Rosenstock-Huessy, E: Out of Revolution

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.