Description

A new collection of essays highlighting the wide range of Buber’s thought, career, and activism.

Best known for I and Thou, which laid out his distinction between dialogic and monologic relations, Martin Buber (1878-1965) was also an anthologist, translator, and author of some seven hundred books and papers. Martin Buber: Creaturely Life and Social Form, edited by Sarah Scott, is a collection of nine essays that explore his thought and career.

Martin Buber: Creaturely Life and Social Form shakes up the legend of Buber by decentering the importance of the I-Thou dialogue in order to highlight Buber as a thinker preoccupied by the image of relationship as a guide to spiritual, social, and political change. The result is a different Buber than has hitherto been portrayed, one that is characterized primarily by aesthetics and politics rather than by epistemology or theology.

Martin Buber: Creaturely Life and Social Form will serve as a guide to the entirety of Buber’s thinking, career, and activism, placing his work in context and showing both the evolution of his thought and the extent to which he remained driven by a persistent set of concerns.

Publisher Review

"Buber held that he had not teaching but rather sought to carry on a conversation, inviting others to think along with him about the essential issues of our creaturely and social life. In this deftly edited volume, Sarah Scott brings together essays that engage in a conversation with Buber. As in any genuine conversation it is without closure, free of dogmatic reflexes, and hence illuminates the abiding relevance of that conversation."-Paul Mendes-Flohr, author of Martin Buber: A Life of Faith and Dissent "Martin Buber: Creaturely Life and Social Form is a valuable, fresh introduction to Buber's thought."-Steven G. Smith, Millsaps College