Abstract
Among the anti-Spenglerian reactions of the 1920s and 1930s - in addition to the polemic launched early on by Robert Musil - the studies in philosophy of history by the Protestant lay theologian and jurist Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy take on singular importance. With his early work, published in 1938 (the title of which provides the heading for this chapter), Rosenstock emerged as the spokesman for a radical-progressive reinterpretation of the European history of mind and society.
In Rosenstock's eyes, Europe's second millennium is the long trace of a history of freedom driven, overtly or covertly, by Christian motives. This is achieved in a series of " revolutions ", the readings and results of which forge what are known as " national characters " - a concept that attempts to avoid essentialist or genetic implications altogether. Beginning with the pontifical revolution of the 11th century, which played a decisive role for Italy and enabled the Church to detach itself from the powers of this world, it continues with the German Reformation which, in Rosenstock's eyes, brought about the emancipation of princes from the tutelage exercised by the Old Empire, to the English Revolution of the seventeenth century, in which the country's middle and lower nobility, the gentry, obtained the domestication of the crown through the sophistical construction of the King in Parliament, thus setting in motion the process of the parliamentarization of sovereignty.
With his impressive interpretation of the French Revolution and his highly problematic analysis of the Russian Revolution, Rosenstock-Huessy cleared a path that enabled him to approach the realities of the 20th century.
A few short years after his 1931 coup, in 1938, Rosenstock-Huessy completed his grand portrait of the European world with the panoramic painting Out of Revolution, which the author - thus approaching the God's eye perspective adopted by - unabashedly presents as a " Autobiography of Western Man ".
If one of the elements of irony characterizing the Spenglerian conception of history was its outflow into scientifically-based pessimism - with, as a final perspective, the " fellahization " of the masses -, Rosenstock's epic of the Europeans results in the ironic effect that anyone who has not read his own biography is now considered a European.
