Wealth & Money Quote by Ferdinand Lassalle

Money is the real editor in Lassalle's line, and that is exactly the point. Writing in a century when mass literacy, cheaper paper, and faster printing were turning information into an industry, he’s marking the moment the newspaper stops being primarily a civic instrument and becomes a financial machine. The phrasing "from that moment on" implies a hinge in history: a structural shift, not a moral lapse by a few bad actors. It’s about capitalism maturing enough to monetize attention at scale.

Lassalle, a socialist agitator and political organizer in the thick of mid-19th-century European turbulence, isn’t simply sneering at greedy publishers. He’s diagnosing how power learns to wear a new costume. Newspapers, once imagined as vehicles for public reason, become "highly lucrative investment" opportunities - the language of markets colonizing the language of citizenship. The subtext is chillingly modern: once profit becomes the organizing principle, the paper’s incentives tilt toward whatever sells, whichever patrons pay, and whichever narratives protect the business model.

His pairing is surgical: "those with a talent for making money" versus "publishers wanting to gain a fortune". One sounds like meritocratic skill, the other like naked ambition. Either way, the outcome is the same: the press is no longer merely reporting politics; it’s participating in it as capital. In Lassalle’s view, that doesn’t just distort the news. It reorganizes democracy around the interests of those who can afford the printing press - or, in today’s terms, the platform.