  Buber conceived of political community as a type of plastic shape, an object (or subject) of Gestaltung and hence realization. Just as he had enlivened Kant’s distinction between phenomenon and noumenon with his literary imagination, so too he transformed the value-theoretical distinction between Gesellschaft (society) and Gemeinschaft (community), types of social aggregation theorized by Ferdinand Tönnies, into a wellspring for his political speeches and writings. The first arena for his social, psychological, and educational engagement was the Zionist movement. Buber’s social philosophy was stimulated and decisively influenced by his close friend, the anarchist Gustav Landauer, whom he recruited to write the volume on revolution for his series Die Gesellschaft. As a pioneer of social thought and a student of Georg Simmel, Buber participated in the 1909 founding conference of the German sociological association. Buber’s social-psychological approach to the study and description of social phenomena and his interest in the constitutive correlation between the individual and his and her social experience remained important aspects of his philosophy of dialogue. It came to the fore again in his last academic position at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where he taught social philosophy (prominent students: Amitai Etzioni, Shmuel Eisenstadt).