1. Minorities, masses, and messianic time in the “ground-breaking” revolution

Seven months after the German-Jewish philosopher and neo-Kantian socialist Hermann Cohen (Reference Cohen1920, 330) passed away in April 1918, Germany was undergoing precisely the sort of “bahnbrechende [ground-breaking] Revolution” that Cohen wrote so ambivalently about in the seventh chapter of his Ethics of Pure Will. There, in the second volume of his three-part System of Philosophy, Cohen argued that Kant's categorical imperative implied an ethical commitment to socialism without the need for any violent break with the present (Edgar, Reference Edgar and Zalta2020). Cohen's non-Marxist socialism, elaborated in and beyond Ethics of Pure Will, was a minority position among German leftists in the early 20th century. Revolution was in the air, following the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia the previous year. Within two weeks of the 29 October 1918 sailors' mutiny in the coastal town of Wilhelmshaven, Cohen's student and close friend Kurt Eisner had declared a socialist republic in Bavaria, Kaiser Wilhelm II's abdication was abruptly announced, and German officials signed the armistice that brought the first world war to an end at last (Kuhn, Reference Kuhn2012, 3, 169).Footnote ¹

Another seven months and the Bavarian republic was history. A wave of right-wing terror sanctioned by the Social-Democratic (SPD) administration in Berlin swept Germany, beginning with the extrajudicial executions of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht in the early hours of 16 January 1919. Eisner was assassinated next, by a young, aristocratic German nationalist on 21 February (Brenner, Reference Brenner2020, 29). The Jewish anarchist Gustav Landauer, who came to Munich at Eisner's request “to advance the transformation of souls as a speaker,” was murdered on May 2 by the same far-right militia that had killed Luxemburg and Liebknecht—the Freikorps (Kuhn, Reference Kuhn2012, 169). Eisner's political successor, the Jewish communist Eugen Leviné, was arrested, and had been formally executed for treason by the end of the first week of July (Kuhn Reference Kuhn2012, 169).

The wide-ranging political discrepancies between an Eisner (an anti-war and thus anti-SPD “Independent Social Democrat”), a Landauer (a romantic anarchist), and a Luxemburg or a Leviné (communist leaders of the Spartakusbund and Communist Party of Germany [KPD] in Bavaria, respectively) are easily obscured on account of their common, Jewish backgrounds and their common, tragic ends (Brody, Reference Brody2018, 4; Brenner, Reference Brenner2020, 18). Landauer's friend, Martin Buber, wrote of the entire revolution as an “unspeakable Jewish tragedy,” and of Eisner in particular as a “marked man” (Brody, Reference Brody2018, 45). Buber longed for a Jewish renewal on Palestinian soil rather than Jewish revolution in central Europe. Moreover, Buber had little confidence that the social revolution in Germany could liberate Jews from what Aamir Mufti (Reference Mufti2007, 39, 50–51) has called “the tension between… emancipation and assimilation” at the heart of the Jewish experience in German-speaking Europe. Samuel Brody (Reference Brody2018, 44) speculates that Buber's reticence about the revolution may have had to do with his “greater connection to the Jewish community,” which was worried about the rise of “antisemitism bolstered by the perception that the revolution had too many Jewish leaders.” In an essay on the “Jewish dimension” of the November revolution, Michael Brenner (Reference Brenner2020, 26) notes the “letters sent by Bavarian Jews who asked Eisner to resign in order to limit the further rise of antisemitism.”

Eisner, Landauer, Luxemburg, and Leviné were each minorities among the masses they led, and each failed to escape the violent problematic of minoritization. In conservative Bavaria, Brenner (Reference Brenner2020, 19) argues that it mattered little that Eisner did not attend synagogue or think of himself as particularly Jewish: “What counted as far as Bavarians were concerned was [that] Eisner spoke like a Prussian, sounded like a socialist, and looked like a Jew.” He was doubly (even triply) “marked.” In his final words, Leviné (Reference Leviné2016) claimed that “Communists [were] dead men on leave.” However, just like Leviné, Eisner was not only a radical; he was also inescapably Jewish. That Eisner was never a Bolshevik mattered little to his killer, who on 20 February told a chambermaid that he was “going to shoot Eisner” because Eisner was “a Bolshevik and a Jew” (Brenner, Reference Brenner2020, 29). Luxemburg's biographers, meanwhile, repeatedly make the point that “the victory of the counter-revolution in January 1919 paved the way for Hitler's victory in January 1933” (Frölich, Reference Frölich2010, 302). The many Jewish anarchist, socialist, and communist martyrs of 1919 can be understood as the first victims of a much larger, far more “unspeakable Jewish tragedy.”

We cannot know how Hermann Cohen would have responded to the “ground-breaking” or “eruptive” revolution in Germany, even if Harry van der Linden (Reference van der Linden1988, 266) has demonstrated that Cohen was not the “bourgeois reformist” that he is sometimes characterized as by orthodox Marxists. Cohen's critique of the “materialist conception of history” had less to do with a Buberian anxiety about revolution and reaction than with the eschatological tenor of Marxism's anticipation of a “bahnbrechende” revolution (van der Linden, Reference van der Linden1988, 266–67). The danger of the revolution, for Cohen, is not its tactlessness nor its zeal for justice. Rather, his polemics against materialist theories of revolution were motivated by an attempt to preserve Cohen's asymptotic outline of history, wherein our political and ethical striving serves to bring us nearer to the ideal messianic age without ever leading us to believe that we have—at last—arrived at our final destination. In rejecting the ground-breaking, Cohen was not rejecting revolution qua revolution; van der Linden (Reference van der Linden1988, 267) contends that Cohen repudiated merely the myth that “time can come to a stop in the revolutionary act and that humanity can start with a clean slate.” Van der Linden (Reference van der Linden1988, 267) submits that such myths excuse excessive violence in the form of “purging” the last vestiges of the ancien régime. Moreover, they inevitably lead to disillusionment when life on the other side of the revolutionary break bears undesirable continuities with the oppressive past. In Religion of Reason Out of the Sources of Judaism—posthumously published in the tumultuous climate of 1919—Cohen juxtaposes messianism against the eschatological telos of the ground-breaking revolution. For Cohen (Reference Cohen1995, 308), “the messianic God guarantees the preservation of the natural background and its connection with the infinite task of morality.”Footnote ² Whereas Giorgio Agamben's (Reference Agamben2005, 62–64, emphasis added) differentiation between messianic and eschatological temporalities in Paul identifies Jesus' resurrection as “the messianic event” that causes time to “contract” ahead of the end of time itself, Cohen's messianic age is permanently ahead of us, approached but never attained. The apostle is too eschatological—and not messianic enough—for Cohen, insofar as he identifies a “caesura” that has transformed reality into a messianic present (Agamben, Reference Agamben2005, 64). For Cohen (Reference Cohen1995, 291), “Messianism degrades and despises and destroys the present actuality, in order to put in the place of this sensible actuality a new kind of supersensible actuality.” Whether those who fight for justice and peace are victorious in their revolt or unceremoniously defeated at the barricades, ethical and political work remains to be done on the day after the revolution, which remains in the realm of sensible actuality.

What van der Linden calls (following Engels [Reference Engels2007, 71]) the materialist conception of history—with its faith in the inevitability of proletarian revolution—promises that history will reach its communist conclusion. For Engels the nature of capitalist society, which divides society into exploiting and exploited classes, predetermines capitalism's eventual collapse. In a 1965 essay on Hermann Cohen's “democratic socialism,” Steven Schwarzschild (Reference Schwarzchild2017, 12) recognizes that this guarantee of eventual success is a necessary “premise of effective action” for Marxists. As the tragic fates of Eisner, Landauer, Luxemburg, and Leviné reveal, revolution is a dangerous game, especially for those doubly marked as radicals and as minorities. Faith in the “inexorable” movement of history empowered Marxists like Luxemburg (Reference Luxemburg1919)—in a way not unlike Kant's (Reference Kant and Gregor1996, 5:30) subject faced with the gallows—to “overcome her love of life” for the communist cause. Yet inexorability could just as easily produce the opposite effect. If the eventuality of the classless horizon is guaranteed, why sacrifice your life for it? If history marches on undeterred, why risk anything at all? If, as Jodi Dean (Reference Dean2017, 154) suggests, a materialist analysis of history shows that the “collective subject of politics” is not the worker or the militant but “the people,” what are we to make of the life-threatening risks incurred by individual workers and militants? After the murders of Luxemburg and Eisner, Landauer instructed Ludwig Berndl to “be not concerned about my life! Of the three dimensions, length was always the one I was least worried about” (in Kuhn, Reference Kuhn2012, 192). Yet many would-be revolutionaries are understandably concerned with living long lives, a reality that appears to be absent in the slogan that workers “have nothing to lose but their chains” (Marx and Engels, Reference Marx and Engels2002, 258).

It is not that Marx denied the gravity of the risks undertaken by individual militants. As Daniel Sabia (Reference Sabia1988, 63) notes, Marx acknowledged and even lionized the “self-sacrifice” of working class partisans. But it is not obvious in Marx how the self-interested ego is transformed into one capable of rising above egoism. According to Sabia (Reference Sabia1988, 63–64), Marx took for granted that the solidarity inherent in daily life with others would replace the “calculating egoist” with a “socially determined self,” and “long before the revolutionary movement is organized.” Indeed, collective forms of political consciousness and shared interests emerge out of interactions in workplace and neighborhood associations. Nevertheless, the proximity that fuels solidarity can result just as easily in bitter rivalry. Moreover, wherever “life together” might incline someone to fight for their neighbors, the willingness to die for one's neighbors represents something other—and something more—than the solidarity of Marx's socially determined self or Dean's collective subject of politics. We can certainly think about how collective bodies move through moments of insurrection, and how the revolutionary who risks everything is “socially determined,” but these considerations do not dismiss the reality that when Landauer tells Berndl not to worry about the longevity of his life, he is not talking about the mortality of any collective subject of which he is a part.

In her “essay on political belonging,” Dean (Reference Dean2019, 3) departs from the purely “collective subject” to an understanding of the comrade as indicating a “relation between those on the same side of a political struggle.” Dean (Reference Dean2019, 4) diagnoses present reality as post-democratic, where “the personal—what the individual experiences, feels, and risks—has turned into the privileged site of political engagement.” Against the individuating forces of late capitalism, Dean calls for a return to the comrade relation that produces something other and more than self-interest. Dean's (Reference Dean2019, 21, 78) comrade is neither an ally—whose commitment depends on “individual feelings and comfort”—nor is she a militant—a solitary “figure fighting for a cause.” Dean (Reference Dean2019, 90, 96, emphasis added) denies that the comrade is an individual at all, suggesting that “comrades put individual identity aside as they work together for justice. Collective desire replaces the fiction that desire can be individual.” This paper does not intend to reject Dean's comrade relation as an antidote to neoliberal individuation. Nevertheless, this paper argues that the individual is not entirely fictive. Individual people enter into the comrade relation, and the decision to act in a comradely manner must be committed to again and again in the face of individuating forces that include not only the market but also reactionary violence. Luxemburg's choice not to flee in the face of Freikorps' terror was her decision, even if a socialist sense of duty informed her response (Michaelis Reference Michaelis2011, 218). This paper turns to Hermann Cohen's theory of prayer not in order to dissolve the comrade relation Dean describes, but to understand how religious practices and similarly ritualized actions can recommit those who face the firing squad as individuals to a cause greater than themselves.

In his biography of Eisner, Albert Gurangas (Reference Gurangas2018, 36) notes that the only major point of contention between his subject and Cohen had been that of “the inevitability of revolution.” Still, in 1912, Eisner attributed the “essence of [his] being” to Cohen's impact upon him (Gurangas, Reference Gurangas2018, 36). Eisner declared on the same occasion that “intellectual influence on [his] innermost was something only one person ever gained: Hermann Cohen, a maker of men” (Brenner, Reference Brenner2020, 22–23). The radical courage that enabled Eisner to tell his friends hours before his death that “one cannot permanently evade a murder attempt, and one can only shoot me dead one time, after all” may have come from his Marxist faith in the ultimate victory of socialism (Brenner Reference Brenner2020, 29). Yet it is equally possible that Eisner's confidence owed itself to Cohen's outsized effect on his life. We know that Eisner was deeply moved by Cohen's commitment to Judaism in the face of antisemitic attacks levelled by Heinrich von Treitschke and Otto Böckel (Brenner, Reference Brenner2020, 23). Cohen's ability to withstand the vitriol aimed at him in the “Conservative, National Liberal, Antisemitic” context of Marburg demonstrates a fortitude not unlike the German-Jewish radicals of 1919, yet without any eschatological promise of a final, all-encompassing, ground-breaking revolution (Gurangas, Reference Gurangas2018, 36).

Cohen may or may not have made Eisner, but what made Cohen? In what follows, I will argue that far from being the paragon of optimism that he is often caricaturized as, Cohen (Reference Cohen1995, 128) was by no means ignorant of what he called the “inherited experience against utopianism.” The inevitability of socialism or what Paul Nahme (Reference Nahme2019, 190) calls “the sociality of reasoning” was not at all self-evident for Cohen. At the same time, Cohen's conception of prayer was the mechanism by which he transformed his doubts about the efficacy of ethical action into renewed solidarity with the oppressed and public recommitment to Judaism. Cohen suggests that even in the absence of a God who speaks back, “prayer becomes [his] belief” in such a way that restores him to pursue political and social justice in spite of the costs involved, and at precisely the moment where self-interest might compel him to retreat or retire from political struggle (Cohen, Reference Cohen1995, 378, emphasis added). According to Schwarzschild (Reference Schwarzchild2017, 3), Cohen read the materialist emphasis on self-interest as “basically antagonistic to socialism,” even as he echoed the Marxist critique of transcendental religion's flight from the arduous work of transforming the material world. While Marx and Engels were not wrong to emphasize this-worldly concerns or to see self-interest as the motor of class struggle, Cohen helps us to see that something other than material self-preservation alone is at work in the extraordinary resolve of Eisner, Landauer, Luxemburg, and Leviné. These “marked,” minority leaders among the masses each demonstrate a political will to press on and take risks for the socialist cause, even in the face of reactionary terror and defeat—a will that for Cohen (Reference Cohen1995, 378) could be generated through Jewish prayer, which re-tethered the individual to “messianic mankind.”

2. The messianic demand: socialism out of the sources of Judaism

In the “Introduction” to his Religion of Reason, Cohen (Reference Cohen1995, 21) provides an outline for his project that sets up messianism as the “summit” of Jewish monotheism. Messianism, and therefore monotheism by extension, has an explicitly political meaning for Cohen (Reference Cohen1995, 21): “that injustice will cease.” As an early 20th century socialist, Cohen wrote with particular injustices in mind. Across his Religion of Reason, Cohen (Reference Cohen1995, 128) identifies the “social differentiation between poor and rich” as the primary concern of ethics and even theodicy, as we will see. An abiding anxiety about widening economic inequality pervades his biblical exegesis. The Deuteronomic laws and statutes appear to Cohen (Reference Cohen1995, 151) as a “legislation for the poor” in a very literal sense. The tithe, the “laws about gleaning the corner,” the Year of Release, and the institution of the Sabbath anticipate what liberation theologians in Latin America would later refer to as God's preferential option for the poor (Cohen, Reference Cohen1995, 151–57). The Hebrew prophets of old, meanwhile, made plain that God “intends to end the suffering of the poor” (Cohen Reference Cohen1995, 143). For Cohen, the Jewish tradition in its idealized form is and always has been a liberation theology, concerned principally with the eradication of economic exploitation and, through economic exploitation, all injustice. Even Maimonides' 12th-century Jewish philosophy is interpreted as socialist (Cohen, Reference Cohen1995, 311, 315). Miguel Vatter (Reference Vatter2021, 77, emphasis added) goes as far as to say that Cohen's reading of Maimonides depicts a genuinely Marxist Maimonides: “For Cohen, following Marx's notion that communism is always already present in any given historical age as its dream, Maimonides’ messianism depends on understanding that ‘the world-to-come is already present’” as an ideal, in the sense that it is able to provide direction to ethical and political action, even if the Kingdom of God is not yet empirically actualized in the material world.

Vatter's observation draws out the tension between Messianic presence and actuality that pervades Religion of Reason. We have already seen how this tension manifests in the opposition between messianism and eschatology. The distinguishing characteristic of Jewish monotheism, which for Cohen (Reference Cohen1995, 35) sets its messianism apart from eschatological theology, is not God's oneness but God's “uniqueness.” Cohen's (Reference Cohen1995, 71) Jewish deity is utterly unlike anything else in the cosmos, and revealed not in persons (Christ) or things (statues) but only to and in relation to persons. Cohen's primary concern is to guard against anything that might impede the endless pursuit of social justice—that is, an end to the exploitation and oppression of the poor. Cohen's fear is that once God is revealed in someone or something, all that there is left to do is wait on God's first or second coming. Real messianism, however, is not an invitation to indifference or passivity. Cohen (Reference Cohen1995, 310, original emphasis) proclaims that “for my personal worship the Kingdom of God is not to be a future advent, but must be a permanent actuality… I do not wait for ‘The Kingdom of God’ to come and merely pray for its advent but bring it about through my own preparedness; through my own will I bring it about.” The gap between the capitalist present and the redeemed future is not an empirical distance, but a gap that matters instead for Cohen's own religious and ethico-political conduct… his worship.

But does Cohen actually believe that he can bring about the Kingdom of God through his will alone? Elsewhere, Cohen (Reference Cohen1995, 160) is clear that “the unique God can have no actuality,” since actuality has to do with sensation, and sensation is necessarily “excluded from the concept of God.” Perhaps the difference here is that whereas the concept of God excludes sensation, and therefore can have no empirical actuality, the Messianic Kingdom of God is beyond sensation, or supersensible. The Kingdom of God exists as a horizon of possibility without ever becoming so manifest that we are released of the moral responsibility of actualizing it. The Kingdom does not represent the “time of the now,” an end to time itself, or the promise of a future world that Cohen roundly objected to in the materialist account of history (Agamben, Reference Agamben2005, 63). Cohen's Kingdom is a never-ending construction site, an ethical and political project that never takes its final form.

The Kingdom of God is not an abstract historical reality for Cohen. It is inseparable from his concrete mission of eliminating poverty and the systems that produce it. The possibility of the Kingdom is the possibility of ethical socialism for Cohen, and vice versa. Yet rather than assume the real possibility of eliminating poverty in history, Cohen (Reference Cohen1995, 128) turns to the paradox of Deuteronomy 15, in which

Here we encounter a Cohen who acknowledges the “inherited experience against utopianism.” History is not an unbroken, triumphant march toward a lofty aim. As Luxemburg (Reference Luxemburg1919) argued, even after the Russian Revolutions of 1917, revolutions invariably ended in resounding defeats for the working class. Moreover, according to Cohen's asymptotic view of history, even the most successful revolution would ultimately fall short of the utopian ideal. Deuteronomy demands that we act as if we can overcome poverty or oppression, even as the author of Deuteronomy reminds us that such an accomplishment may be historically beyond reach. The as if is enough for Jamie Ferreira (Reference Ferreira2014, 18), who explains that “for Kant, striving to promote the highest good and ‘acting as if God exists’ are materially equivalent.” Whether or not God concretely exists as the one who guarantees the final victory of good over evil is irrelevant to the task at hand for Kant. What matters is that God is hypothesized—that we conduct ourselves as if she exists.

Articulating a preferential option for the poor out of Cohen's (Reference Cohen1995, 21) unique God in the same way as Deuteronomy, messianism teaches us “that injustice will cease” and demands that “morality will be established in the human world,” at a future time. Cohen's insistence that injustice will cease and morality will be established is stronger than anything guaranteed by Ferreira's interpretation of the Kantian as if. Moreover, Cohen (Reference Cohen1995, 21) writes that “against this confidence, no skepticism, no pessimism, no mysticism, no metaphysics, no experience of the world, no knowledge of men, no tragedy, and no comedy can prevail.” Yet to assert this is to suggest that experience, knowledge, and skepticism—among other things—do in fact challenge Cohen's messianic confidence. Cohen's socialist messianism is postulated against the evidence of the historical record. He stands in solidarity with the poor as if morality will be established in the human world, not because he knows without a doubt that it will.

Cohen (Reference Cohen1995, 21–22) emphasizes that although the “apex of monotheism is Messianism… its center of gravity lies in the relation between God and the individual.” The infinite task of “actualizing” messianism is laid out before each human being (Cohen, Reference Cohen1995, 328). The meaning of messianism is political and social—the eradication of poverty—but the messianic demand is nevertheless addressed to each person as an individual subject. Yet the nature of this demand of the individual all but guarantees that no one who undertakes Cohen's moral quest will live long enough to see the actualization of the Kingdom of God on earth. Of Moses' inability to enter the Promised Land, Cohen (Reference Cohen1995, 77) contends that “the individual dies, even the most favored one; God, however, lives for the entire people.” Cohen's (Reference Cohen1995, 301) solution to the problem of death is that there is a sense in which Moses—like the rest of us—lives on in “the historical continuity of his people.” In spite of (or because of!) their sacrifices, we can say that Luxemburg, Leviné, Landauer, and Eisner live on in revolutions to come. In the words of Paul Frölich (Reference Frölich2010, 303), “when the triumphal procession of barbarism reaches its limits… the Acheron will begin to move again, and victors will spring from the spirit of Rosa Luxemburg.”

If the visions of immortality-through-posterity put forth by Cohen and by Frölich are not entirely satisfying, it may be because the materialist rejoinder of capitalism's “inevitable” demise feels more accessible and compelling to those who would risk their lives for the cause (Marx and Engels, Reference Marx and Engels2002, 233). It promises that—unlike Moses—those who are alive today might experience socialism within their lifetimes, if they fight for it. Capitalism's demise seems less imminent for us today, of course, than it did to Cohen and the architects of the Bavarian republic at the end of the First World War, who believed that a socialist world was at hand. Capitalism has proven itself remarkably malleable and enduring. Its “power,” to quote Ursula K. Le Guin (Reference Le Guin2014), “seems inescapable—but then, so did the divine right of kings.” For the materialist, the possibility and even expectation of escaping capitalism's grasp in one's lifetime is eminently preferable to the prospect of merely experiencing liberation vicariously through future generations.

For Cohen, however, the possibilities of the materialist thesis do not make up for the risk that it might devolve into quietism, violence, or disillusionment, as van der Linden demonstrates. Whether or not Cohen leans too far in the other direction—whether his horizon is “too far off” or does not guarantee enough to stimulate ethical and political action in the present—I leave to the reader to decide.Footnote ³ For now, having shown that Cohen acknowledged the “inherited experience against utopianism” and did count experience and knowledge as witnesses against messianism's attractive claims, we can turn at last to that tool through which Cohen transformed his doubt and skepticism into renewed commitment to political struggle: prayer.

3. What need teaches: Cohenian prayer as the praxis of recommitment

In his 1836 critique of The Romantic School, Heinrich Heine (Reference Heine1882, 31) cites a German proverb which imparts that “need teaches us to pray.” According to Heine (Reference Heine1882, 31), the masses are “more inclined than ever” to prayer in the face of social crises, whether Napoleon's invasion of Germany—which Heine had in mind—or the counterrevolutionary advance of the Freikorps in 1919. Prayer is therefore not some dispassionate dialogue with the deity, but closer to what Jakob Dylan describes as a “calling out from the deep ends of my bones” (The Wallflowers, 2005). Existential lament is conspicuously absent from Andrea Poma's (Reference Poma1997, 257–58) depiction of Cohenian prayer, but it is hard to miss in Religion of Reason.Footnote ⁴ Prayer involves “longing” or “desire” for God, Cohen (Reference Cohen1995, 374–75) writes, but of a qualitatively different sort than sexual or romantic desire. According to Cohen (Reference Cohen1995, 375), the desire that expresses itself in prayer “corresponds to the natural urge of man not to despair of himself, and to clasp the anchorage of self-assurance in order not to be ruined by despair and self-abandonment.” Hence, Cohen writes, “longing is the hope of rescue from the danger of the throes of death.” Cohenian prayer pertains to “the I in the plight of its soul” (Cohen, Reference Cohen1995, 417).

In Cohen's (Reference Cohen and Jospe1993, 202) essay on “The Concept of Reconciliation,” we find this longing for God in the productive tension that emerges between doubt and confidence:

Prayer mediates an internal struggle that begins with the unsettling suspicion that one's faith that good will win out over evil in the end is misguided. Through prayer, the subject arrives at (or returns to) “moral confidence and trust.” Cohen's articulation of a realistic, skeptical soul and the soul which believes calls to mind Antonio Gramsci (Reference Gramsci1973, 159), who notes being divided between a pessimistic mind and an optimistic will. Here, however, it is not a division between mind and will, but a division within the soul itself. For Cohen (Reference Cohen1995, 378–79), this duality is the product of the reality that the “moral I” addressed by the messianic demand “is infringed upon by dissipations, conflicts, and contradictions, which constantly threaten to split and cleave it.” In our pursuit of a world without economic exploitation we are tempted—we might imagine—by self-interest and self-preservation.Footnote ⁵ Some of the questions that must have confronted our German-Jewish radicals, especially as the forces of right-wing reaction pressed nearer, are as follows: why does it fall to me to risk my life for others, especially when those others are not pulling their own weight? Why are particular individuals asked to sacrifice so much “in the service of history” if the proletarian revolution is inevitable (Cohen, Reference Cohen1995, 439)? Why is it that the marginalized and minoritized are doubly marked in revolutionary contexts? Why does the class struggle exact such a personal toll on individual martyrs? If God is so good, why does poverty—that “question mark against divine providence” (Cohen, Reference Cohen1995, 135)—exist in the first place, and why the immense historical difficulty in eradicating it? These questions, however, return us to themes of lament and longing, and thus also to prayer.

The power of Jewish prayer to “make one my heart” and overcome the fragmentation of the soul, for Cohen (Reference Cohen1995, 379, 375), has to do with the rhetorical structure of prayer as “dialogic monologue,” which is exemplified in the psalms. The psalms are dialogical in the sense that they bring the psalmist into a real relation with the deity, even as the content of the psalm remains a monologue. This is a monologue offered not toward just any God, either, but toward the unique God of Jewish monotheism. Prayer takes the concrete literary form of a monologue because this unique God is ultimately, in Cohen's controversial view, an idea rather than a person—and as in Jakob Dylan's experience, this “God says nothing back” (The Wallflowers, 2005). Still, this unique God is also a unique audience. To bring one's longing before this unique God demands a different rhetorical repertoire than that which I employ in journaling to myself, composing a poem for a loved one, or giving a speech at a demonstration. In each case, the audience calls forth something specific from me; even in my private journal I am writing for an audience that can respond to me and thus conditions what I choose to share. Freed from an audience that can verbally respond to the honest articulation of longing and lament, Cohenian prayer grants a new vantage point to the petitioner, enabling them at last to “express in language confidence in God” (Cohen, Reference Cohen1995, 372).

Take, for example, Psalm 22. The psalmist's refusal to pause and wait for an answer after asking “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (v. 1) is indicative of what the psalmist expects to hear from the divine audience—nothing at all. The psalmist does not anticipate any response and says so explicitly: “I cry by day, but you do not answer” (v. 2). Nevertheless, the author comes into a real relation with the unique God by virtue of merely directing language at that God. The piercing question becomes a supplication (“do not be far from me,” v. 11), and this supplication transitions quickly into worship (“all the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord,” v. 27). Moreover, the conflict between the skeptical soul and the soul that believes is resolved in the psalmist's ethical recommitment to the historic task of messianism as Cohen understands it: “the poor shall eat and be satisfied” (v. 26). The psalmist affirms their desire to “live for” the God who liberates the poor from the house of slavery and exploitation (v. 29), and the impulse to self-preservation that gives occasion to the psalm is overcome.

We cannot know what “dissipations, conflicts, and contradictions” may have rendered the author of Psalm 22 so despondent, but it does appear as if the psalmist's prayer has enabled them to recommit to and “live for” the messianic mission of the eradication of poverty and hunger.Footnote ⁶ For Cohen (Reference Cohen1995, 398), liturgical prayers free petitioners “from all the limitations of national particularism, from all the narrowness of individualism.” Cohen is rightly repudiated for his denigration of Polish Jewry and his dangerous celebration of “Germanism” during the world war that Eisner, Landauer, Leviné, and Luxemburg were principled enough to reject. Yet it strikes me that there is a serious tension between the Cohen of Germanism and Judaism, which uncritically assumed the nearness or the inevitability of the messianic age, and the Cohen we find in Religion of Reason, for whom the yokes of doubt and disillusionment had to be overcome through prayer, which dispels nationalism and self-preservation. Cedric Cohen Skalli (Reference Cohen Skalli, Assel and Wiedebach2021, 192) demonstrates that Hermann Cohen championed the German war effort because of his political conviction that “the Reich was also serving Jewish interests in it warfare.” Yet the Marburg professor's theory of prayer suggests that the dialogical monologue with God ought to free us from such shortsighted political compromises rooted in geopolitical “interests.” Cohen (Reference Cohen1995, 399) writes that “the man who cannot pray is unable to unburden himself of his finiteness, with all its dross and dread. On the other hand, he who can pray is not a slave to superstition or self-interest.”

Cohen (Reference Cohen1995, 399) continues to say that anyone who has “mastered” the art of dialogical monologue “loses earthly fears and earthly heaviness in his ascent to infinity. He forgets the suffering that occasioned the prayer, because in this capacity of his soul he rises above.” Here, Cohen seems to flirt with the mysticism that he so consistently criticizes. Perhaps, however, the art of dialogical monologue cannot ever be mastered, and so the eschatological connotations of an “ascent to infinity” or general amnesia regarding the “suffering that occasioned the prayer” are unthinkable in practice. On this view, Cohen is merely giving shape to idealized prayer, which is always beyond our capability to master and yet which nevertheless ought to be the aim of the petitioner. What is attained through our ability to pray is a recommitment to struggle on behalf of the oppressed, no matter the cost. Earthly fears do not disappear entirely because there is no actual ascent to infinity; nevertheless, earthly fears can be faced with courage through the “unification of the heart of the individual” (Cohen, Reference Cohen1995, 379). If Eisner, Landauer, Luxemburg, and Leviné did not pray in recognizably religious ways, we can imagine that they too engaged in rhetorical forms and practices that freed them from doubt and reconnected them to the movement for which they would sacrifice their lives.

4. Religion of reason: ritual, the party, and its militant

To be sure, other rhetorical forms than Jewish prayer resemble the dialogical monologue. Like the psalms, what Du Bois (Reference Du Bois1994, 159) referred to as the “sorrow songs” of the African American cultural tradition address themselves “toward some unseen power.” Writing as much about their melodies as their lyrical content, Du Bois (Reference Du Bois1994, 162) found that “through all the sorrow of the Sorrow Songs there breathes a hope—a faith in the ultimate justice of things. The minor cadences of despair change often to triumph and calm confidence.” Yet Du Bois (Reference Du Bois1994, 162) could not help asking, “is such a hope justified? Do the Sorrow Songs ring true?” In taking up Du Bois' question, Joseph Winters emphasizes the importance of Du Bois' preposition “through.” That hope breathes through the songs tells us that

In these words, Winters challenges narratives about Du Bois' unflappable optimism in ways that pertain to the re-reading of Cohen that I have provided here. Moreover, he draws our attention to the community-forming power of prayer and hymnody. The sorrow songs embrace the moans and cries of those left behind by the project of racial uplift that Du Bois was so invested in. In refusing to abandon those still afflicted by “ongoing modes of suffering,” the songs produce an African American community capable of a collective striving for liberation. Without collective striving there can be very little individual emancipation, since under capitalism those who inherit capital have a considerable advantage over historically disenfranchised competitors.

The same preposition (“through”) occupies a place of prominence in Langston Hughes' 1938 poem, “Kids Who Die,” which re-circulated on social media in the wake of the elementary school shooting in Uvalde, TX (see Begg, Reference Begg2022). Today, understandable skepticism and ire is directed at the response of politicians and community leaders who offer “thoughts and prayers” instead of concrete action and reform after mass shootings in schools, malls, movie theaters, and places of worship. The critical distinction to make between the passive thoughts and prayers of complacent politicians and the dialogical monologue outlined in this paper is that the latter is not offered in place of reform, but rather enables the subject to continue to fight for reform even in the wake of setbacks and defeat. The distinctive feature of Cohen's neo-Kantian philosophy in general and his interpretation of Jewish prayer in particular is not only that it encourages ethico-political action in the world, rather than quietism or nihilism, but that it suggests that there is no help that will come from outside. Like the poetry of Langston Hughes or the sorrow songs, this sort of prayer establishes communities capable of self-emancipation through what Cohen (Reference Cohen1995, 388) refers to as prayer's “socializing power,” which is to say that it unites a people through a common language, a shared history, and a collective mission.

As far as Immanuel Kant was concerned, such socialization was the only value of prayer. Joseph Ballan (Reference Ballan2011, 2–3) writes that “the only kind of ritual prayer acceptable to Kant would be that which takes place in the context of a religious assembly, where it serves to unite worshippers in their striving to realize the Kingdom of God on earth.” As a sincere Kantian socialist, Cohen valued prayer's power to produce communities out of individuals, and collective struggle out of the monumental task set before the individual by messianism. When Cohen (Reference Cohen1995, 381) writes of prayer as “the fundamental religious act,” he means that it roots the person who prays in truth. At the same time, prayer is the fundamental religious act in the sense that it re-connects individuals to one another. It not only binds together like-minded people around a common conception of God and a shared historical mission, uniting those who stand on the same side into Jodi Dean's comrade-relation; it also binds the fate of each person to the fate of the poor. One can even say that self-interest is transformed by the socializing power of Cohenian prayer. Prior to any ethical recommitment to solidarity or justice, dialogical monologue's socializing power can supply the sort of “education” that helped Cohen (Reference Cohen1995, 136) to see that “the great majority of men cannot be isolated from me, and that I myself am nothing if I do not make myself a part of them.” The existence of the community, generated by communal prayer and other similar rhetorical forms, logically produces what Cohen (Reference Cohen1995, 137) called “the fellowman.” And only at this point can one begin to articulate something that could be called collective self-interest, one that extends beyond the self-preservation of the individual.

In considering the Alenu prayer in particular, Cohen (Reference Cohen1995, 385) writes that “the prayer establishes the congregation” and therefore it “belongs not so much to the individual as to the congregation.” The Alenu (עָלֵֽינוּ) takes its name from its first word, which places responsibility for the Kingdom of God on “us.” Yet according to Cohen, the Alenu's socializing power—its power to generate a congregation committed as a collective entity to the unrealizable realization of the Kingdom of God—does not eclipse the power of the Alenu to create individual partisans for the poor as well, capable of recommitting to the cause of socialism even and especially in the wake of defeats. The Alenu has not only a socializing power but also what Elena Namli (Reference Namli, Namli, Svenungsson and Vincent2014, 141) has called a “restorative power” capable of dispelling doubt, disillusionment, and all of the other dissipations that infringed upon Cohen's “moral I.” If the prayer produces a revolutionary party capable of transforming the world through its socializing power and its Messianic aim, it restores the party's militant following the violent suppression of the working class by the proto-fascist Freikorps. In Cohen's (Reference Cohen1995, 385) words, the Alenu “establishes the individual, but the extent to which it can succeed… depends on the extent to which the individual is united with the congregation” and its infinite mission. The ethical responsibility of fulfilling messianism's goal of eradicating class oppression and exploitation falls not on the abstract shoulders of the party or the congregation but on the shoulders of individual militants and members, who cannot perform their task alone and yet who feel the full weight of the messianic demand to eliminate poverty or bring an end to gun violence.

5. Praying within reason: dispelling the fate of past and present socialists

As the foil of the socializing power of prayer, the proto-fascist counterrevolution of 1919 was a violent process of individuation. To speak of the “collective subject of politics” misses that Luxemburg, Landauer, Leviné, and Eisner were not taken in together; they were hunted down as individuals, one by one, by Freikorps paramilitaries at the urging of the Social Democratic Party in power. Their deaths served as reminders of the isolation and pain that was and is experienced by those who fundamentally threaten the status quo. It took an incredible amount of courage, and something other than the narrow self-interest of individual self-preservation, for these German-Jewish anarchists, socialists, and communists to repeatedly risk and finally lose their lives for the sake of the proletariat and the abolition of inequality.

What accounts for such fortitude? Can it emerge merely from the materialist guarantee of a ground-breaking revolution as the inevitable conclusion of an impersonal class struggle? Cohen wants to say no, since self-preservation stands against the kind of political courage demanded by the messianic goal. For Cohen, the one who is in relation to God through prayer “does not stand alone,” even along the firing wall or on the gallows (Reference Cohen1995, 438). The courage of the religious martyr, writes Cohen (Reference Cohen1995, 439), empowers the martyr to “suffer for the sake of the messianic goal.” But the subject torn between confidence and “realistic” doubt cannot live as “God's hero” (Cohen, Reference Cohen and Jospe1993, 202; Cohen, Reference Cohen1995, 439); the division between the realistic, skeptical soul and the idealistic soul that believes must first be reconciled through the ritual of prayer. Cohen's prayer is nevertheless a reasonable prayer. There is no special knowledge or mystical union attained through its performance. Nowhere does the petitioner expect God to say anything in return. For Cohen, however, the unique address of the dialogical monologue makes possible both a radical recommitment to the messianic horizon of history and a transformation of individual self-interest into collective identity and collective interests.

The skeptical soul surveys what Cohen called the inherited experience against utopianism and raises the reasonable question, why risk anything at all for the Messianic horizon? If those who confront the powers that be share in the fate of Eisner, Luxemburg, Landauer, and Leviné, why struggle for socialism at all? Writing a full 90 years after the collapse of the revolution in Bavaria, Drucilla Cornell (Reference Cornell2008, 137) brilliantly returns the question to the skeptic:

The Thatcherite refrain that there is no alternative to austerity capitalism attempted to kill off the idea that things could be otherwise. Yet it feels the need to do so precisely because the dreams of collective ownership and the eradication of poverty continue to haunt the neoliberal order. If there truly was no alternative to the dictatorship of markets, the custodians of capitalism would not feel the need to talk so often about communism. To insist on the inevitability of the ground-breaking revolution today will not do, of course, but that does not mean that we are without any alternatives. Nor are we ethically “off the hook” while oppression, exploitation, and inequality persist (Cornell, Reference Cornell2008, 146). Messianism's weighty demand continues to press down upon our individual shoulders, reminding us that “there shall be no needy” among us, even as history attests to the possibility that “the poor shall never cease out of the land.” Yet the permanence of poverty must also remain merely a possibility. For Cornell (Reference Cornell2008, 9, emphasis added), fatalism should be granted a “momentary place in the perpetuation of a world dominated by a barrage of technology and the worst forms of naturalized positivism that deny any remaining dignity to human beings and their aspirations.” Nevertheless, we should not mistake capitalism's endurance as evidence for its inevitability.

Cohen makes space for fatalism and doubt in the longing of prayer. Yet “prayer becomes my belief,” by returning me to the relation with God, commitment to God's cause, and solidarity with the dispossessed (Cohen Reference Cohen1995, 378). It enables me to act as if liberation were possible and as if, even in death, I might experience the liberated future through posterity. Hope is not the mere absence of doubt, Mariame Kaba (Reference Kaba2021, 27) reminds us, but rather “a discipline… that we have to practice” daily. According to Ballan (Reference Ballan2011, 8) and Cohen, ethics must learn, practice, and perform the dialogical monologue—the articulation of doubt before the altogether other—so as to sustain the comrade-relation and not to fall into immobilizing despair. If socialists today do not need to recite Psalm 22 or sing the sorrow songs, it nevertheless stands to reason that the learning, practice, and performance of dialogical monologue in other rhetorical forms might help generate a genuinely collective self-interest and to recommit the disillusioned, doubting militant to a struggle beyond themselves.