Communist Hobgoblin Controversy Goes Mainstream

Letter in the London Review of Books

London Review of Books 9 August 2023

LETTERS

Spectre

David Ireland mentions that Helen Macfarlane, translator of The Communist Manifesto in 1850, is ‘widely derided’ for her rendering of ‘ein Gespenst’ as ‘a frightful hobgoblin’ (Letters, 13 July). At the time, ‘hobgoblin’ was sound literary currency. In 1684, John Bunyan’s ‘Who Would True Valour See’ has ‘Hobgoblin, nor foul Fiend/ Can daunt his Spirit.’ In Jeremy Bentham’s Book of Fallacies (1824), ‘The hobgoblin, the eventual appearance of which is denounced by this argument, is anarchy, which tremendous spectre has for its forerunner the monster innovation’. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Self-Reliance (which Macfarlane makes reference to in her own writings for the Red Republican) says: ‘A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.’

David Black
London N22