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Raymond Williams - Keywords CITY City has existed in English since 13th century, but its distinctive modern use to indicate a large or very large town, and its consequent use to distinguish urban areas from rural areas or country, date from 16th century. The later indication and distinction are obviously related to the increasing importance of urban life from 16th century onwards, but until 19th century this was often specialized to the capital city, London. The more general use corresponds to the rapid development of urban hving during the Industrial Revolution, which made England by middle period of 19th century the first society in the history of the world in which a majority of the population lived in towns. City is derived from (Old French) cite and (Latin) civitas. But civitas was not city in the modern sense (that was urbs ), civitas was the general noun derived from civis ( citizen), which is nearer our modern sense of a ‘national’. Civitas was then the body of citizens rather than a particular settlement or type of settlement. It was so applied by Roman writers to the tribes of Gaul. In a long and complicated development civitas and the words derived from it became specialized to the chief town of such a state, and in ecclesiastical use to the cathedral town. The earlier English words had been borough → burh (Old English) and town → tun (Old English). Town developed from its original sense of an enclosure or yard to a group of buildings in such an enclosure (as which it survives in some modern village and village-division names) to the beginnings of its modem sense in 13th century. Borough and city became often interchangeable, and there are various legal distinctions between them in different periods and types of medieval and post-medieval government. One such distinction of city, from 16th century, was the presence of a cathedral, and this is still residually though now wrongly asserted. When city began to be distinguished from town in terms of size, mainly from 19th century but with precedents in relation to the predominance of London from 16th century, each was still administratively a borough, and this word became specialized to a form of local government or administration. From 13th century city became in any case a more dignifying word than town , it was often thus used of Biblical villages, or to indicate an ideal or significant settlement. More generally, by 16th century city was in regular use for London, and in 17th century city and country contrasts were very common. City in the specialized sense of a financial and commercial centre, derived from actual location in the City of London, was widely used from the first period of 18th century, when this financial and commercial activity notably expanded. The city as a really distinctive order of settlement, implying a whole different way of life, is not fully established, with its modern implications, until the first period of 19th century, though the idea has a very long history, from Renaissance and even Classical thought. The modern emphasis can be traced in the word, in the increasing abstraction of city as an adjective from particular places or particular administrative forms, and in the increasing generalization of descriptions of large-scale modern urban living. The modern city of millions of inhabitants is thus generally if indefinitely distinguished from several kinds of city (cathedral city, university city, provincial city). At the same time the modern city has been subdivided, as in the increasing contemporary use of inner city , a term made necessary by the changing status of suburb. This had been, from 17th century, an outer and inferior area, and the sense survives in some uses of suburban to indicate narrowness. But from the last period of 19th century there was a class shift in areas of preference; the suburbs attracted residents and the inner city was then often left to offices, shops and the poor.
CIVILIZATION
Civilization is now generally used to describe an achieved state or condition of organized social life. It referred originally to a process, and in some contexts this sense still survives. Civilization was preceded in English by civilize , which appeared in the first period of 17th century, from 16th century civiliser (French), civilizare (Medieval Latin) - to make a criminal matter into a civil matter, and thence, by extension, to bring within a form of social organization. The rw (ultimate traceable word, from which ‘root’ meanings are derived) is civil from civilis (Latin). Civil was thus used in English from 14th century, and by 16th century had acquired the extended senses of orderly and educated. Hooker in 1594 wrote of ‘Civil Society’ - a phrase that was to become central in 17th century and especially 18th century - but the main development towards description of an ordered society was civility, fw civilitas, mL - community. Civility was often used in C17 and C18 where we would now expect civilization, and as late as 1772 Boswell, visiting Johnson, ‘found him busy, preparing a fourth edition of his folio Dictionary ... He would not admit civilization, but only civility. With great deference to him, I thought civilization, from to civilize, better in the sense opposed to barbarity, than civility,, Boswell had correctly identified the main use that was coming through, which emphasized not so much a process as a state of social order and refinement, especially in conscious historical or cultural contrast with barbarism. Civilization appeared in Ash’s dictionary of 1775, to indicate both the state and the process. By 1C18 and then very markedly in C19 it became common. In one way the new sense of civilization, from 1C18, is a specific combination of the ideas of a process and an achieved condition. It has behind it the general spirit of the Enlightenment, with its emphasis on secular and progressive human self-development. Civilization expressed this sense of historical process, but also celebrated the associated sense of modernity: an achieved condition of refinement and order. In the Romantic reaction against these claims for civilization, alternative words were developed to express other kinds of human development and other criteria for human well-being, notably CULTURE (q.v.). In 1C18 the association of civilization with refinement of manners was normal in both English and French, Burke wrote in Reflections on the French Revolution: ‘our manners, our civilization, and all the good things which are connected with manners, and with civilization’. Here the terms seem almost synonymous, though we must note that manners has a wider reference than in ordinary modern usage. From eC19 the development of civilization towards its modern meaning, in which as much emphasis is put on social order and on ordered knowledge (later, SCIENCE (q.v.)) as on refinement of manners and behaviour, is on the whole earlier in French than in English. But there was a decisive moment in English in the ISSOs, when Mill, in his essay on Coleridge, wrote: “Take for instance the question how far mankind has gained by civilization. One observer is forcibly struck by the multiplication of physical comforts; the advancement and diffusion of knowledge; the decay of superstition; the facilities of mutual intercourse; the softening of manners; the decline of war and personal conflict; the progressive limitation of the tyranny of the strong over the weak; the great works accomplished throughout the globe by the co-operation of multitudes…” This is Mill’s range of positive examples of civilization, and it is a fully modern range. He went on to describe negative effects: loss of independence, the creation of artificial wants, monotony, narrow mechanical understanding, inequality and hopeless poverty. The contrast made by Coleridge and others was between civilization and culture or cultivation: “The permanent distinction and the occasional contrast between cultivation and civilization… The permanency of the nation… and its progressiveness and personal freedom… depend on a continuing and progressive civilization. But civilization is itself but a mixed good, if not far more a corrupting influence, the hectic of disease, not the bloom
There is also a specialized metropolitan use, as in the postal service, in which all areas outside the capital city are ‘country’. Countryman carries both political and rural senses, but the latter is stronger and the former is usually extended to fellow-countryman. CULTURE Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language. This is so partly because of its intricate historical development, in several European languages, but mainly because it has now come to be used for important concepts in several distinct intellectual disciplines and in several distinct and incompatible systems of thought. The fw is cultura, L, from rw colere-, L. Colere had a range of meanings: inhabit, cultivate, protect, honour with worship. Some of these meanings eventually separated, though still with occasional overlapping, in the derived nouns. Thus ‘inhabit’ developed through colonus, L to colony. ‘Honour with worship’ developed through cultus, L to cult. Cultura took on the main meaning of cultivation or tending, including, as in Cicero, cultura animi, though with sub- sidiary medieval meanings of honour and worship (cf. in English culture as ‘worship’ in Caxton (1483)). The French forms of cultura were couture, oF, which has since developed its own specialized meaning, and later culture, which by eC15 had passed into English. The primary meaning was then in husbandry, the tending of natural growth. Culture in all its early uses was a noun of process: the tending of something, basically crops or animals. The subsidiary coulter - plouglishare, had travelled by a different linguistic route, from culter, L - plouglishare, culter, oE, to the variant English spellings culter, colter, coulter and as late as eC17 culture (Webster, Duchess of Malfi, III, ii: ‘hot burning cultures’). This provided a further basis for the important next stage of meaning, by metaphor. From eC16 the tending of natural growth was extended to a process of human development, and this, alongside the original meaning in husbandry, was the main sense until 1C18 and eC19. Thus More: ‘to the culture and profit of their minds’; Bacon: ‘the culture and manurance of minds’ (1605); Hobbes: ‘a culture of their minds’ (1651); Johnson: ‘she neglected the culture of her understanding’ (1759). At various points in this development two crucial changes occurred: first, a degree of habituation to the metaphor, which made the sense of human tending direct; second, an extension of particular processes to a general process, which the word could abstractly carry. It is of course from the latter development that the independent noun culture began its complicated modern history, but the process of change is so intricate, and the latencies of meaning are at times so close, that it is not possible to give any definite date. Culture as an independent noun, an abstract process or the product of such a process, is not important before 1C and is not common before mC19. But the early stages of this development were not sudden. There is an interesting use in Milton, in the second (revised) edition of The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth (1660): ‘spread much more Knowledg and Civility, yea. Religion, through all parts of the Land, by communicating the natural heat of Government and Culture more distributively to all extreme parts, which now lie num and neglected’. Here the metaphorical sense (‘natural heat’) still appears to be present, and civility (cf. CIVILIZATION) is still written where in C19 we would normally expect culture. Yet we can also read ‘government and culture’ in a quite modern sense. Milton, from the tenor of his whole argument, is writing about a general social process, and this is a definite stage of development. In C1S England this general process acquired definite class associations though cultivation and cultivated were more commonly used for this. But there is a letter of 1730 (Bishop of Killala, to Mrs Clayton; cit Plumb, England in the Eighteenth Century) which has this clear sense: ‘it has not been customary for persons of either birth or culture to breed up their children to the Church’. Akenside (Pleasures of Imagination, 1744) wrote: ‘... nor purple state nor culture can bestow’.
Wordsworth wrote ‘where grace of culture hath been utterly unknown’ (1805), and Jane Austen (Emma, 1816) ‘every advantage of discipline and culture’. It is thus clear that culture was developing in English towards some of its modern senses before the decisive effects of a new social and intellectual movement. But to follow the development through this movement, in 1C18 and eC19, we have to look also at developments in other languages and especially in German. In French, until C18, culture was always accompanied by a grammatical form indicating the matter being cultivated, as in the English usage already noted. Its occasional use as an independent noun dates from mC18, rather later than similar occasional uses in English. The independent noun civilization also emerged in mC18; its relationship to culture has since been very complicated (cf. CIVILIZATION and discussion below). There was at this point an important development in German: the word was borrowed from French, spelled first (1C18) Cultur and from C19 Kultur. Its main use was still as a synonym for civilization: first in the abstract sense of a general process of becoming ‘civilized’ or ‘cultivated’; second, in the sense which had already been established for civilization by the historians of the Enlightenment, in the popular C18 form of the universal histories, as a description of the secular process of human development. There was then a decisive change of use in Herder. In his unfinished Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind (1784-91) he wrote of Cultur: ‘nothing is more indeterminate than this word, and nothing more deceptive than its application to all nations and periods’. He attacked the assumption of the universal histories that ‘civilization’ or ‘culture’ - the historical self-development of humanity - was what we would now call a unilinear process, leading to the high and dominant point of C18 European culture. Indeed he attacked what he called European subjugation and domination of the four quarters of the globe, and wrote: Men of all the quarters of the globe, who have perished over the ages, you have not lived solely to manure the earth with your ashes, so that at the end of time your posterity should be made happy by European culture. The very thought of a superior European culture is a blatant insult to the majesty of Nature. It is then necessary, he argued, in a decisive innovation, to speak of ‘cultures’ in the plural: the specific and variable cultures of different nations and periods, but also the specific and variable cultures of social and economic groups within a nation. This sense was widely developed, in the Romantic movement, as an alternative to the orthodox and dominant ‘civilization’. It was fir^t used to emphasize national and traditional cultures, including the new concept of folk-culture (cf. FOLK). It was later used to attack what was seen as the MECHANICAL’ (q.v.) character of the new civilization then emerging: both for its abstract rationalism and for the ‘inhumanity’ of current industrial development. It was used to distinguish between ‘human’ and ‘material’ development. Politically, as so often in this period, it veered between radicalism and reaction and very often, in the confusion of major social change, fused elements of both, (It should also be noted, though it adds to the real complication, that the same kind of distinction, especially between ‘material’ and ‘spiritual’ development, was made by von Humboldt and others, until as late as 1900, with a reversal of the terms, culture being material and civilization spiritual. In general, however, the opposite distinction was dominant.) On the other hand, from the 1840s in Germany, Kultur was being used in very much the sense in which civilization had been used in C18 universal histories. The decisive innovation is G. F. Klemm’s Allgemeine Kulturgeschichte der Menschheit - ‘General Cultural History of Mankind’ (1843-52) - which traced human development from savagery through domestication to freedom. Although the American anthropologist Morgan, tracing comparable stages, used ‘Ancient Society’. with a culmination in Civilization, Klemm’s sense was sustained, and was directly followed in English by Tylor in Primitive Culture
complexity, that is to say, is not finally in the word but in the problems which its variations of use significantly indicate. It is necessary to look also at some associated and derived words. Cultivation and cultivated went through the same metaphorical extension from a physical to a social or educational sense in C17, and were especially significant words in C18. Coleridge, making a classical eC19 distinction between civilization and culture, wrote (1830): ‘the permanent distinction, and occasional contrast, between cultivation and civilization’. The noun in this sense has effectively disappeared but the adjective is still quite common, especially in relation to manners and tastes. The important adjective cultural appears to date from the 1870s; it became common by the 1890s. The word is only available, in its modern sense, when the independent noun, in the artistic and intellectual or anthropological senses, has become familiar. HostiUty to the word culture in English appears to date from the controversy around Arnold’s views. It gathered force in 1C and eC20, in association with a comparable hostility to aesthete and AESTHETIC (q.v.). Its association with class distinction produced the mime-word culchah. There was also an area of hostility associated with anti-German feeling, during and after the 1914-18 War, in relation to propaganda about Kultur. The central area of hostility has lasted, and one element of it has been emphasized by the recent American phrase culture-vulture. It is significant that virtually all the hostility (with the sole exception of the temporary anti- German association) has been connected with uses involving claims to superior knowledge (cf. the noun INTELLECTUAL), refinement (culchah) and distinctions between ‘high’ art (culture) and popular art and entertainment. It thus records a real social history and a very difficult and confused phase of social and cultural development. It is interesting that the steadily extending social and anthropological use of culture and cultural and such formations as sub-culture (the culture of a distinguishable smaller group) has, except in certain areas (notably popular entertainment), either bypassed or effectively diminished the hostility and its associated unease and embarrassment. The recent use of culturalism, to indicate a methodological contrast with structuralism in social analysis, retains many of the earlier difficulties, and does not always bypass the hostility. IMPROVE Improve is an interesting example of the development of a general meaning from a more specific meaning. It came into English, at first with many variations of spelling, from fw en preu, oF, rw pros -profit. In its earliest uses it referred to operations for monetary profit, where it was often equivalent to invest, and especially to operations on or connected with land, often the enclosing of common or waste land. From C16 to 1C18 the predominant meaning was that of profitable operations in connection with land; in C18 it was a key word in the development of a modernizing agrarian capitalism. The sense of ‘using to make a profit’ is retained in surviving phrases such as ‘improve the occasion’ and ‘improve the hour’. The wider meaning of ‘making something better’ developed from C and became established, often in direct overlap with economic operations, in C18. The sense was noted and criticized by Cowper: “Improvement too, the idol of the age. Is fed with many a victim.” (The Task, iii, 764-5, 1785) From mC18 there is the characteristic ‘improve oneself, and such phrases as ‘improving reading’ followed. Jane Austen was aware of the sometimes contradictory senses of improvement, where economic operations for profit might not lead to, or might hinder, social and moral refinement. In Persuasion (ch. v), a landowning family was described as ‘in a state of alteration, perhaps of improvement’. The separation of the general meaning from the economic meaning is thereafter normal, but the complex underlying connection between ‘making something better’ and ‘making a profit out of something’ is significant
when the social and economic history during which the word developed in these ways is remembered. We can compare the corresponding development of interest. ORGANIC Organic has a specific meaning in modern English, to refer to the processes or products of life, in human beings, animals or plants. It has also an important applied or metaphorical meaning, to indicate certain kinds of relationship and thence certain kinds of society. In this latter sense it is an especially difficult word, and its history is in any case exceptionally complicated. Organ first appeared in English, from C13, to signify a musical instrument; something like the modern organ, in this context, appeared from C14. It had fw organe, oF, from organum, L, rw organon, Gk - an instrument, engine or tool, with two derived senses: the abstract ‘instrument’ - agency, and musical instrument. There was a later applied sense of organon, which was repeated in all the derived words: the eye as a ‘seeing instrument’, the ear a ‘hearing instrument’ and so on, whence organ as a part of the body, in English from eC15. But the full range of meanings - musical instrument, engine, instrument (organ of opinion) and part of the body -was present in English in C16. Organic, appearing from C16, followed first the sense of engine or tool. North, translating Plutarch in 1569, wrote: ‘to frame instruments and Engines (which are called mechanicall, or organicall)’. This is instructive in view of the later conventional contrast between organic and mechanical. It is from the sense of organ as instrument or agency that organize and organization in their modern senses eventually developed, mainly from 1C18 and eC19 (compare the developments of society and civilization). But each word was used earlier with the distinct physical reference, as, from C17, was organism. Organic followed a different course, and indeed by C19 could be used in contrast with organized. The source of its common specific modern meaning is the major development of natural history and biology in C18, when it acquired a dominant reference to things living and growing. Organic chemistry was defined in eC19, acquiring the later more specialized sense of the chemistry of compounds of carbon from c. 1860. It was this development in biology and the ‘life sciences’ which laid the basis for the distinction between the former synonyms organic and MECHANICAL (q.v.). The distinction was made in the Romantic movement, probably first in German, among the Nature Philosophers. Coleridge distinguished between organic and inorganic bodies or systems; in the organic ‘the whole is everything and the parts are nothing’, while in the inorganic ‘the whole is nothing more than a collection of the individual parts’. This has obvious connections with the developing sense of organized and of organism, but the distinction was profoundly influenced by the contrast with mechanical, in opposition to mechanical philosophy and, unquestionably, to the new significance of machines in the Industrial Revolution. When applied to social organization, organic moved towards a contemporary specialization of natural: an organic society was one that has ‘grown’ rather than been ‘made’. This acquired early relevance in criticism of revolutionary societies or proposals as artificial and against the ‘natural order’ of things. It later acquired relevance to contrasts between primarily agricultural and primarily INDUSTRIAL (q.v.) societies. Carlyle still had the complex sense in mind when he wrote of ‘taming’ the French Revolution, ‘so that its intrinsic purpose can be made good, that it may become organic, and be able to live among other organisms and formed things’. Yet Burke, on the same subject, had used an opposite sense: comparing the English of 1688 with the French of 1789 he wrote: ‘the, acted by the ancient organized states in the shape of their old organization, and not by the organic moleculae of a disbanded people’. Moleculae, here, reminds us of a developing sense of atomistic to indicate relatively disorganized or disintegrating forms of society and social thought.
Inventions’ (1659). This range of uses continued, and was joined by a popular use as a description of certain places: ‘a very romantic seate’ (Evelyn, D/ary, 1654). Romantic as a new kind of description of a literary, artistic and philosophical movement was essentially a development of eC19, primarily in Germany and France (A. W. Schlegel and Mme de Stael). Its English use was heavily influenced by German thought (cf. Lovejoy and Eichner) where the particular distinction between Romantic and Classical originated (most influentially in Friedrich Schlegel, from 1798). Yet Romantic as now used of the Romantic movement or the Romantic poets (of 1C18 and eC19) did not come into general use before the 1880s. Moreover, except in specific contexts, with reference to particular periods and styles, Romantic in this sense has remained difficult to separate from the earlier general uses. The existing sense of a free or liberated imagination was undoubtedly greatly strengthened. An extended sense of liberation from rules and conventional forms was also powerfully developed, not only in art and literature and music but also in feeling and BEHAVIOUR (q.v.). A corresponding sense of strong feeling, but also of fresh and authentic feeling, was also important. The romantic hero developed from an extravagant to an ideal character. New valuations of the ‘irrational’, the ‘unconscious’ and the ‘legendary’ or MYTHICAL (q.v.) developed alongside new valuations of ihc folk-cultures within which some of these materials seemed to be found, and, in a different dimension, alongside new valuations of SUBJECTIVITY (q.v.), which connected with the emphasis on Uberaied imagination and on strong ORIGINAL (q.v.) feeling. The degree of overlap between some of these senses and some of the earlier senses is obvious; what was new but remains difficult to make precise was the general philosophical basis for what were previously regarded as specific and separable features. In C20, Romantic as an historical description, and as a disputed but still necessary generalization for the philosophical and literary movement from 1C18, has remained common. But the older uses are still active, with considerable ambivalence. A romantic place is still approved; a romantic scheme is not. The derived C19 words, romanticism and romanticize (outside the specific cultural references), are heavily unfavourable. Romantic feelings and romance itself have meanwhile been commonly specialized (with support from the subjects of many romances and romantic stories, now specialized as romantic fiction) to love between men and women. There is a subsidiary distinction between romantic love and sexual love, but a sexual relationship is still, in popular use, a romance, and romantic places and romantic situations are much influenced by this. This has often affected understanding of the earlier Romances and Romantic literature, which in real terms remain very different. SENSIBILITY Sensibility became a very important word in English between mC18 and mC20, but in recent years this importance has quite sharply decUned. It is a very difficult word, both in its senses and variations within this historical period, and in its relations within the very complicated group of words centred on sense. We have only to remember that sensibility is not a general noun for the condition of being sensible to realize how difficult this group can be. Some of the interrelations of the group have been analysed by William Empson in The Structure of Complex Words, 250-310; 1951. The earliest uses of sensibility, fw sensibilitas, L, followed the earliest uses of sensible, fw sensible, F, sensibiiis, IL - fell, perceived, through the (physical) senses. This use of sensible, from C14, underlay sensibility as physical feeling or sense perception from C15. But it was not a word often used. The significant development in sense was the extension from a process to a particular kind of product: sense as good sense, good judgment, from which the predominant modern meaning of sensible was to be derived. (Common sense has followed this track, ending in a blunt assertion of the obvious - what everybody knows, or knows to be practical - after its earlier and more active reference to a sense
achieved by common process; the variations of COMMON (q.v.) are crucial here.) But before sensible was specialized to this limited use, it had moved, temporarily, in another direction, towards ‘tender’ or ‘fine’ feeling, from C16. This just survives in sensible of (cf. the special use of touched); sense of has a wider actual range, including neutrality. It was from sensible in this particular use that the important C18 use of sensibility was derived. It was more than sensitivity, which can describe a physical or an emotional condition. It was, essentially, a social generalization of certain personal qualities, or, to put it another way, a personal appropriation of certain social qualities. It thus belongs in an important formation which includes TASTE (q.v.), cultivation and discrimination, and, at a different level, CRITICISM (q.v.), and CULTURE (q.v.) in one of its uses, derived from cultivated and cultivation. All describe very general human processes, but in such a way as to specialize them; the negative effects of the actual exclusions that are so often implied can best be picked up in discrimination, which has survived both as the process of fine or informed judgment and as the process of treating certain groups unfairly. Taste and cultivation make little sense unless we are able to contrast their presence with their absence, in ways that depend on generalization and indeed on CONSENSUS (q.v.). Sensibility in its C1 8 uses ranged from a use much like that of modern awareness (not only consciousness but conscience) to a strong form of what the word appears literally to mean, the ability to feel: ‘dear Sensibility! source... unexhausted of all that’s precious in our joys, or costly in our sorrows’ (Sterne, 1768). It was at this point that its relation to sentimental became important. Sentiment, from fw sentimentum, mL, rw sentire, L - to feel, had ranged from C14 uses for physical feeling, and feeling of one’s own, to C17 uses for both opinion and emotion. In mC18 sentimental was widely used: ‘sentimental, so much in vogue among the polite... Everything clever and agreeable is comprehended in that word ... a sentimental man ... a sentimental party ... a sentimental walk’ (Lady Bradshaugh, 1749). The association with sensibility was then close: a conscious openness to feelings, and also a conscious consumption of feelings. The latter use made sentimental vulnerable, and in C19 this was, often crudely, pushed home: ‘that rosepink vapour of Sentimentalism, Philanthropy and Feasts of Morals’ (Carlyle, 1837); ‘Sentimental Radicalism’ (Bagehot on Dickens, 1858). Much that was moral or radical, in intention and in effect, was washed with the same brush that was used to depict self-conscious or self-indulgent displays of sentiment. Southey, in his conservative phase, brought the words together: ‘the sentimental classes, persons of ardent or morbid sensibility’ (1823). This complaint is against people who feel ‘too much’ as well as against those who ‘indulge their emotions’. This confusion has permanently damaged sentimental (though limited positive uses survive, typically in sentimental value) and wholly determined sentimentality. Sensibility escaped this. It maintained its C18 range, and became important in one special area, in relation to AESTHETIC (q.v.) feeling. (Jane Austen, of course, in Sense and Sensibility, had explored the variable qualities which the specialized terms appeared to define. In Emma she may have picked up one tendency in ‘more acute sensibility to fine sounds than to my feelings’ (II, vi; 1815).) Ruskin wrote of ‘sensibility to colour’ (1843). The word seems to have been increasingly used to distinguish a particular area of interest and response which could be distinguished not only from RATIONALITY (q.v.) or intellectuality but also (by contrast with one of its C18 associations) from morality. By eC20 sensibility was a key word to describe the human area in which artists worked and to which they appealed. In the subsequent development of a CRITICISM (q.v.) based on distinctions between reason and emotion, sensibility was a preferred general word for an area of human response and judgment which could not be reduced to the emotional or emotive. What T. S. Eliot, in the 1920s, called the dissociation of sensibility was a supposed disjunction between ‘thought’ and ‘feeling’. Sensibility became the apparently unifying word, and on the whole was transferred from kinds of response to a use
and ‘to the benefit of society’ (1749). In one way the abstraction was made more complete by the development of the notion of ‘a society’, in the broadest sense. This depended on a new sense of relativism (cf. CULTURE) but, in its transition from the notion of the general laws of fellowship or association to a notion of specific laws forming a specific society, it prepared the way for the modern notion, in which the laws of society are not so much laws for getting on with other people but more abstract and more impersonal laws which determine social institutions. The transition was very complex, but can now be best seen by considering society with state. State had developed, from its most general and continuing sense of condition (state of nature, state of siege, from C13), a specialized sense which was virtually interchangeable with estate (both state and estate were from fw estate oF, status, L - condition) and in effect with rank: ‘noble stat’ (1290). The word was particularly associated with monarchy and nobility, that is to say with a hierarchical ordering of society: cf. ‘state of prestis, and state of knyghtis, and the thridd is staat of comunys’ (1300). The States or Estates were an institutional definition of power from C14, while state as the dignity of the king was common in C16 and eC17: ‘state and honour’ (1544); ‘goes with great state’ (1616); ‘to the King... your Crowne and State’ (Bacon, 1605). From these combined uses state developed a conscious political sense: ‘ruler of the state’ (1538); ‘the State of Venice’ (1680). But state still often meant the association of a particular kind of sovereignty with a particular kind of rank. Statist was a common term for politician in C17, but through the political conflicts of that century a fundamental conflict came to be expressed in what was eventually a distinction between society and state: the former an association of free men, drawing on all the early active senses; the latter an organization of power, drawing on the senses of hierarchy and majesty. The crucial notion of civil society (see CIVILIZATION) was an alternative definition of social order, and it was in thinking through the general questions of this new order that society was confirmed in its most general and eventually abstract senses. Through many subsequent political changes this kind of distinction has persisted: society is that to which we all belong, even if it is also very general and impersonal; the state is the apparatus of power. The decisive transition of society towards its most general and abstract sense (still, by definition, a different thing from state) was a C18 development. I have been through Hume’s Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751) for uses of the word, and taking ‘company of his fellows’ as sense (i) and ‘system of common life’ as sense (ii) found: sense (i), 25; sense (ii), 110; but also, at some critical points in the argument, where the sense of society can be decisive, sixteen essentially intermediate uses. Hume also, as it happens, illustrates the necessary distinction as society was losing its most active and immediate sense; he used, as we still would, the alternative company: “As the mutual shocks in society, and the oppositions of interest and self-love, have constrained mankind to establish the laws of justice ... in like manner, the eternal contrarieties, in company, of men’s pride and self-conceit, have introduced the rules of Good Manners ov Politeness…” (Enquiry, VIII, 211) At the same time, in the same book, he used society for company in just this immediate sense, where we now, wishing for some purposes to revive the old sense, would speak of ‘face-to-face’ relationships; usually, we would add, within a COMMUNITY (q.v.). By 1C18 society as a system of common life was predominant: ‘every society has more to apprehend from its needy members than from the rich’ (1770); ‘two different schemes or systems of morality’ are current at the same time in ‘every society where the distinction of rank [see CLASS] has once been established’ (Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, II, 378-9; 1776). The subsequent development of both general and abstract senses was direct.
A related development can be seen in social, which in C17 could mean either associated or sociable, though it was also used as a synonym for ‘civiF, as in social war. By 1C18 it was mainly general and abstract: ‘man is a Social creature; that is, a single man, or family, cannot subsist, or not well, alone out of all Society.. ,’ (though note that Society here, with the qualification all, is still active rather than abstract). By C19 society can be seen clearly enough as an object to allow such formations as social reformer (although social was also used, and is still used, to describe personal company; cf. social life and social evening). At the same time, in seeing society as an object (the objective sum of our relationships) it was possible, in new ways, to define the relationship of man and society or the individual and society as a problem. These formations measure the distance from the early sense of active fellowship. The problems they indicate, in the actual development of society, were significantly illustrated in the use of the word social, in eC19, to contrast an idea of society as mutual co-operation with an experience of society (the social system) as individual competition. These alternative definitions of society could not have occurred if the most general and abstract sense had not, by this period, been firm. It was from this emphasis of social, in a positive rather than a neutral sense, and in distinction from INDIVIDUAL (q.v.), that the political term SOCIALIST (q.v.) was to develop. An alternative adjective, societal, was used in ethnology from eC20, and has now a broader, more neutral reference to general social formations and institutions. One small specialized use of society requires notice if not comment. An early sense of good society in the sense of good company was specialized, by the norms of such people, to Society as the most distinguished and fashionable part of society: the upper CLASS (q.v.). Byron (Don Juan, XIII, 95) provides a good example of this mainly C19 (and residual) sense: Society is now one polish’d horde Formed of two mighty tribes, the Bores and Bored. It is ironic that this special term is the last clear use of society as the’ active companionship of one’s (class) fellows. Elsewhere such feelings were moving, for good historical reasons, to community (q.v.)) and to the still active senses of social. TRADITION Tradition in its most general modern sense is a particularly difficult word. It came into English in C14 from fw tradicion, oF, traditionem, L, from rw tradere, L - to hand over or deliver. The Latin noun had the senses of (i) delivery, (ii) handing down knowledge, (iii) passing on a doctrine, (iv) surrender or betrayal. The general sense (i) was in English in mC16, and sense (iv), especially of betrayal, from 1C15 to mC17. But the main development was in senses (ii) and (iii). Wyclif wrote in c. 1380: ‘a positive lawe or a tradycion that that han hem silfe made’, which is an active sense, but there was a more passive sense in the characteristic C15 ‘the trewe tradicion’. It is this range that remains important. It is one thing to say ‘old songs delivered to ihem, by tradition, from their fathers’ (1591): an active, and oral, handing down, or again: ‘the expressing or transferring our knowledge to others ... I will tearme by the general name of Tradition or Deliverie’ (Bacon, 1605). But another sense was coming strongly through: ‘Will you mocke at an ancient Tradition began uppon an honourable respect’ (Henry V, V, i) or: “Throw away Respect, Tradition, Forme And Ceremonious Dutie…” (Richard II, III, ii) It is easy to see how a general word for matters handed down from father to son could become specialized, within one form of thought, to the idea of necessary respect and duty. Tradition survives in English as a description of a general process of handing down, but there is a very strong and often predominant sense of this entailing respect and duty. When we look at the detailed processes of any of these traditions, indeed when we realize that there are traditions (real plural, as distinct from the ‘plural singular’ present also in values and STANDARDS (q.v.)), and that only some of them or parts of them have been
its available and strengthening sense of consume - is not easy in such a range. What utilitarian in this spelled-out sense emphasizes is a split of some kinds of activity from others, ART (q.v.), that eminently practical word, was specialized as part of the same movement to a different kind of activity and a different kind of happiness or pleasure: contemplative or AESTHETIC (q.v.). So the longstanding practice of using things to make other things was specialized by purpose, into one kind, art, and another kind, utility. This is the division at the root of capitalist production, where things are specialized to commodities. It is the transfer that occurred, for example, in ‘this money-getting utilitarian age’ (1839), and in one sense it is a real transfer. But, as with materialist, different kinds of objection were gathered and confused. Many of the opponents of utilitarianism and materialism have used the difficulties of these ways of seeing the world, which in practice have been so widely accepted, to urge residual values which, in terms of a traditional social order or a god, take priority over the ‘greatest happiness of the greatest number’. But they have been wonderfully assisted in this by the theoretical and practical specialization of utility to the terms of capitalist production, and especially by the translation of ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’ into the terms of the organized market (in its increasingly abstract C19 sense), which was taken to be the mechanism for regulating this ultimate purpose. Utility, once a critical concept, became, in this context, at once ratifying and demeaning, and other terms had to be found to assert the principle of most people’s happiness. WEALTH Wealth was formed, perhaps by analogy with health, from the associated words well, adverb, fw wel or well, oE and weal, noun, fw wela, oE. It indicated happiness and prosperity but, if the question arose, it could clearly be specialized to either. The modern sense is clear enough in: “For here es welih inogh to win To make us riche for evermore.” (1352) But the wider meaning is evident in the need to distinguish ‘worldly welthe’ (1340), and ‘nullus est felicior’ (no man is more happy) was translated in 1398 as ‘no man hath more welth’. In c. 1450 there was ‘with-oute you have I neither joye ne welthe’ and in Wyatt (1542) there was the clear sense of happiness: ‘syns every wo is joynid to some welth’. Commonwealth, from common weal, commonweal and common wealth, had the general sense of the well-being of the community before it developed into a special but related sense of a kind of social order. It was still also possible to write ‘for the weith of my soul’ (1463). Wealthy was more often used in the general sense (from C14) until perhaps mC15, and specialization to the wealth of a country seems earlier than that to the wealth of a man. From 1C16 wealth was used in a surviving sense to indicate abundance of something: ‘wealth of saumon’; wealth of examples. In C17 and C18 the word acquired not only a more definite association with money and possessions, but a strong subsidiary deprecatory sense. The political economists from Adam Smith (who in his best-known work used as a title the already well-known C17 phrase wealth of nations) sought to distinguish between wealth in a man and the wealth of a society. The former had sufficient and often derogatory association with possessions to require a distinction of the latter as production: cf. ‘a man of wealth... implies quantity ... a source of wealth... quantity is not implied ... products’ (1821). But on the whole wealth and wealthy have come through in individualist and possessive senses, with a predominant reference to money. Other words such as resources have been found for the other economic meaning. The general reference to happiness and well-being had been so far lost and forgotten that Ruskin (Unto this Last, iv, 26) was forced to coin a word to express a sense of the unhappiness and waste which followed from some kinds of production. These led, in the specialized
sense, to wealth, but there was need for the opposite term, tilth. This recalls the original formation, however oddly it may now read, and there was some precedent in illfare (see WELFARE) which was used occasionally between C14 and C17 and briefly revived in C and C20. WELFARE Welfare was originally the phrase welfare, mE, from well in its still familiar sense and/are, primarily a journey or arrival but later also a supply of food. Welfare was commonly used from C14 to indicate happiness or prosperity (cf. WEALTH): ‘thy negheburs welfare’ (1303); ‘welfare or ilfare of the whole realm’ (1559). A subsidiary meaning, usually derogatory in the recorded instances, was of merrymaking: ‘such ryot and welfare and ydlenesse’ (1470); Vine and such welfare’ (1577). The extended sense of welfare, as an object of organized care or provision, came in eC20; most of the older words in this sense (see especially CHARITY) had acquired unacceptable associations. Thus welfare- manager (1904); welfare policy (1905); welfare work (1916); welfare centres (1917). The Welfare State, in distinction from the Warfare State, was first named in 1939.
