Isaac Breuer’s Total Theocracy

• In Event: Isaac Breuer’s Political Theory: State, Sovereignty, and Law

Abstract

This paper explores a unique period in Isaac Breuer’s philosophy, in which, parallel to the collapse of the Weimar Republic and National Socialism’s seizure of power, he formulated what should be regarded from the perspective of the history of Jewish political thought as a novel regime: “Total Theocracy.” It demonstrates that during the second half of the 1920s, Breuer radicalized his political theory significantly, and anchored his rejection of secularism in an innovative philosophical system, aiming to achieve the Kantian “thing as such” through the Torah. The ontological anchoring of Orthodox theology enabled Breuer to present the Torah as achieving the quality of “totality,” an idea that shaped his theocracy.
The paper examines Total Theocracy from historical and analytical perspectives. Historically, it situates this concept within the different contexts in which it was developed. Breuer’s notion of totality rests at the crossroads of three discourses, for which totality, as an opportunity or a problem, stands at the fore: Neo-Kantianism, the Weimar critique of modernity, and German Jewish Neo-Orthodoxy. From an analytical perspective, the paper investigates the main components of the doctrine of Total Theocracy. It exposes in Breuer’s writings two principal systems of the political: liberal, pluralist, and “bad” politics on the one hand, and total, unified, and recommended politics on the other. Finally, Total Theocracy is analyzed in terms of its influence on the political imagination of Jewish Orthodoxy.
While the link between Orthodox views and illiberal politics might seem intuitive and taken for granted nowadays, my paper shows the peculiarities and the vicissitudes of this connection, and how, upon its first introduction, the positioning of Orthodoxy as illiberal caused various theological problems. Moreover, it claims that Breuer’s influence on the development of Jewish ultra-Orthodoxy is much more profound than hitherto assumed, and set the course of the latter vis-à-vis liberal politics. Finally, by studying Total Theocracy against the backdrop of the philosophical discourses surrounding modernity in Weimar, the paper suggests that ultra-Orthodox theology might owe more than it is willing to admit to the German critique of liberalism.

Author

• Itamar Yechiel Ben-Ami