Your complimentary articles

You’ve read all of your complimentary articles for this month. To have complete access to the thousands of philosophy articles on this site, please

If you are a subscriber please sign in to your account.

To buy or renew a subscription please visit the Shop.

If you are a print subscriber you can contact us to create an online account.

Visions of Society

Martin Buber & Leo Tolstoy: Two Examples of Spiritual Anarchism

Patrick Cannon articulates an alternative anarchism.

I would like to present for your consideration two interesting and peculiar versions of anarchism, as articulated by the German-Israeli existentialist and social thinker Martin Buber (1878-1965) and the reclusive Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910). Buber is a fascinating representative of Jewish left-wing thought, while Tolstoy a famous Christian anti-authoritarian. Although the two thinkers came from different religious backgrounds and geographic circumstances, Buber and Tolstoy’s political philosophies converge on a position I will be calling ‘spiritual anarchism’. Both thinkers stand sharply divided from the dominant, secular anarchist orthodoxy (if there were ever aproximately such a thing).

Martin Buber

Martin Buber is best remembered for his magnum opus I and Thou (1923), in which he sought to give an account of our relationship to other people and to God – the ‘Eternal Thou’.

…