WILLIAMS & PALMER ON EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURY WORDS


From Raymond Williams: Culture & Society: 1750-1950  (1959?).

   In the last decades of the eighteenth century, and in the first half of the nineteenth century, a number of words, which are now of capital importance, came for the first time into common English use, or, where they had already been generally used in the language, acquired new and important meanings.... Five key words are the key points from which this map can be drawn. They are industry, democracy, class, art, and culture. The importance of these words, in our modern structure of meanings, is obvious. The changes in their use, at this critical period, bear witness to a general change in our characteristic ways of thinking about our common life: about our social, political, and economic institutions; about the purposes which these institutions are designed to embody; and about the relations to these institutions and purposes of our activities in learning, education and the arts. The word which more than any other comprises these relations is culture, with all its complexity of idea and reference.
 


 From R.R. Palmer & J. Colton: A History of the Modern World (3rd ed)

The Advent of the Isms

    The combined forces of industrialization and of the French Revolution led after 1815 to the proliferation of doctrines and movements of many sorts. These broke out in a general European revolution in 1848. As for the thirty-three years from 1815 to 1848, there is no better way of grasping their long-run meaning than to reflect on the number of still living "isms" that arose at that time.
    So far as is known the word "liberalism" first appeared in the English language in 1819, "radicalism" in 1820, "socialism" in 1832, "conservatism" in 1835. The 1830's first saw "individualism," "constitutionalism," "humanitarianism," and "monarchism." "Nationalism" and "communism" date from the 1840's. Not until the 1850's did the English-speaking world use the word "capitalism" (French capitalisme is much older); and not until even later had it heard of "Marxism," though the doctrines of Marx grew out of and reflected the troubled times of the 1840's.

    The rapid coinage of political "isms" does not in every case mean that the ideas they conveyed were new. Men had loved liberty before talking of liberalism, and been conservative without knowing conservatism as such. The appearance of so many "isms" shows rather that people were making their ideas more systematic. They were being obliged to reconsider and analyze society as a whole. The social sciences were taking form. An "ism" (excluding such words as "hypnotism" or "favoritism") may be defined as the conscious espousal of a doctrine in competition with other doctrines. Without the "isms" created in the thirty-odd years after the Peace of Vienna it is impossible to understand or even talk about the history of the world since that event....

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