Clint Gardner on Rosenstock-Huessy
”The history of the human race is written on a single theme: How does love become stronger than death? The composition is recomposed in each generation by those whose love overcomes murdering or dying. So history becomes a great song, Augustine’s Carmen Humanum. As often as the lines rhyme, love has once again become stronger than death. This rhyming, this connecting, is men’s function on earth. But that this is our function we have only known since the birth of Christ.” – Sociology II, p. 759
“Rosenstock-Huessy continually astonishes one by his dazzling and unique insights.”
– W. H. Auden
The German-American social philosopher Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, who taught at Dartmouth College from 1935 to 1957, has admirers and former students throughout the world. Now the time seems ripe to bring them together on the Internet so they may exchange ideas and information. Just as important, this new Internet presence should serve as a starting place to introduce Rosenstock-Huessy to persons who have never heard of him.
Looking through the resources at this site, you will soon learn that Rosenstock-Huessy was as interdisciplinary a scholar as you are ever likely to meet. As he himself expressed it at the end of his major work Out of Revolution:
“I have survived decades of study and teaching in scholastic and academic sciences. Every one of their venerable scholars mistook me for the intellectual type which he most despised. The atheist wanted me to disappear into Divinity, the theologian into sociology, the sociologists into history, the historians into journalism, the journalists into metaphysics, the philosophers into law, and – need I say it? – the lawyers into hell, which as a member of our present world, I never had left.” – p. 758
Precisely the fact that he was so very interdisciplinary may help to explain why Rosenstock-Huessy, who has been hailed by many of the leading intellectuals of our time, remains relatively unknown to this day. Thus, in launching this Web site, we are extending to all its visitors an invitation: join us in discovering a social philosopher whose time may finally come as we enter the third millennium. If you are new to him, you are not arriving too late! What you learn from him, and how you say it in your own words, may make the breakthrough that still awaits his work. As the legal scholar Harold Berman expressed it in his new introduction to Out of Revolution:
“Rosenstock-Huessy was a prophet who, like many great prophets, failed in his own time, but whose time may now be coming. In spite of – and because of – its unconventional character, Out of Revolution has much to teach us about how history should be understood, and even more important, how the history of the second millennium of the Christian era can serve as a prophesy of the future of the human race.” – p. xviii]