Paths in Utopia

Introduction

Buber wrote the book in Jerusalem, where he had lived since 1938; it appeared in Hebrew in 1946, in English in 1949 and in German in 1950. He argues that Marx and Engels dismissed the “utopian” socialists unfairly: Saint-Simon, Fourier, Owen, Proudhon, Kropotkin and Gustav Landauer sought a structural renewal of society through small communities and federations rather than through seizing the state. Soviet communism, by concentrating power, showed where the purely political route led. The final chapter, “An Experiment That Did Not Fail”, presents the Jewish collective settlements in Palestine, the kibbutzim, as a living example of decentralised cooperative socialism.

Connections

Builds on

• Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution1902 · Peter Kropotkin

More works by Martin Buber

• 1923I and Thou