Books about Rosenstock-Huessy

This book argues that despite the tensions existing in all societies between religious faith and legal order, they inevitably interact. In the course of his discussion, Berman traces the history of Western law, exposes the fallacies of law theories that fail to take religion into account, examines key theological, prophetic, and educational themes, and looks at the role of religion in the Soviet and post-Soviet state. (from the Emory University Studies in Law and Religion.)

Most people put law and religion in separate compartments. Berman writes: "The principal affirmation is that law and religion are two different but interrelated aspects, two dimensions of social experience--in all societies, but especially in Western society, and still more especially in American society today. Despite the tensions between them, one cannot flourish without the other. Law without (what I call), religion degenerates into a mechanical legalism. Religion without (what I call) law loses its social effectiveness." Frona Powell, in her review in Iustitia, wrote: "This book is comprised of [Berman's 1971 lectures in the series of Lowell Lectures on Theology] with an introduction, postscript, and annotations... Those who are members of the legal profession as well as those who are not, are aware of the fact that the legal system does not always function properly... Berman recognizes the problem, which he calls 'the massive loss of confidence in law-not only on the part of law-consumers but also on the part of law-makers and law-distributors'... He attributes society's loss of faith in law to the fact that law has become 'shorn of its mystique and its authority in the grand design of the universe'... Berman's concept of... law is... different than that of the legal positivists of his generation."  

Harold Berman's masterwork narrates the role of revolution in the development of Western law. Berman challenges conventional nationalist approaches to legal history, which have neglected the common foundations of all Western legal systems. He also questions conventional social theory, which has paid insufficient attention to the origin of modem Western legal systems and has therefore misjudged the nature of the crisis of the legal tradition in the twentieth century. He traces the slow construction of modern Western legal institutions over the centuries since the Papal Revolution at the dawn of the second millennium, when the Western church established its political and legal unity and its independence from emperors, kings, and feudal lords. Berman shows how the coexistence of competing systems of law (canon law, royal law, feudal law, and the urban and mercantile law emerging in Europe's newly founded cities) are the source of the Western belief in the supremacy of law. Written simply and dramatically, offering both a wealth of detail for the scholar and a fascinating story for the layman, his book grapples with the meaning of our heritage and its consequences for our future.

Harold Berman's masterwork narrates the role of revolution in the development of Western law. This new volume explores two successive transformations of the Western legal tradition under the impact of the sixteenth-century German Reformation and the seventeenth-century English Revolution, and the powerful influences of Lutheran and Calvinist doctrines. Berman examines the far-reaching consequences of these apocalyptic political and social upheavals on the systems of legal philosophy; legal science; criminal, civil, economic, and social law in Europe. Berman challenges both conventional approaches to legal history (which have neglected the religious foundations of Western legal systems) and standard social theory (which has paid insufficient attention to the communitarian dimensions of early modern economic law, corporation law and social welfare). Clearly written and cogently argued, this long-awaited, magisterial work is a major contribution to an understanding of the relationship of law to Western belief systems.

Seventeen writers respond to the work of Rosenstock-Huessy in papers given at the first international conference on Rosenstock-Huessy, held at Waterloo, Ontario, in June of 1982. The conference marked the first time that those who had known Rosenstock-Huessy personally and those who knew him only through his books had a chance to meet and discuss their experiences. Edited by Rosenstock-Huessy's son and heir, Hans R. Huessy, and the host of the conference, Darrol M. Bryant, this book offers insights from both communities.

Edward Mellen Press, 1987. Hardbound, 270 pages.

 

The Jewish Hegel scholar Franz Rosenzweig had an intense conversation with the Christian legal historian Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy in 1913. That "Leipzig Night Conversation" led Rosenzweig to prepare to convert to Christianity, but in the end he turned to embrace his Jewish faith for the first time. Three years later, the two men engaged in a correspondence now considered a historic turning point in the long history of Jewish-Christian controversy. Rosenzweig went on to write The Star of Redemption, which made him an important figure in twentieth-century Jewish thought. Rosenstock-Huessy's body of work covers the great revolutions in European and Church history, and industrial law; he began teaching university students in 1912 and continued well past his official retirement in 1957, but always sought to effect social change beyond academe. This is the first major collection of essays that address both of the two friends and their "new thinking." Their dialogue echoed Nietzsche's anti-transcendent reading of Judaism and Christianity, as well as his attack on idealism, but it also resurrected the redemptive core of the two faiths as sources for the rejuvenation of society. This book includes three essays by Rosenstock-Huessy on Nietzsche, and a translation of a chapter from his 'Sociology', clarifying the "post-Nietzschean" approach of the "new thinking."  New edition, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009. Hardbound.

It has often been said that the dialogue between Rosenstock-Huessy and Rosenzweig opened a new era of Jewish Christian dialogue. But few scholars have really grappled with the subject matter of their dialogue or considered how the two men themselves saw this new era in the Jewish-Christian relationship. Until now there has been no comprehensive attempt to address their different points of view and their different understandings of Jewish and Christian history. Wayne Cristaudo's Religion, Redemption and Revolution changes all that. It is the first book written out of a profound knowledge of both Rosenstock-Huessy's and Rosenzweig's work in almost fifty years. If for no other reason than that, the book deserves our attention and the author our gratitude. The review of this book in the Journal of Religion welcomed

Cristaudo’s effort to present the basic features of Rosenzweig’s and Rosenstock-Huessy’s  thought [as] a welcome and important contribution to the field… Presenting the two thinkers together is to offer correctives to the scholarship on Rosenzweig… Cristaudo identifies important and understudied themes in Rosenzweig’s work and sheds light on these topics by juxtaposing his and Rosenstock-Huessy’s thought... [The] book makes... a strong case for the relevance of Rosenzweig’s and Rosenstock-Huessy’s thought in contemporary philosophical and religious debates.

Cristaudo proposes a religious view in which the central issue is not the existence of  God, but the love which overpowers people and redirects our lives, the process to which we give the name of "God." This book is not only of tremendous value for people interested in Jewish-Christian dialogue, but for people interested in history and the needed exchange between our Western heritage and pre-Western and pre-Christian ways of life. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2012

When Clint Gardner first attended Rosenstock-Huessy's classes at Dartmouth College in the 1940s, the younger man was astounded by what he heard: his professor spoke passionately about God in a secular way, translating Christianity into contemporary terms so that it could speak to people who had outgrown "church" language that was still prevalent in the 1930's. In fact, Rosenstock-Huessy was one of a group of early 20th century German writers whose retranslation of tradition continues continues to reverberate and propel profound changes in thinking among both clergy and laity alike. Part memoir, part philosophy, BEYOND BELIEF introduces readers to what Gardner sees as Rosenstock-Huessy's down-to-earth spirituality and one man's discovery of its power in his life.

The cover photo shows Clint Gardner's helmet, split open by a mortar fragment on Omaha Beach at 5 p.m on June 6, 1944. (An officer from the Imperial War Museum told Gardner that the hole in his helmet was the largest on record, for a survivor, in either World War I or II.) Gardner went on to fight in the Battle of the Bulge and to take command of the Buchenwald concentration camp, just a week after its liberation. In this book, Gardner relates his wartime experiences but also explores how those events set him on a journey of spiritual exploration,  an all-out effort to understand what we can still say about God after the Holocaust. Meeting the Russian prisoners at Buchenwald, and hearing that Stalin had set up camps that were all too similar, made Gardner decide to take on the challenge of Russia's problems as his own. (That decision led him to initiate citizen exchanges between the US and what was then the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War and eventually took him to the Kremlin, where he met both Gorbachev and Sakharov.) Throughout this book, he connects his experiences to his discovery of "a down-to-earth spirituality," one that offers a new hope for the reconciliation of science and religion. A free sample may be found here. Xlibris, 2004. Hardcover, 261 pages.

This book is Gardner's first attempt to introduce the general public to Rosenstock-Huessy’s work by relating his own personal thoughts and experiences. In his preface, Gardner writes: "What Rosenstock-Huessy was getting at does not lend itself to formal studies. We should try to speak with him, rather than analyze what he said. He does not offer some finished new ‘philosophy.’ Rather, in all his varied works, he asks us to join him in his search for a new, non-ideological language to describe who we are and where we are going."

The book, which first appeared in 1981, is written as a journal of the 1970's, recording trips to Moscow, Canton, Delhi, and Berlin. It also contains a selective bibliography, a brief biography of Rosenstock-Huessy, notes, and an index. (In 2017, the blogger Harley Voogd gave it 4 stars out of 5 on GoodReads.)

Hardbound and paperback, 272 pages.

 

In the course of covering his student years at Dartmouth, Hart makes several brief references to Rosenstock-Huessy; he later published a tribute to his teacher. The reviewer for Kirkus Reviews wrote: "The Fifties were not boring at all, according to longtime Dartmouth conservative and National Review editor Hart. Rather, they were a time of intellectual, political, athletic, and artistic ferment--a period 'which in retrospect seems to grow ever more attractive.' ...He followed the modern poets, so every Columbia reading by Eliot or Auden gets its page. However, such works as Andersonville, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, and Advise and Consent are also cited as evidence that 'to find anything comparable you had to go all the way back to the Twenties.' As for politics: 'You only have to cite the names Hiss, Chambers, [and] Rosenberg. . . to begin to recall the political intensity of the period...' A personalized pastiche--introduced by William Buckley--for others of a like persuasion." Hardcover, 304 pages.

In his foreword, Wayne Cristaudo writes:

This book represents a major philosophical breakthrough--not only in ethics but more generally in the human sciences. For it succeeds in doing two major things. First, it identifies the aspects of responsibility and reality (interior as well as exterior) with which the major ethical paradigms and orientations are preoccupied. Second, it brings ethics itself into a bigger conversation with the human and social sciences... introducing three different modalities of time into the picture: the different times of (1) daily decisions, (2) biography, and (3) "history as such." There is one other important aspect to the book that should be mentioned. Its framework is deeply indebted to... Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy. It was Rosenstock-Huessy's ambition in his magnum opus, Soziologie... to radically transform the human or social sciences by what he called a grammatical method. He argued that what we are and express, long for, and make of our past, present, and future are grammatically encapsulated communications--a function of speech between souls... Otto Kroesen has taken Rosenstock-Huessy's method and applied it to the great ethical dilemmas we face today. Most conspicuously--after taking us through the major different philosophical alternatives within ethics today, and relating them to the role played by organizations in shaping our existence--he reflects upon the great spiritual traditions that are the enormous forces "trajecting" behind all the peoples of the world. Arching over this book is the great question of how creative concord can be achieved in a world that is open now to vastly different forces that have been shaped by enormous technological, commercial, geopolitical and administrative forms. These forms pull us all, with our vastly different traditions, priorities and social memories, into a common world.

Kroesen asks how social dialogue can create a common support base for dealing with change, and how economics and politics can be organized around such interaction, to prevent a clash of civilizations. Differences should not be erased; instead, they must be coordinated by timely alternation. By listening to the times and to each other, we create a common understanding of the way forward. The Christian heritage of Western modernity must be combined with older layers of culture from the East and the South, since we all have to find our way by making creative use of many traditions. Such intercultural management contributes to the re-creation of the planet and, in the process, people find their personal destiny within a planetary biography. Wipf and Stock, 2014. Paperback, 226 pages.

Frankfurt: Campus Verlag.  2009

George Allen Morgan had a uniquely broad knowledge of Rosenstock-Huessy's writings; his insights into that corpus are contained in this scholarly primer of Rosenstock-Huessy’s thought.

Morgan met Rosenstock-Huessy at Harvard in 1934. He had just completed his doctorate in philosophy under Alfred North Whitehead and was preparing his classic work, What Nietzsche Means; the younger man would later play a major role in the genesis of Rosenstock-Huessy's The Christian Future. After WWII, Morgan spent 23 years as a career foreign service officer and diplomat; in his retirement, he spent fifteen years making notes on all of Rosenstock-Huessy’s many books and articles, and this compact and beautifully written volume is the result.

The book is divided into three parts. The first, entitled "Fundamentals," begins with the elements of Rosenstock-Huessy’s "speech-thinking": the grammatical method and the cross of reality. The second, "Historical Perspectives," addresses Rosenstock-Huessy's view of pre-Christian, Christian, and post-Christian history. The third, "Selected Aphorisms", contains a magnificent collection of them. An early edition of Lise van der Molen’s bibliography is also included. (Speech and Society is out of print.)

Hardbound, 220 pages.

 

In the last chapter of his book, The Christian Future, Rosenstock-Huessy wrote in 1945: "Our peacemakers and planners must be supported by camps all over the globe, where youth, recruited from every town and village all over the globe, serves. This service must implement the global organization as the young must experience what the old are planning before the old can have any authority."

In statements dating back to 1912, Rosenstock-Huessy has shown himself to be the prophet of the United States Peace Corps. He was among the first to set up voluntary service camps in Europe after the First World War. In the United States, at the invitation of President Roosevelt, he undertook to reform the Civilian Conservation Corps by turning it into a universal service, open to young persons from all walks of life. That story is told inCamp William James. From the preface by the American historian Page Smith, who was a member of the original camp:

Today when the Congress of the United States considers proposals to reestablish, along new lines, a corps of young people volunteering for national environmental service, it is instructive to note that many of the issues as to the proper role, recruitment, and organization of an "ecology army" were first confronted and debated by the founders of Camp William James. When the state of California set up, in 1976, its own "California Conservation Corps," it helped to draw attention once more to the issue of service by young people as "The Moral Equivalent of War."… There could therefore be no more appropriate time to retrieve the history of Camp William James, the first practical effort to give effect to the idea of national service in time of peace."

Paperback and hardbound, 272 pages.

 

Richter recounts the way the events of the twentieth century remade European intellectual history, evoking endless attempts by writers across the continent to interpret and to redeem its dreadful events. His book has one such attempt as its focus and its heart: the two-volume Soziologie by the philologist, jurist, historian, and sociologist Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (1888-1973). The individual volumes carry the titles, The Hegemony of Spaces and The Full Count of the Times, and deal with the different ways our social spaces and our existence in time impact our perception and creation of a common reality. The author examines Rosenstock-Huessy and his sociology by placing them in their time and in their place on its ideological spectrum, summarizing the main arguments made in the two volumes (published in 1925 and 1956-57, respectively) in pursuit of a critical judgment that should make clear Rosenstock-Huessy’s continuing relevance today. In German. Paperback, 206 pages.

Stuttgart: Kohlhamme.  1973

Schoeps opens with a description of the basic characteristics of late Judaism and early Christianity, examining the presuppositions which underlie the essential conflict between Jewish and the Christian understanding of the messianic, the relation of law and faith. Having defined the Biblical and Talmudic foundations of the argument, Schoeps describes the relation and attitude of the great medieval apologists Saadyah Gaon, Judah ha-Levi, Isaac Troki, and Isaac Orobio de Castro toward Christian teaching. In the 1916 correspondence between Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Franz Rosenzweig, Schoeps sees the dawning of a new era in the relations between the communities of faith. This book concludes with a telling and eloquent statement of the theological contribution which Judaism and Christianity can make to each other's religious existence. Faber and Faber, 1963.

In this book, the author of the eight-volume People's History of the United States addresses the current state and future of education, traces its origins and development, and calls for radical changes in the system. Book News wrote: "In contrast to the neo-conservative critique of academic leftists... Smith... goes for the right target--the institution, not the individual. The problems: ...the flight from teaching due to tenure requirements; the worthlessness of most research and the mediocrity of most monographs; the narrowing of the disciplines; [and] the dominance of the 'scientific' approach." Publisher's Weekly wrote: "Smith, founding provost of UC Santa Cruz, contributes probing, provocative insights. With a tribute to his undergraduate mentor, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, [Dartmouth] social philosophy professor and often disparaged radical thinker, the author sets about 'mapping the desert' of contemporary higher education... He sums up its present state as 'academic fundamentalism.' ...In Smith's view, a meld of the classical Christian traditions with secular democracy may restore the modern university as a true 'academic community.'"  

In Rediscovering Christianity, Page Smith traces Christian thought through Western history, and asks what solutions that tradition might offer to our society's present malaise. He draws on St. Augustine's idea of two distinct and separate cities (the city of God and the city of man) and traces the "city of man" from the Roman Empire to present-day society, lost in consumerism, decadence, and overindulgence. After detailing the tenets of Christianity and moving through European history to the philosophies of Wycliffe, Luther, Calvin, John Winthrop, and Descartes, Smith examines the political and religious origins of democracy in America. He asks us to look back to the past to find a new vision of a possible future and calls for a return to the values of decency, generosity, and piety, values which have been at the core of what made society human since the beginning of time.

"In the book Speak That I May See Thee, Harold Stahmer, with the help of Walter Ong, shows how irrational it would be not to expect God to address humankind in language."

—Anthony Thiselton

Speak That I May See Thee explores the religious significance of language, especially the spoken word, as revealed in the writings of J.G. Hamann, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Franz Rosensweig, Martin Buber, and Ferdinand Ebner. Dr. Stahmer evaluates the contributions of these men in light of concerns that are decidedly more American than European character; he avoids the more traditional theological and analytic philosophical approach is to language, preferring instead to examine the potentially sacramental nature of all forms of human discourse, from a right variety of perspectives. Stahmer says that "one hopes that the studies will contribute to an understanding and appreciation of the significance of the writings of these men, and perhaps inspire others to add to and correct, where necessary,those themes and issues treated here. And it is hoped that these studies will enable people from all walks of life, especially those outside the framework of institutional religion, to enhance their respect for and confidence in the potentially secret character of human speech." Stahmer's interest in the importance of oral and aural themes in Western man’s earliest development is combined with, first, the concerns of those writers interested in human communication in an electronic age (Marshall McLuhan, Walter J. Ong, S.J.) and, second, with the implications of radical religion, religionless Christianity, and death-of-God themes. Above all, Speak That I May See Thee explores the role of speech in the creation of them are truly human society. As such it will speak to those interested in literature and communication, as well as those concerns with religious, phenomenological, and existential themes. New York: MacMillan. 1973

Wuerzburg: Koenigshausen & Neumann. 2012

A Guide to the Works of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy contains the entire bibliography of Rosenstock-Huessy’s published and unpublished writings (as of 1995), and was designed to be a companion volume to the "Collected Works" on DVD. Each entry contains microfilm locator numbers as well as notes referring the user to related entries elsewhere in the bibliography. The Guide is a valuable reference tool for anyone familiar with Rosenstock-Huessy’s work.

This definitive, updated edition is a restructured and expanded edition of Lise van der Molen's bibliography, now organized chronologically, and alphabetically within each year. The alphabetical short-title list enables the user to find references quickly and efficiently. The contents of the Guide can also be found on the "Interactive Bibliography" page here on this site.

Hardbound, approximately 200 pages.

The "Offensive Junger Christen" wrote that "this 'little biography' was written by Ko Vos, who spent her career teaching at Rotterdam's Pedagogical Academy making Rosenstock-Huessy's insights available to future teachers,' especially in special education. 'In all cultures and all times, there are people who are far ahead of their time and find answers to problems that still seem to lie far in the future. Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy was one such man, an inspired scholar (in legal history, sociology, social teaching, and speech) and a thinker focused on a world in which all borders have fallen. He found truth not in theological or philosophical systems but in the language of events, which he translated into human speech." In German. Shaker Verlag, 1997. Paperback, 78 pages.  

Freiburg: Karl Alber. 2010

Uncommon Friendships explores the overlooked dynamic of inter-religious friendships, considering their significance for contemporary religious thought. Young explores the relationships between three pairs of important religious thinkers—Franz Rosenzweig and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Blanchot, and Julia Kristeva and Catherine Clément. He shows how that sustained engagement and disagreement became central to their religious and philosophical development, helping them to respond effectively and creatively to problems facing their communities and societies. Examining their work, Young shows how such friendships can help us rethink religion, aesthetics, education, and politics—as well as friendship itself. “I know of nothing quite like [this book]. It is rigorous scholarship that has the sharp edge of cultural criticism and yet the inspiring effect of a philosophic and spiritual poem.” —Peter Ochs, University of Virginia “An elegantly written and intellectually engaging study... Young's lucid descriptions of the long-term intellectual engagements... highlight[s] the embodied, creative, and often unsettling affects of friendship upon the evolution of an intellectual work.” —Randi Rashkover,George Mason University Wipf and Stock, 2010. Paperback, 330 pages.

The contributions of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (1888-1973), one of the most profound and original thinkers of the twentieth century, span several disciplines in the humanities— history, philosophy, sociology, linguistics, religion— although his work is ultimately uncategorizable. In 1933, immediately upon the ascent of Hitler, he began to arrange a leave of absence that would allow his emigration to the United States from Germany, taught at Harvard for two ears, and then at Dartmouth College until 1957. His voice was prophetic, urgent, compelling, and it remains relevant. This collection of essays is by a retired professor of history who was a student of Rosenstock-Huessy's in the 1950s and found his lecturing transformative. It is not a nostalgic book, however. It is written with the conviction that Rosenstock-Huessy still needs to be heard, more urgently than ever for the betterment of humankind. Norman Fiering is the author of two other books, Jonathan Edwards's Moral Though and Its British Context and Moral Philosophy at Seventeenth-Century Harvard: A Discipline in Transition, as well as numerous journal articles. For twenty-three years he was director and librarian of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University.