  Buber honed his political theology in response to the conflict between fascism and communism, the two main ideologies dominating mid-twentieth century Europe. His national-utopian thought shared traits with both of these extreme positions and made him, in fact, one of the few Jewish personages “acceptable” as a partner for debate with moderate National Socialists in the early 1930s, a proximity he himself vigorously dismissed as a misperception. His political position remained indissolubly linked to his philosophical-theological commitment to the life of dialogue developed in I and Thou. According to Buber, politics was the work by which a society shapes itself. He rejected any hardened ideological formations of “the collective” and thus objected to the solutions articulated on either political extreme. He understood these to recognize neither an I nor a Thou in social life. Buber particularly opposed the notion that the political sphere rested on the friend/enemy distinction, as theorized by the ultra-conservative jurist Carl Schmitt. Buber’s political ideal, “a-cephalic” and utopian as it was, was derived from his reconstruction of the ancient Israelite polity as reflected in the Book of Judges. Conversely, it has been argued, his reading of Judges was inspired by the anarchism of Landauer. (See Brody (2018))