  In Paths in Utopia (1947), Buber was to plot the “image of perfect space” as one composed of lines that allow no fixed definition, the zone between the individual and collective constantly recalibrated according to the free creativity of its members. “The relationship between centralism and decentralization is a problem which…cannot be approached in principle, but…only with great spiritual tact, with the constant and tireless weighing and measuring of the right proportion between them.” A “social pattern,” utopia was based on a constant “drawing and re-drawing of lines of demarcation” (Paths in Utopia, 1996, p. 137). An “experiment that did not fail,” the Jewish village communes in Palestine (i.e. the kvutza, kibbutz, and moshav) owed their success to the pragmatism with which their members approached the historical situation, to their inclination towards increased levels of federation, and to the degree to which they established a relationship to the society at large. Single units combine into a system or “series of units” without the centralization of state authority (ibid., 142–8). “Nowhere…in the history of the Socialist movement were men so deeply involved in the process of differentiation and yet so intent on preserving the principle of integration” (ibid., 145). They discovered “[t]he right proportion, tested anew every day according to changing conditions, between group-freedom and collective order” (ibid., 148). It is not difficult to recognize in this description of the modern Jewish agricultural collective an updated version of the biblical tribal past that Buber idealized in his work on the primitive Israelite polity of the age of the biblical judges.