Francesco Ferrari

CV & List of Publications

“Martin Buber’s Conception of the Kibbutz: Communitarian Experiment or Theopolitical Utopia?” (BCK)

My research project is titled “Martin Buber’s Conception of the Kibbutz: Communitarian Experiment or Theopolitical Utopia?” (BCK).  BCK aims to develop a scholarly study of Buber’s peculiar conception of the Kibbutz in dialogue with the most recent state of the art, which attests to a renewed attention devoted to his socio-political philosophy. To achieve its goal, BCK will investigate two lines of thought within Buber’s writings dating back to a dense 30-year period from the Balfour Declaration (November 1917) to the Declaration of Independence of the State of Israel (May 1948): (1) The idea of community in Buber’s socio-political philosophy; (2) Buber’s notion of theopolitics, also fundamental in his thought.

BCK will assess the relevance of the Kibbutz in Buber’s thought, which both of these new lines of research, however promising and significant, have somewhat overlooked.  Its specific research hypothesis is that the Kibbutz constitutes a peculiar mutual interaction of religion and urbanity, a holistic communitarian settlement, characterized by the unity of production, consumption, and residence, whose members are strongly motivated in their agency from their religious identity. BCK will thematize the mutual interaction of religion and urbanity in Buber’s interpretation of the Kibbutz, referring to key terms of his socio-political philosophy such as: reciprocity, solidarity, cooperation, self-determination, free association, federalism, decentralization, anarchy, utopia and theopolitics. In this regard, BCK will particularly focus on: (1) Buber’s militancy between 1919 and 1921 within Hapoel Hatzair, a socialist-inspired Zionist party founded by Aaron David Gordon in 1905, which soon became a central reference for many pioneers of the Second and Third Aaliyah. (2) Buber’s membership in the pacifist association Brit Shalom, which he joined as early as 1925,and which became a key interlocutor for those Jews who placed at the center of their political agenda the construction of a binational, democratic Jewish-Arab state aiming at just relations between the two peoples as equal partners.

BCK will test its hypothesis by making use of a multiple research methodology: (1) BCK will carry out a rigorous textual analysis of Buber's socio-political writings on the Kibbutz, placing them in dialogue with his conception of community and theopolitics. (2) BCK will contextualize these writings in German-Jewish and Jewish-Arab cultural history spanning from 1917 to 1948. (3) BCK will then analyze Buber’s conception of the Kibbutz by enhancing the “interdependencies between urbanisation processes and religious change” (Rüpke, Rau 2020), with reference to the hermeneutical paradigm that lies at the core of the KFG “Religion and Urbanity: Mutual Formations” (FOR 2779) at the Max-Weber-Kolleg (University of Erfurt).

More specifically, BCK will present the extent to which during World War I Buber’s socio-political thought undergoes a paradigm shift, moving from the leading idea of a “cultural Zionism” to that of a “religious Zionism”, which has its place of realization in the nexus of religion and urbanity embodied by the Kibbutz. BCK will assess how this goes hand in hand with: (1) The advent of Buber’s dialogical principle, through the articulation of the “a priori of relation”. (2) Buber’s critical stance toward the European nation-state and its degeneration into nationalism. (3) Buber’s plea for a community, he profiled as an alternative to the centralized power of the state and to the atomized individualism of the society.