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The Interhuman and What is Common to All: Martin Buber and Sociology
Author(s) -
Friedman Maurice
Publication year - 1999
Publication title -
journal for the theory of social behaviour
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.615
H-Index - 51
eISSN - 1468-5914
pISSN - 0021-8308
DOI - 10.1111/1468-5914.00110
Subject(s) - dialogical self , sociology , meaning (existential) , politics , george (robot) , psychoanalysis , epistemology , socialism , philosophy , law , psychology , communism , art history , political science , art
Martin Buber was close to sociology and sociologists from his university years on and in 1938 was head of the new Department of Sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Although influenced by Ferdinand Toennies, and George Simmel, he went beyond them in his philosophy of the “interhuman” from which standpoint he also criticized Max Scheler. Focal social concepts of Buber's are “the interhuman”_the dialogical relationship between persons that entails “inclusion,” or “imagining the real,” making present, and confirmation (compared here with the social psychology of George Herbert Mead); the “essential We” or common cosmos that each helps to build by speech‐with‐meaning from his or her unique stance; the distinction between the “political principle” of government and the “social principle” of fellowship and social spontaneity; and the philosophy of community that led Buber to a federalistic socialism and the vision of restructuring society into a “community of communities”.