Alan Mittleman Responds:

I appreciate the close reading and constructive criticism that Hanoch Ben Pazi and Nicham Ross have given to my article. It is entirely appropriate to point out, as they have done, that the thinkers with whom I dealt are more nuanced and complex than I was able to capture in my somewhat typological treatment. My aim was not to provide detailed, scholarly studies of each of these canonical modern Jewish thinkers but to focus on their specific constructions of the concept of hope, especially in reference to politics.

The article was drawn from my now published book, Hope in a Democratic Age (Oxford, 2009). Part of the rather schematic presentation of these thinkers comes from the structure I employed in my book. I paired each Jewish thinker with a Christian thinker who exemplified the same ideal-typical tendency. Rosenzweig was paired with the American Protestant theologian Stanley Hauerwas; Buber with the German Protestant theologian Jürgen Moltmann; and Cohen with the founder of the Social Gospel, Walter Rauschenbusch.

Rosenzweig’s view, which Ross correctly notes, is that politics, albeit left to Christianity, remains necessary and valuable. Hauerwas roundly denounces this view. Hauerwas saw politics as an utterly fallen practice, the temptations of which Christianity must resist and renounce. There can be no Christian politics or (contra Reinhold Niebuhr) Christian political ethics. Hauerwas’ view seemed to me remarkably like Rosenzweig’s vis-à-vis the Jews. Considered jointly, these thinkers typified for me a striking mistrust of and disdain toward politics based on religious principle. That each one is more nuanced and dialectical than the contours of my typological portrait suggest, I do not deny. Nonetheless, I would still maintain that, for the Rosenzweig of The Star of Redemption at least, the nations are struggling to attain what the Jews have already achieved. Politics will be shed once the Christians reach the self-sufficiency and perfection of the Jews. Politics is a transient, inferior mode of being.

As to Buber, I meant by “realism” something slightly different from the current usage of the term in political discourse. Once again, the original setting of these studies in my book gave context to this language. I had in mind Reinhold Niebuhr’s concept of a “Christian realism,” a dialectical valuation of politics within a Christian ethics. The current usage of “realism” in foreign policy as a pure appraisal of national interest without moral entanglements is not what Niebuhr meant, although his use of the term does gesture in that direction. (He meant to free the political necessities of “immoral society” from the ethical imperatives of “moral man.”) It seemed to me—it still seems to me—that this sense of realism describes Buber’s approach quite well. (In my book, I attempted to show Buber’s likeness to Niebuhr despite Niebuhr’s own claim that Buber was an overly utopian idealist. Ross has a powerful ally in Niebuhr!) In any case, the advantage of all of these thinkers is that they address the question of hope and politics directly. To the extent that we want to think deeply about this question, these thinkers, Jewish and Christian, provide valuable points of reference.

I am grateful to Ben Pazi for his reflections, particularly for his deepening of the treatment of Cohen and his inclusion of Levinas, a thinker whom I did not consider. Perhaps my “robust sense of reality,” to use Bertrand Russell’s term, restrains my appreciation of Cohen. I do not think that politics can be infused by or subsumed under ethics. I think that a moral pluralism exists, rather like Weber described, which prevents “political ethics” from eliding into ethics per se. How deep this pluralism goes or ought to go is an important question. I think that hope should be scaled to a realistic grasp of the possibilities of coordinated human action. There are circumstances when hope, at least hope for politics, is foolish. I’m not sure that Cohen could make such a claim.