Life Lines: Quotations from the Work of Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy

The Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Fund
For four decades, the Fund operated a publishing wing, Argo Books, which published many of Rosenstock-Huessy's English-language works and unpublished manuscripts as books. (The German Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Gesellschaft undertook similar efforts with the German-language works; the Dutch group Respondeo published a number of translations into Dutch.) The Fund recently decided to pass on responsibility for Rosenstock-Huessy's works to another publisher, and his English-language works are now available on Amazon, sold by Wipf and Stock of Eugene, OR, who also publish Jacques Ellul and William Stringfellow.)


About the Author
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy (1888-1973) was a sociologist and social philosopher who, along with his close friend Franz Rosenzweig, and Ferdinand Ebner and Martin Buber, was a major exponent of speech thinking or dialogicism. The central insight of speech thinking is that speech or language is not merely, or even primarily, a descriptive act, but a responsive and creative act, which is the basis of our social existence. The greater part of Rosenstock-Huessy's work was devoted to demonstrating how speech/language, through its unpredictable fecundity, expands our powers and, through its inescapably historical forming character, also binds them. Born in Berlin, Germany into a non-observant Jewish family, he converted to Christianity in his late teens. He met and married Margrit Hussy in 1914. Rosenstock-Huessy served as an officer in the German army during World War I. He then pursued an academic career in Germany as a specialist in medieval law, which was disrupted by the rise of Nazism. In 1933, after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, he immigrated to the United States where he began a new academic career, initially at Harvard University and then at Dartmouth College, where he taught from 1935 to 1957.