Understanding Rosenstock-Huessy

A Haphazard Collection of Ventures

Norman Fiering



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.