Carl Schmitt and Martin Buber on the 'realization' of political form

This article discusses the Austrian-Jewish philosopher Martin Buber’s theopolitical challenge to the German jurist Carl Schmitt’s political theology of sovereignty, an until recently largely overlooked contribution to the long array of 20thcentury critical engagements with the Schmittean secularization theorem. Departing from Schmitt’s own distinction between formative spirit and substantive form, offered in his early writings on the Roman Catholic Church as political form, this article argues that Buber’s critical engagement with Schmitt’s political doctrine of sin simultaneously reveals the unorthodoxy of the latter’s theological analysis, as it provides a more fruitful way to bring a theologically informed reflection on human nature into dialogue with political thought. It concludes by suggesting that Buber’s theopolitical vision of the self-forming community allow us to imagine human association beyond the narrow confines of theories of state sovereignty.