On and Out of Revolution: Between public law and religion

Abstract

While advocates and critics of liberal republics disagree on whether “pure politics” requires ultimate authorization both call upon theories that explain all revolutions as attempts to transcend political theology for the sake of a purely immanent political realm. Their secularist, “political”/programmatic views and hopes on revolution are here contrasted with a reading of Eugene Rosenstock-Huessy’s Out of Revolution whereby “revolution” is read as the autobiography of western man written through a series of great European Revolutions. As products of changes in the vocabulary of occidental Christian political theology these revolutions were structurally unable to transcend authority; but they were able to project western power around the world. Lacking in awareness of its religious vocabulary the late-modern subject inherits this global western power but can no longer rebel as before. The article summarizes Rosenstock-Huessy’s genealogy of revolution in Section II; in Sections I and 3 his insights are brought to bear on theories of revolution-qua-secularization be it in the form of the utopian overcoming of “religion” (Arendt) or in the form of overcoming Christianity’s fabulous and real history – its political theology – while retaining its universality for the sake of emancipation of a “universal” – not western – victim.