Revolutions, wars and the Jewish and Christian contribution to redemptive cosmopolitanism in Franz Rosenzweig and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy

Abstract

This article addresses the important contribution of Judaism and Christianity to cosmopolitanism through the works of Franz Rosenzweig and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy. It argues that while the usual approach to cosmopolitanism is to consider its philosophical origins, the European roots of cosmopolitanism as an actual process are deeply indebted to the central importance of redemption within the Jewish and Christian faiths. Whereas Rosenzweig explores the mutual interdependence and respective social significance of Jews and Christians (in spite of the fundamental inimicalness between these two faiths), Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy argues that the messianic logic inherent in the redemptive tradition also spawned the messianic aspirations behind the great European revolutions, including the anti-Christian and atheistic French and Russian. The article concludes by looking at the United States after the Second World War as continuing the ‘mission’ of redemptive cosmopolitanism.

Keywords:

• Cosmopolitanism
• Judaism
• Christianity
• Franz Rosenzweig
• Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy
• redemption
• revolution

Notes

1. Cf. Nussbaum, “Kant and Stoic Consciousness;” Brown, Grounding Cosmopolitanism: From Kant to the Idea of a Cosmopolitan Culture; and Kleingeld, Kant and Cosmopolitanism.

2. Benhabib, Another Cosmopolitanism, 20.

3. Benhabib, 16.

4. Behabib, Another Cosmopolitanism, 16, also 18.

5. Delanty, The Cosmopolitan Imagination: The Renewal of Critical Social Theory, 6.

6. Beck, The Cosmopolitan Vision, 14.

7. Fine, Cosmopolitanism.

8. Delanty, The Cosmopolitan Imagination: The Renewal of Critical Social Theory, 28.

9. Rosenstock-Huessy, Out of Revolution: Autobiography of Western Man, 755–8, and Speech and Reality, 40–2, and Planetary Service: A Way into the Third Millennium.

10. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, 247.

11. Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, 292–3.

12. Rosenstock-Huessy, Judaism Despite Christianity: The 1916 Wartime Correspondence between Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Franz Rosenzweig.

13. See Cristaudo, Religion, Redemption and Revolution: The New Speech Thinking of Franz Rosenzweig and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, and Stahmer, “Franz Rosenzweig’s Letters to Margrit Rosenstock-Huessy, 1917–1922.”

14. Letter from Eugen to Gritli [Margrit] Huessy, 1.11.24, available in the Rosenstock-Huessy Collection at Dartmouth College.

15. Rosenstock-Huessy, Im Kreuz der Wirklichkeit: Eine nach-goethische Soziologie, 3 vols. Volume 1 has now been translated by Jurgen Lawrenz, with Frances Huessy and myself, and is to appear with Transaction in Spring/Summer 2017.

16. Bouretz, Witnesses for the Future: Philosophy and Messianism; Cohen, Elevations: The Height of the Good in Rosenzweig and Levinas; Gibbs, Correlations in Rosenzweig and Levinas; Rosenstock, Philosophy and the Jewish Question: Mendelssohn, Rosenzweig and Beyond; Simon, Art and Responsibility: A Phenomenology of the Diverging Paths of Rosenzweig and Heidegger.

17. Rosenzweig, The New Thinking, 69.

18. E.g. Putman, “Introduction,” to Rosenzweig, Understanding the Sick and The Healthy: A View of World, Man and God, 18, and Palmer and Schwartz in Rosenzweig, “Innerlich bleibt die Welt eine”. Ausgewählte Texte von Franz Rosenzweig über den Islam, 7–32 and 111–47.

19. This is behind Pollock’s argument about Rosenzweig replacing one All with another. See Pollock, Benjamin. Franz Rosenzweig and the Systematic Task of Philosophy, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

20. Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, 239–40.

21. Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, 241.

22. Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, 323.

23. Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, 320–1.

24. Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, 297.

25. Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, 299.

26. Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, 302.

27. Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, 302–3.

28. Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, 293.

29. Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, 295.

30. Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, 292–3, 304–5.

31. Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, 301.

32. See footnote 11, Rosenzweig, Philosophical and Theological Writings, 52.

33. Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, 303.

34. The importance of this formulation was conveyed to me in personal correspondence by Michael Gormann-Thelen.

35. Rosenstock-Huessy, Speech and Reality, 40.

36. Thanks to Rosenstock-Huessy’s student, Harold Berman, Rosenstock-Huessy’s term “Papal Revolution” has become a reasonably widely used term for the event that used to generally be classified as the Gregorian Reform or Investiture conflict. Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western legal Tradition, vol. 1.

37. Important contributions on this vast topic on Geneva’s impact upon the North American founding include: Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century; M. Kingdon, Calvin and Calvinism: Sources of Democracy; Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics; Wolin, Politics and Vision; Cuddihy, No Offense: Civil Religion and Protestant Taste; Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism.

38. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition.