OUT OF REVOLUTION.
Autobiography of Western Man, by Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy. William Morrow and Company, 1938. pp. xii, 795. $6.00.
In the year 1917, one of England's fighting men, R. H. Tawney, wrote for The Athenaeum an inspired argument. His title was "The Sword of the Spirit." He was trying to make clear for what he and his comrades were fighting. He passionately demanded that victory, if won, should not be diverted from the purpose by which alone the war could be justified. "Either a war is a crusade or it is a crime: there is no halfway house," he said. "If right is the Allies' goal then right must be the Allies' limit. For that they are bound to fight: they are free to fight for nothing else."
In the same decisive year of the war, another scholar-soldier, who was in the ranks of the German army facing Verdun, was likewise seeking to understand War. It was then and there, Professor RosenstockHuessy tells us, that the idea of this book came to him. "A pupil of the World War," he says, "Sees a new future and a new past." He caught sight of the role of Revolutions in "the creation of humankind." That insight, which would explain not only war but also religion and law, Church and State, belief and institution, language and music, society and the individual—which would place all these in right relations to one another—led him into a far-reaching and fundamental attempt at the reconstruction of the Philosophy of History. From 1917 to 1938 he has been building an interpretation of the experience of Europe from 1000 A.D. to the present time. War stirred an Englishman to an immediate, passionate, appeal for justice and fairness. It drove his German fellowsoldier into two decades of inquiry, equally passionate, but also detailed, persistent, comprehensive, unifying.
Professor Rosenstock-Huessy sees human history as a series of related revolutions. "The creative act that sets free new potentialities of mankind is properly called revolution." "All great revolutions re-create public law, public order, public spirit, and public opinion; they all reform private customs, private manners, and private feelings." "The Great Revolutions break out whenever the power which has governed heaven and earth dries up at the fountain-head. The Great Revolutions seem to destroy an existing order; but that is not true. They do not break out until the old state of affairs is already ended, until the old order of things has died and is no longer believed in by its beneficiaries."
In the period between 1517 and 1918 the author finds and interprets four fundamental revolutions. They are (1) the German Protestant Revolution of the 16th century, (2) the English Parliamentary Revolution of the 17th century, (3) the French Revolution of the 18th century, and (4) the Russian Revolution at the close of the 19th century. Each of these created a nation. All of them were "secular" in aim. "The four great forms of government all have one and the same passion: to be free from the visible Catholic Church." In the five hundred years preceding 1517 the author finds a similar series of basic reconstructions of human life, all of which were within the Catholic Church, all of which were "religious" in aim. In both eras alike, each separate revolution stretches out over a long period of time. Each of them goes through a succession of stages. "Conflict, despair, faith, pride, humiliation, and fulfillment" are the "six notes of every revolutionary period." Each is universal as well as specific in its influence. Each, as it dies away, prepares the ground for its successor. In our own day, Russia, Germany, and America express revolutionary tendencies and the author ponders deeply over the leadings which they offer to mankind.
The present reviewer is far too ignorant of historical fact to venture an assessment of the narrative adequacy of Professor Rosenstock-Huessy's observations. What does impress me is the sense that he has fought his way down through historical incidents to philosophical meanings. Rightly, I think, he declines to put his work on the same level as that of Spengler. This book is no merely external attempt to organize happenings on the plane of "mere happenings." It interprets history by going beneath history. The writer has, I judge, drunk eagerly of the inspiration of Bergson as well as of Nietsche. He rejects both Idealism and Materialism as theories of the world. He rejects both abstract Moralism and abstract Naturalism as theories of human behavior. In this middle ground he finds the insight which makes the history of mankind into an autobiography. By a striking and curious reversal of the method of Plato's Republic he reveals human society in the light of the experience of the human individual. The soldier in the trenches discovers the stuff of which human history is made. That stufE is not mere ideas. It is not material things. "Our passions give life to the world, our collective passions constitute the history of mankind."
In this brief note, I have merely touched upon the outlines of the argument of the book. If there were space, I would like to tell of the criticism of Marxism, the condemnation of Descartes, the theory of the Common Law, the characterization of the ruling groups in Germany, England, France, and Russia, the discussions of language and music, the finding of the tree of mankind in each of its branches, the interpretation of the United States, the placing of Communism and Fascism in the stream of revolutionary tendency. But I hope that the graduates of Dartmouth will read this book for themselves. The books written by its professors reveal, perhaps more clearly than anything else, what a college is doing for its undergraduates.
