Paths in Utopia

Martin Buber Library

by Martin Buber, R.F.C. Hull (Translator)

"A summary and scholarly study of humanity's search for the perfect social structure". -- The Christian Science Monitor

Genres: Philosophy, Utopia, Nonfiction, History, Classics, Politics

Hardcover

First published June 1, 1958

About the author

Martin Buber was an Austrian-born Jewish philosopher best known for his philosophy of dialogue, a religious existentialism centered on the distinction between the I-Thou relationship and the I-It relationship.

Buber came from a family of observant Jews, but broke with Jewish custom to pursue secular studies in philosophy. In 1902, Buber became the editor of the weekly Die Welt, the central organ of the Zionist movement, although he later withdrew from organizational work in Zionism. In 1923 Buber wrote his famous essay on existence, Ich und Du (later translated into English as I and Thou), and in 1925 he began translating the Hebrew Bible into the German language.

In 1930 Buber became an honorary professor at the University of Frankfurt am Main, and resigned in protest from his professorship immediately after Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933. He then founded the Central Office for Jewish Adult Education, which became an increasingly important body as the German government forbade Jews to attend public education. In 1938, Buber left Germany and settled in Jerusalem, in the British Mandate of Palestine, receiving a professorship at Hebrew University and lecturing in anthropology and introductory sociology.

Reviews

[Marc · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overview of the classical utopian thinkers. Extremely fascinating, still inspiring!

[David Carver · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book offers a passionate intellectual history of the "utopian" ideal that presented itself in socialist thought at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and which continued to develop alongside (more, in spite of) later developments in socialism that ultimately came to greatest notoriety in Lenin's Russian experiment. As a summation of an underrepresented set of beliefs and thinkers, this book deserves a place on any thinking person's bookshelf; as a guide to what freedom, kinship, industry, or town life really look like in a utopian socialism, it never fails to frustrate the reader, on the one hand by diverting into the theoretical aspects of Proudhon, Kropotkin, and Landauer without any reference to how their thought might look in practice, and on the other by laying out historical examples, texts, or institutions with the assumption that the reader will be familiar with all of them -- this latter most infuriating in the last chapter, when, in the course of explaining the experiment that has "not failed," the Jewish Kvuza in Palestine, Buber strays between vagueness and technicality without giving a picture of how these communities operated on the day-to-day, common, personal level. For a primer on a more human, connected socialism, this book feels strangely inhuman, falling into an abyss either of idealism (good, but inadequate) or bureaucratic cataloging. I enjoyed this book, but was disappointed.

[Danilo Lipisk · Rating 3 out of 5]

The writing of the book is boring. Buber certainly did not write this book to be read by the masses. Socialist intellectuals will probably delight in the analyzes of various thinkers that Buber offered in this short book.

For a layman like me who knows little about the works presented in this book, I will probably forget everything I read tomorrow or the next day. So bad.

Perhaps the only thing I will remember from this book is that Buber argues that utopia should not be seen as an end goal to be achieved, but as an ongoing process of searching for a more just and meaningful world.

[Samantha Hines · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ugh, grad school.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Buber's attempt to rescue socialism from Marxist-Leninist centralism is gallant and thoughtful; but the Prudhon-Kropotkin-Landauer line, in which Buber places himself, lost the war long ago. Buber is so far from socialism as we know it that Robert Nozick likens Buber’s attitudes to F.A. Hayek’s with perfect validity in "Anarchy, State, and Utopia." "Paths in Utopia" does not boast the originality or artistry of earlier works like "I and Thou" and "Between Man and Man," and his intellectual universe is sometimes infuriatingly Euro-centric. (He loves federalism but seems unaware of the American Founding Fathers.) But “Paths in Utopia” is of-a-piece with Buber’s best work and does not in the end disappoint. This is honorable writing from a great man.

[Simon · Rating 2 out of 5]

Paths In Utopia by Martin Buber
This book should only be read by people who
really want to look at the ideas behind the
concept of Utopian Socialism that influenced
the "Big Thinkers" behind communism. Martin
writes in a very laborious and boring way about
how to make better societies, there are some good
ideas in the book but it is way too much like
hard work wading through the 150 pages that
seemed like 450 pages.
Damn where did the entertaining writer of Tales
of Rabbi Nachmann go to, perhaps it was the fact
that this book was originally completed in the
spring of 1945 when the world was such an
uncertain place to be writing such an academic
tome may have affected him.