Buber himself suggests, is not historical. It is to establish the true meaning of the socialist idea and to free it from the distortions and corruptions it has undergone in the past century. This “true” idea of socialism Buber expounds with passionate conviction. Socialism is the “structural renewal” of society through the development of a network of communities, united in free federation. “The socialist idea points of necessity to the organic construction of a new society out of little societies inwardly bound together by a common life and common work, and their associations.” This type of social reconstruction need not wait for a political revolution or even for large-scale change in economic institutions; indeed, unless the inner effort to “renew society through the renewal of its cell-tissue” has already done its work, economic and political revolutions will do little more than change the façade, leaving the structure itself untouched. Buber takes seriously the Marxian idea—of which Marx himself made but little practical use—that the purpose of revolution is to release “the elements of the new society which have already developed in the womb of the old”; these elements, he insists, are not the big trusts and gigantic factories, not even primarily the workers’ organizations and trade unions, but community settlements for collective production and living, such as now play an important part in the economy of the State of Israel. This is the only way to build up a “genuine society,” he affirms; that is, a society composed not of isolated, atomized individuals in subjection to the state, but a communitas communitatum, a society that is really a federation of free associations, each concerned to build life on the basis of free community. “An organic commonwealth will never build itself out of individuals, but only out of small and ever smaller communities: a nation is a community to the degree that it is a community of communities.” The great enemy of “genuine society” is centralism and authoritarian regimentation, particularly as expressed in the state. “The essential point,” Buber concludes in his very last paragraph, “is to decide on the fundamentals: a restructuring of society as a league of leagues, and a reduction of the State to its proper function, which is to maintain unity; or the devouring of an amorphous society by the omnipotent State: 289 Socialist Pluralism or so-called Socialist Unitarianism.”

With this concept as a criterion, Buber undertakes to examine the socialist tradition in its various forms. What he says about the “utopians” is very suggestive and his criticism of Marxism is both fair and acute. (His comments on the Soviet “experiment,” however, are quite inadequate; he is so taken up with the details of the shifts of Bolshevik attitude in the early years that he hardly hints at the horrible reality of the Soviet slave state of today.) But what I find most rewarding is his acute analysis of the cooperative movement. “The heart and soul of the cooperative movement,” he believes, “is to be found in the trend of society towards structural renewal,” though it is only the “full cooperative, based on the union of production and consumption,” that seems to him to have any enduring role.

The book concludes with an epilogue on “An Experiment That Did Not Fail.” “There is only one all-out effort to create a full cooperative which justifies our speaking of success in the socialist sense,” he says, “and that is the Jewish Village Commune in its various forms, as found in Palestine.” But even this judgment he qualifies a few pages later by changing the term “success” to “non-failure,” for the outcome of the experiment is by no means clear and he already sees great dangers threatening it. This chapter, despite its brevity and occasional vagueness, is one of the most interesting in the book.

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It is clear that in his warnings against the totalitarian pretensions of the state, Buber is in accord with the pluralistic emphasis in recent socialist thought, while his insistence on the free community as the “cell” of a “genuine society” brings him close to the “communitarian” ideas that play so important a part in Catholic social radicalism. I certainly go along with his conception of the good society as one rich in internal structure, a society made up of societies based on voluntary cooperation. I think, too, that he makes a good case for the potentialities of this idea in a country like Palestine, where a new social structure had to be built from the bottom up. But what I do not see is how this idea—the idea of an “organic restructuring” of society through free association and federation—can become operative in a country like the United States, which already has a vast economic structure at various stages of monopoly and social control. The big problem that confronts the realistic socialist in America today is how to bring community and community interest into such areas as the steel, aluminum, coal, and automobile industries. Are we to abjure institutional reform until we have built up viable “full cooperatives” in these fields, and indeed can the latter be built in such large-scale mass-production enterprises? Until the relevance of “structural renewal” to our situation, which is not untypical of the situation in the Western world, is made clear, we will not be in a position fully to assess the value and significance of the idea.

Criticism might be directed also against Buber’s too easy assumption that free cooperation is readily available in social life. Buber is not an anarchist; he does not propose to “abolish” the state. Indeed, he recognizes that “in all probability, there will never—so long as man is what he is—be freedom pure and simple, and there will be State, i.e., compulsion, for just so long.” But he seems to think of state compulsion as merely a peripheral and external force, necessary to “maintain unity.” He does not, so far as I can judge from this book, seem to appreciate the tragic necessity of some degree of coercion, open or disguised, in almost every human enterprise, if justice is to be maintained and the disruptive forces of individual and collective egoism are to be effectively curbed.

I think also that Buber does not adequately bring out the distinction between Marx’s “eschatological utopianism” and the very different utopianism of the “utopian” socialists. “The vision of lightness in revelation,” he says, “is realized in the picture of a perfect time—as messianic eschatology; the vision of lightness in the ideal is realized in the picture of a perfect space—as Utopia. . . . Eschatology, insofar as it is prophetic; Utopia, insofar as it is philosophical, both have the character of realism.” But this seems to me to overlook precisely the vast difference between time and space. Eschatology—in time—implies a creative, dynamic movement towards an “end” that is both completion and fulfillment; Utopia—in space—is static, “idealistic,” and visionary in the bad sense. In fact, Marx’s secularization of the eschatological vision of Hebraic religion may be conceived as a partial conversion of eschatology into Utopia, for when, in an eschatology, the “end of time” is made a point in time (history), time is annulled and transformed into space, and Utopia results. But the eschatological dynamic is not entirely lost and that is why, despite all the horrible perversions of Marxism in contemporary history, Marx remains “ambassador of the Lord of History,” as Hermann Cohen once called him, in a sense in which no “utopian” can ever be.

These criticisms, however, are altogether secondary; they do not touch the heart of the work, which is a passionate vindication of the idea of socialism as freedom. Here I have no criticism, only appreciation and gratitude. In the spiritual struggle against the totalitarian idea—an idea which is not simply identical with Soviet Communism but has its roots in our own social reality as well—this brief book of Buber’s oífers great resources of illumination and power.

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