The Nation as Imperative: Cooperative Nationalism and the Idea of the State in Martin Buber and Hermann Cohen

Imperatives, as Immanuel Kant observed, differ from laws. Laws set limits through coercion, whereas imperatives imagine infinity through freedom. What does it mean for the nation to be an imperative? Starting with the famous 1916 controversy on Zionism between the neo-Kantian philosopher Hermann Cohen and the philosopher of dialogue Martin Buber, this essay explores how Buber developed Cohen’s dialectic of Machtstaat (power-state) and Kulturstaat (culture-state) into a model of cultural cooperation. Unlike Cohen, whose understanding of nation and nationality relied on Herder and Fichte, and who feared that Zionism would always be exclusionary, Buber believed that Zionism could be the inclusive self-realization of the Jewish people. Yet Buber’s Zionism of meta-national cooperation also deeply echoed Cohen’s own understanding of the German State as transcending itself in cooperative federalism. In the end, both believed that human culture offered ways of solidarity and community that the state per se could not provide and which, in fact, functioned as a corrective to the state’s “omnipotence.” For Buber, the pragmatic acceptance of the State of Israel was but the beginning of a meta-political imperative articulated by the prophets, and anticipated a time when the state, as Cohen believed, would be “displaced by messianism.”