I love the Internet, for all the usual reasons, but today it helped solve a tiny puzzle over a footnote in a book called Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson. In the book (first published back in 1983), Anderson quoted a line from Hegel that has been much copied. Here’s an excerpt from the London Review of Books:
After reading Anderson, one never opens the paper over breakfast without somehow remembering:
“The significance of this mass ceremony – Hegel observed that newspapers serve modern man as a substitute for morning prayers – is paradoxical.” [my italics]
Now I love that quote too (since it so resonates with my own opinions) and I wanted to find the original. The chunk of Anderson from the LRB above is from page 35 of my edition. So I checked the footnote, wondering where he got it from.
That prints a line from a 1968 article (subs. req.) by historian Elizabeth Eisenstein (“Printed materials encouraged silent adherence to causes whose advocates could not be located in any one parish and who addressed an invisible public from afar.”) But that line isn’t Hegel’s, it’s Eisenstein’s, and her very enjoyable and thoughtful piece (included in this book) doesn’t have the quote either.
So, does the quote exist? Or is it simply too good to be true? Well – tiny drum roll, curtain draws back – here it is (awkwardly translated, schade):
Reading the newspaper in early morning is a kind of realistic morning prayer. One orients one’s attitude against the world and toward God [in one case], or toward that which the world is [in the other]. The former gives the same security as the latter, in that one knows where one stands.
It’s quoted by academic Susan Buck-Morss, and she sources it to page 543 of the 1977 reprint of the nineteenth century biography of Hegel by Karl Rosenkranz, at which point we just have to believe her!
Interestingly, Rosenkranz’s book isn’t in Anderson’s bibliography – still he must have noted it down from somewhere. Interestingly too, Buck-Morss uses the quote to raise the influence of newspaper reading on Hegel (Mr Abstract himself)…but in journalism, sometimes you have to know when to stop.
2 responses to “Solving a tiny footnote puzzle in journalism history”
Well, Hegel is one of very few philosophers I never managed to read – with his page long, or more, sentences he’s a very demanding read, though easier in English than German or Norwegian (in the latter two languages his sentences just go on and on and on). Several years ago, in Uni, when I ‘interviewed’ all the major philosophers on a new Norwegian law about Sunday shopping, Hegel was the only one without a proper comment (his entry went something like ‘we did get a reply from Hegel, but didn’t quite understand what he said’). Einstein’s book is brilliant though.
That sounds like a great piece!