Daniel Bell on the Significance of Walter Benjamin
Daniel Bell was a sociologist and a professor emeritus at Harvard University, best known for his seminal contributions to the study of post-industrialism. Bell, who passed away last month, has been described as “one of the leading American intellectuals of the postwar era.” His three best known works are The End of Ideology, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society and The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism.
Below, Harvard University Press Executive Editor for the Humanities Lindsay Waters remembers how Bell convinced the board of the importance of Walter Benjamin’s work, which resulted in HUP publishing of 3,000 pages of Benjamin’s essays.
The distinguished German publisher Siegfried Unseld (head of Suhrkamp Verlag) came one day from Frankfurt to Cambridge to see Arthur and me to bring me a plan for a comprehensive but nonetheless selective edition of the writings of Walter Benjamin. The list of what Unseld thought needed to be in what would have to be a multi-volume work was extensive. My postmodernist friends, the ones who liked Heidegger, had introduced me to Benjamin. To gather firepower to win the Syndics discussion of the Benjamin, I turned to the then Harvard art historian T.J. Clark, and he wrote a great review of the plans for the edition. But when we got to the Syndics meeting I was overwhelmed by worry. How could the august Syndics approve the publication of volumes of a man Selected Writings whose dissertation at the University of Frankfurt was turned down? Who was this schlemiel Walter Benjamin, the little rag-picker? How could publishing thousands of pages of this slacker-dude’s essays and notebooks be grand enough for Harvard University Press? Before the meeting I’d done no lobbying of the Syndics. At the meeting an inevitable question arose: “OK, he sounds like an impressive critic and thinker, but why do we have to publish thousands of pages of his work?” And Dan answered without a pause: “Because he is a critic, and he’s not a theorist. If he were a theorist, he’d have presented his ideas systematically, and we could publish a well-chosen selection of his work that would represent his thinking beautifully, but he’s a critic, not a theorist, which means his ideas are scattered across all the pages of his work, and the only way to publish his work adequately is to publish hundreds and hundreds of pages of it so readers can see how his ideas emerge as he gets caught up in analyzing hundreds of concrete situations.” Arthur was convinced and the Board was convinced, and we have now published about three thousand pages of Benjamin’s writings, including an edition this spring of his Early Writings, 1910-1917.
If you’d like to experience Walter Benjamin’s work yourself, stop by Art in the Age and check out our selection of Benjamin essays, including the editions from HUP mentioned above.
