Abstract
István Hajnal is one of the most remarkable historians and a forerunner of research on the history of communication. He developed his radical theories on the connections between writing as a technique and social structure mainly in the first half of the twentieth century. He emphasized, in a unique way, the importance of technology for social development arguing that the transformation of social structures and the individual within stand in a mutual and interdependent relation with various technological systems. While doing so he reconsidered Max Weber’s concepts of traditionalism and rationalism from a so to speak Heideggerian angle.
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Notes
Cf. the introduction to Glatz (1993).
Lakatos (2001, p. 16) cites the evidence for this.
His first papers on the Middle Ages were published by the Bibliothéque Nationale and the British Museum.
In this essay Zolnai also refers to Hajnal's achievments in “the historiography of culture,” namely that based on his comparative palaeography one could infer French cultural influence in the regions north of the Alps.
To support this he relies on extensive philological material, e.g. from the history of Hungarian diplomacy.
His research concerning the 12–13th century was summed up in his habilitation dissertation entitled Írástörténet az írásbeliség felújulása korából[Palaeography from the Period of the Renewal of Literacy] (Hajnal 1921).
An important remark from Hajnal’s (1933, p. 41) Mieses-criticism: “Therefore it is not religion that creates writing, but in some ways writing arouses religious ideas.”
On his international reception see Nyíri 1994, pp. 136–137, 142.
Hajnal (e.g. 1939, p. 178) also made critical remarks on Dilthey.
“Hajnal is relevant because the spirit of the age now is capable of accepting and assimilating the philosophical thoughts hiden behind his historiographic works […] Hajnal sees the ‘history of communication’ as an essential dimension in the course of history. He assumes the shift from orality to literacy—in Greece, and later in the European Middle Ages—to be a sociologically and epistemologically definitive one, being a transition from traditional to rational, and in the current flourishing of literacy he discovers the origin of a potential new orality.” (Nyíri 1994, p. 132).
As Hajnal says: “writing is not the cause of this development. It is not an effective force. It will not imply any development in itself. But without it, it is impossible.” (Hajnal 1932a, p. 17).
While considering the thought- and community-forming function of literacy Hajnal goes beyond Spengler, Bronislaw Malinowski (who in 1923 discussed the semantic differences of orality and literacy), Milman Parry (who exposed the oral nature of the Homeric texts at the end of the 1920s), and even the Durkheim disciple, Maurice Halbwachs (who in 1925 pointed out the fictitious nature of collective memory) (Cf. Nyíri 1994, p. 136).
In the second half of the twentieth century many of Hajnal's claims are echoed by Anglo-Saxon studies discussing antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Modern period's mediahistory ranging from the earlier mentioned Innis through Michael Clanchy and Brian Stock to the anthropologist Jack Goody (Cf. also Briggs and Burke 2002, p. 11).
See in Hajnal (1933, p. 48): “Spirit is rather a consequence than a cause. Geistesgechichte in the field of modern economic development correctly states that the basic condition of this development is the general rationalization and calculability of life. However, to explain this rationalization with a rational mind is as impossible as to explain the economic boost with an economic spirit.”
This critical remark concerning the event-like nature of the effect of religious ideas is quite unlikely to be justified by Weber’s texts. The spirit of capitalism as a principe with ethical aspects is indeed the joint product of a religious ethics and the practice of society (Weber 1972, pp. 53–57).
László Lakatos comments on this: “There is no use in the initial supposition that rationalism is connected to a special type of writing characteristic only to Europe, and we should also avoid the assumption that its carrier is a kind of mentality.” (Lakatos 2001, p. 20). Although the case is a bit more complex here, as Hajnal connected the mass expansion of literacy with European social development.
Hajnal (1937, pp. 142–143) writes: “The real innovation in general thus was the development of human skills. It has to be social in its most essential sense: even if it does not have a direct benefit, it at least raises self-consciousness and the trust in personal skills. Only this type of innovation spreads and becomes practice in every sense.”
“The lack of development of the antique technology was not because it was dependent on slavery. The cause for this is that the slaves had to be utilised as a shockingly abrupt perfection expected from technology.” (Hajnal 1944, p. 345).
“In the Middle Ages technology became the expression of experiences in a material form, the experience of connection with nature, and the experience of nature integrated into society. Obviously, it is not mere physical activity but rather the realisation of the creative mind in material ways.” (Hajnal 1949, p. 428). Hajnal’s personal conviction in connection with the medieval development of technology as establishing the breakthrough of modern technology is similar to Marc Bloch’s more recent notions (Kovács 2004, p. 253).
Hajnal also suggested that human beings are affected by the mass-produced and multiplicated texts in the same way as they have been by large-scale industrial technology: “Hajnal characterised modern culture as a period suffering from ‘letter-addiction’, and the only way out is to return to ‘the reality of experiences.’” (Kondor 2004, p. 225).
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Szirák, P. Socialising technology: the archives of István Hajnal. Stud East Eur Thought 60, 135–147 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-008-9053-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-008-9053-z