Book, Redemption and utopia: libertarian Judaism in Central Europe[LS]

Radical and libertarian thinkers, having in common the heritage of Judaism, on the one hand, and the cultural insertion tempered by the romanticism of the time, experienced the failure of democracy and the rise of Nazi-fascism, a process that plunged civilization into an unnameable nightmare, releasing a repressive and genocidal rage that was already considered impossible to happen. The creative power of these men – Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, Gershom Scholem, Leo Löwenthal, Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Gustav Landauer, Ernst Bloch, György Lukács, Erich Fromm, Hans Kohn – redefined the conception of history and engendered a new perception of time. Michael Löwy, himself a radical and internationally recognized thinker, offers us this melting pot of ideas based on the particularities of those times, pointing to the present and the futures that we can or cannot build. In his theses On the Concept of History, Benjamin demanded that history be written from the point of view of the defeated. This essay is an attempt to apply this method. It is precisely because they are defeated, marginals against the current of their time, obstinate romantics and incurable utopians, that their work becomes increasingly current, increasingly full of meaning. Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, Gershom Scholem, Leo Löwenthal, Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Gustav Landauer, Ernst Bloch, György Lukács, Erich Fromm, Hans Kohn… The thinkers whose “elective affinities” this Redemption and Utopia seeks to outline were children of society and Jewish culture flourishing in German-speaking Central Europe. They witnessed the failure of democracy and saw the seizure of power by Nazi fascism as the end of a world. The civilization that had generated them had betrayed itself and succumbed to the assault of the forces of discrimination and the most brutal repression. Energized by the poles of redemption (coming from the Jewish tradition of which they were heirs) and utopia (via romanticism in which they were culturally inserted), they gave birth to both a new conception of history and “a new perception of temporality, in rupture with evolutionism and the philosophy of progress”. It is from this angle that Michael Löwy reconstitutes this peculiar cultural universe and places before us once again these modern prophets and their works that, overcoming time, warn us of the dangers ahead.