Books by Rosenstock-Huessy

Reprint of 1927-28 edition, edited by Michael Gormann-Thelen and Fritz Herrenbruck, with a new afterword by Wolfgang Ullmann. Verlag Klaus Boer, 1996.

Hardbound (3 volumes), 1,320 pages.

The Age of the Church is the communal testament of two men facing the end of an era. The first two volumes contain essays that span the history of the church, but the book is more than a collection of essays. Rosenstock-Huessy’s colleague at the University of Breslau, the church historian Joseph Wittig, had been attacked as "Luther redivivus" for his statements of doctrine in essays written for what he saw as a Catholic people living in fear of its own Church; he was eventually excommunicated. (The ban was lifted unconditionally twenty years later.) The third volume is a detailed documentary record of the events leading up to Wittig’s excommunication.

In The Age of the Church, Rosenstock-Huessy writes that the true church knows no distinction between Catholic and Protestant; the Catholic holds order on the inside and endures chaos on the outside; the Protestant attempts to impose order on the world in order to allow his heart the fullness of freedom.

That description fits the authors themselves:  Wittig "kept order on the inside," first by demonstrating how doctrine sprang from and was revealed by truths discernible in everyday experiences, and then by remaining steadfastly Catholic in the face of general condemnation; Rosenstock-Huessy’s works record the progress of the Spirit through time an ordering of time to permit free growth into the future.  Rosenstock-Huessy’s first great vision at Verdun saw the millennium of European history as a whole.  His work with Wittig widened that span to two millennia, and lays out the unity of the times from Golgotha to the present.

 

Der Atem des Geistes (The Breath of the Spirit, 1951) is the first book Rosenstock-Huessy published in Germany after World War II: a collection of essays presenting his method of inquiry for the social sciences, what he calls "a new science" in the first section of the book. In the chapter "Das Versiegen der Sprache" ("Speech Peters Out") he writes:

[Mankind has] been ignored for 40 years, because the sciences in office--all of them--take aim in their gnostic-platonic way at objects in nature and have no faith in names; in doing so, living man consciously distances himself from his own nature. However, a new ‘Organon’ for all the sciences of society, state and church [to replace Aristotle's canon] , a grammar of human associations is in the making here. (35)

Other chapters address Augustine and the Christian virtues; the faith of scientists like Faraday; the legacy of his friend, the theologian and church historian, Joseph Wittig; and the place of the Jesuits in the battle for the importance of social groups and against the hegemony of the mind in human life.

Hardbound, 296 pages.

 

Translated and revised by Christoph von dem Bussche and Konrad Thomas. Siebenstern Taschenbuch Verlag, 1955. Reprinted in paperback by Brendow Verlag, 1985.

288 pages.

This edition has a preface by J. H. Oldham. For a description, see The Christian Future.

 

While serving as an officer before Verdun in 1917, Rosenstock-Huessy had a great vision of the unity over time of the separate histories of Europe's peoples: that every European nation had developed its distinguishing characteristics in a great revolutionary upheaval like the World War, and that the upheavals which molded the spiritual and cultural outlook of the separate nations were part of a single, vast process. He saw the unity of a millennium of connected revolutions running from 1076, when the Pope declared the church's independence from the Holy Roman Emperor (beginning the tradition of separating church and state) to the "marriage of war and revolution" he saw before his eyes in 1917. He saw the Russian Revolution as an overture to the two World Wars which, taken together as a single historical event, did what Communism could not do--create a global society in which the peoples of the world became dependent on one another. For a further description of the ideas, see Out of Revolution.

Die Europäischen Revolutionen is the book on which Out of Revolution was based, but the English-language edition is not a translation. With the help of American friends, Rosenstock-Huessy re-wrote the book for Americans, reversing the order of its chapters to make recent history the point of entry to the sequence of revolutions that forged Europe. This German original is chronologically organized and has quite a different text.

Paperback, 584 pages.

 

This reprint of a book published in 1952 presents the grammatical method as a tool to study times and eras. When the grammatical method is used, history appears as the economy of salvation. As a background, the book explores the paradigms that underlie theology and the natural sciences.

The first chapters criticize theology, saying it should narrate not theorize, should function as a servant, not as a ruler. The middle of the book, chapter 5, "The Execution of God," addresses modern times. Chapters 6-11 use Paracelsus as an example to present Rosenstock-Huessy’s view of developments over time as the key events in the social sciences.

Paperback, 219 pages.

 

A facsimile reprint of the 1910 first edition, Herzogsgewalt und Friedensschutz  (Princely Power and Peacekeeping) is an expanded version of Rosenstock-Huessy’s dissertation (Landesfriedensgerichte und Provinzialversammlungen vom neunten bis zwölften Jahrhundert (Local Courts and Regional Parliaments from the Ninth to the Twelfth Century), Heidelberg, 1909). Much of the matrix of modern European civilization was forged during the years covered in the title; Rosenstock-Huessy elucidates the development of both peace-keeping and legal process in the western regions of the Holy Roman Empire, exploring the traces of that formative process in the surviving written sources and evaluating the historical impact of those documents at the time of their composition.

Hardbound, 205 pages.

 

Königshaus und Stämme outlines the development of royal houses and the household system of the royal families, the aristocracy, as a form of constitutional law. This constitutional system went beyond the bounds of the tribes involved, which were often at loggerheads with one another. Building on the principles outlined in Königshaus und Stämme, Rosenstock-Huessy later developed the theory that the power of royal houses to found constitutional systems was the deep secret of empires, from ancient Egypt over Charlemagne to the League of Nations.

Hardbound, 402 pages.

 

 

Soziologie is one of Rosenstock-Huessy’s fundamental works, written around the spaces and times which govern human life, language and associations. To Rosenstock-Huessy, speech is central to sociology; sociology must recognize that speech is the concrete form of social reality.

In Volume 1, Rosenstock-Huessy presents the areas of existence in which people play or confront serious life, such as marriage or service in war. He says that important human experiences like these are created by human powers like enthusiasm, love, or faith. He then contrasts these life-changing, deeply rooted experiences in time and space with the abstract concepts, space and time.  He sees these human powers as the concrete forces which create timespans, and so create and structure history. In Volume 2 he turns to history, which he sees as one part of each person’s soul, and so a major influence on people’s actions. He presents recurring historical events and times both as people’s personal experiences and as constituent parts of a larger whole. In Volume 3 he turns to questions of people living together, and discusses the way they create communities and social structures.

These volumes, entitled The Hegemony of Spaces (Die Übermacht der Räume) and The Full Count of Times (Die Vollzahl der Zeiten, 1 and 2), have made a lasting impression on readers. The first volume recently appeared in English, as The Cross of Reality: The Hegemony of Spaces, and the second volume is in preparation. Some of the material may also be found in the lecture series Cross of Reality (1953), in the Circulation of Thought group, and in the Universal History group.

"Language is wiser than he who speaks it," Rosenstock-Huessy often to used to say to underline the scope of language. Language contains the experiences and inspirations of the ages. The language that people speak and the great historical learning experiences in their cultures have developed in the same process. Language is at the core of Rosenstock-Huessy’s view of social reality.

In this large collection of individual essays from 1916-1964 the author presents his fundamental view on language. The first volume closes with the German original version of Practical Knowledge of the Soul; the second volume closes with a German version of Fruit of Lips. Many of the essays contained in The Origin of Speech were written in English, and then translated into German and thoroughly revised so that they could be included in Die Sprache des Menschengeschlechts.

Two volumes, hardcover. Vol. 1, 810 pages; Vol. 2, 904 pages.

 

In the aphasia that reigned in Europe after the end of World War I, Rosenstock-Huessy was searching for ways to renew speech. After having fought at the front near Verdun for several years and having witnessed the devastation of Europe, he believed that male speech was no longer fruitful and had come to its end. In his moving essay, Die Tochter (The Daughter), Rosenstock-Huessy introduces daughterly speech as the cure for mankind at this point in time. At the instigation of the author, Bas Leenman brought this essay together with Martin Buber’s translation into German of the Book of Ruth. The publication was made possible by the Stichting Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Fonds in The Netherlands.

Hardbound, 46 pages.

 

Rosenstock-Huessy approved the publication of his essay "The Fruit of Our Lips" twice in his lifetime: first, as the capstone of his two-volume retrospective of his works on language, Die Sprache des Menschengeschlechts, and in this troika of essays. The first two essays have never appeared in English, though the first, "Im Kreuz der Wirklichkeit" ("In the Cross of Reality"), is the last chapter of the two-volume Soziologie (1958). The second, "ICHTHYS: Leben, Lehre, Wirken," (ICHTHYS: Life, Teaching, and Action") was originally written as a polemic against the stand Franz Rosenzweig took at the end of  The Star of Redemption; the version published four years later as part of Das Alter der Kirche (The Age of the Church) is neither polemic nor addressed to Rosenzweig. In the essay he not only makes the  clearest statement of his understanding of Christ, but argues that the true nature of incarnation is the result of a modern (and entirely new) imitatio Christi, one that is primarily political in nature.

Paperback, 138 pages.

 

Rosenstock-Huessy confronted the fact that in destroying master craftsmen’s independent workshops, the Industrial Revolution had deprived them of both work autonomy and a valuable asset to bequeath. He declared the necessity of a kind of "industrial feudalism" to redress this loss.

In Werkstattaussiedlung, originally published in 1922, he proposes setting up experienced workers in their own shops, obligated to meet production quotas for the parent company, but otherwise free to take on outside work and to organize production as they see fit. Over time, ownership of the satellite shops would pass to the former employees, who would then be free to bequeath the shop as they saw fit, the contractual obligation to the parent company remaining in force. The book starts with the life story of the lathe operator Eugen May and closes with a proposal for enabling legislation under the Weimar constitution.

 

This is a fictitious letter, supposedly written by the Greek philosopher Heraclitus to the Greek philosopher Parmenides. Parmenides teaches concepts and abstractions; Heraclitus represents active life, where names and serious speech reign. Assuming the role of Heraclitus, Rosenstock-Huessy attacks the German philosopher Martin Heidegger as a modern Parmenides.

 

Stimmstein is the yearbook of the Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Gesellschaft. Its name comes from Revelation (John 2:17). Every volume contains unpublished work by Rosenstock-Huessy, as well as a section presenting scholarly literature on Rosenstock-Huessy. In addition to the regular volumes, the Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Gesellschaft publishes supplements to Stimmstein. Stimmstein should be ordered through Argo Books Verlag (see page 62.) Volume 1 appeared in 1987 (ISBN 3-87067-317-6) and contains an essay by Rosenstock-Huessy on "Daughterly Thinking," a biography of Hans Ehrenberg and two of his essays, "The great Russians and our educational question" (1929), "Anonymity" (a sketch.) Volume 2, 1988 (ISBN 3-87067-338-9) contains Rosenstock-Huessy’s original handbook on work-service camps (1933), an essay by Wolfgang Ullmann on "New Thinking," and stories from the Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy-Huis. Volume 3, 1990 (ISBN 3-89376-010-5) contains the papers given at a conference held in 1988 in Würzburg in honor of Rosenstock-Huessy’s 100th birthday. Volume 4, 1993 (ISBN 3-89376-017-2) contains Rosenstock-Huessy’s 1944 essay "Mad Economics or Polyglot Peace." Volume 5 is planned for 1997. The subject is new models for universities. Stimmstein Supplement 1992 contains Rosenstock-Huessy’s essay "Hitler and Israel" in English, German, Dutch, and Polish. Stimmstein Supplement 1995 contains William James’ essay "The Moral Equivalent of War" in English, German, Serbo-Croatian, and Russian. It also has Rosenstock-Huessy’s essay "The Soul of William James" ("Die Seele von William James") from I Am an Impure Thinker, as well as "The Threat to History and the Danger of Barbarism" ("Die Geschichtsnot und die Gefahr der Barbarei") from 1932. MITTEILUNGSBLÄTTER DER EUGEN ROSENSTOCK-HUESSY GESELLSCHAFT The Mitteilungsblätter contain smaller works of Rosenstock-Huessy’s. They also contain news items about the Gesellschaft’s activities and projects the Gesellschaft feels carry on Rosenstock-Huessy’s work. There is a section with reviews of scholarly and lay publications. The Mitteilungsblätter appear once or twice a year. They can be obtained by contacting the Gesellschaft’s business office.