 Against philosophers and theologians, he saw his task as restoring our attunement to the potencies embedded in our speech and institutions so that we could draw upon the power of past times in order to strengthen our openness to the promise of the future in the present. To this end, while his corpus cuts across numerous disciplines, his major systematic work, one rewritten throughout the course of his life, was his two part Sociology  Im Kreuz der Wirchlichkeit (In the Cross of Reality)—the first volume of which is to appear with Transaction in 2017: volume one originally appeared (to use the English title) in 1925 as The Forces of Community, and then reworked as  The Hegemony of Spaces; volume two being The Full Count of the Times. His social philosophy is concerned with how, when a world implodes on or devours them—through what he terms the four social diseases of anarchy, decadence, revolution and war (1970a, 11–16)—people can escape the tyranny of forces that have come to rule the space in which they dwell by founding a new time which will then open up other spatial possibilities. For him, then, the key to human freedom is the capacity both to found the new and draw upon the powers encapsulated in bodies of time past which enable us to live in a present in which we feel blessed by the future. Rosenstock-Huessy repeatedly argues that philosophy generally is particularly weak in assisting us with this task and it is ultimately to sociology that Rosenstock-Huessy turned as ‘the way to win again our freedom over spaces and through times’ (2009,1, 22). Hence against the Cartesian cogito, which he saw as providing the underpinning formulation of the philosophy of modernity, Rosenstock-Huessy retorts with the much more archaic Respondeo etsi mutabor—‘I respond although I will be changed’ (1938, 817–830; 1970b, 17–33). In other words, we are fundamentally responsive creatures—and our creations are shaped by our responses either to the weight and push of the past, the burdens or joys of the present or the pull and call of the future. Like Vico, whom Rosenstock-Huessy greatly admired, he believes we are inescapably rooted in history, even though our great revolutions attempt to rip us out of it, in order to begin anew and build a much better world, thereby opening up new paths of  self-hood.[5] 