Out of Revolution: Autobiography of Western Man

Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy

Apr 2013 · Wipf and Stock Publishers

About this ebook

This classic, originally published in 1938, was reprinted in 1969 for a new generation by Berg Publishers. From the new introduction by Harold J. Berman:
"That this book-- written six decades ago --is without question an extraordinary book, a remarkable book, a fascinating book, has not saved it from relative obscurity. It is directed against conventional historiography, and for the most part the conventional historians have either ignored it or denounced it . . . [It] is a history in the best sense of the word. Although it embodies original scholarship of the highest professional quality, it is written primarily for the amateur, the person of general education, who wants to know where we came from and whither we are headed. But it is also a theory of history: how history should be understood, how historians should write about it . . .. Out of Revolution interprets modern Western history as a single 900-year period, initiated by total revolution . . . and punctuated thereafter by a series of total revolutions that broke out successively in the different European nations . . .. Rosenstock-Huessy was a prophet who, like many great prophets, failed in his own time, but whose time may now be coming."

About the author

Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (1888-1973) was a sociologist and social philosopher who, along with his close friend Franz Rosenzweig, and Ferdinand Ebner and Martin Buber, was a major exponent of speech thinking or dialogicism. The central insight of speech thinking is that speech or language is not merely, or even primarily, a descriptive act, but a responsive and creative act, which is the basis of our social existence. The greater part of Rosenstock-Huessy's work was devoted to demonstrating how speech/language, through its unpredictable fecundity, expands our powers and, through its inescapably historical forming character, also binds them. Born in Berlin, Germany into a non-observant Jewish family, he converted to Christianity in his late teens. He met and married Margrit Hussy in 1914. Rosenstock-Huessy served as an officer in the German army during World War I. He then pursued an academic career in Germany as a specialist in medieval law, which was disrupted by the rise of Nazism. In 1933, after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, he immigrated to the United States where he began a new academic career, initially at Harvard University and then at Dartmouth College, where he taught from 1935 to 1957.