Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Raymond Williams

A new phrase, state-capitalism, has been widely used in mC20, with precedents from eC20, to describe forms of state ownership in which the original conditions of the definition – centralized ownership of the means of production, leading to a system of wage-labour – have not really changed.

      It is also necessary to note an extension of the adjective capitalist to describe the whole society, or features of the society, in which a capitalist economic system predominates. There is considerable overlap and occasional confusion here between capitalist and BOURGEOIS (q.v.). In strict Marxist usage capitalist is a description of a mode of production and bourgeois a description of a type of society. It is in controversy about the relations between a mode of production and a type of society that the conditions for overlap of meaning occur.

      See BOURGEOIS, INDUSTRY, SOCIETY

CAREER

      Career is now so regularly used to describe a person’s progress in life, or, by derivation from this, his profession or vocation that it is difficult to remember, in the same context, its original meanings of a racecourse and a gallop – though in some contexts, as in the phrase ‘careering about’, these survive.

      Career appeared in English from eC16, from fw carrière, F – racecourse, rw carraria, L – carriage road, from carrus, L – wagon. It was used from C16 for racecourse, gallop, and by extension any rapid or uninterrupted activity. Though sometimes applied neutrally, as of the course of the sun, it had a predominant C17 and C18 sense not only of rapid but of unrestrained activity. It is not easy to be certain of the change of implication between, for example, a use in 1767 – ‘a … beauty … in the career of her conquests’ – and Macaulay’s use in 1848 – ‘in the full career of success’. But it is probable that it was from eC19 that the use without derogatory implication began, especially with reference to diplomats and statesmen. By mC19 the word was becoming common to indicate progress in a vocation and then the vocation itself.

      At this point, and especially in the course of C20, career becomes inseparable from a difficult group of words of which WORK, LABOUR (qq.v.) and especially job are prominent examples. Career is still used in the abstract spectacular sense of politicians and entertainers, but more generally it is applied, with some conscious and unconscious class distinction, to work or a job which contains some implicit promise of progress. It has been most widely used for jobs with explicit internal development – ‘a career in the Civil Service’ – but it has since been extended to any favourable or desired or flattered occupation – ‘a career in coalmining’. Career now usually implies continuity if not necessarily promotion or advancement, yet the distinction between a career and a job only partly depends on this and is often associated also with class distinctions between different kinds of work. On the other hand, the extension of the term, as in ‘careers advice’, sometimes cancels these associations, and there has been an American description of ‘semi-skilled workers’ as having a ‘flat career trajectory’.

      It is interesting that something like the original metaphor, with its derogatory C17 or C18 sense, has reappeared in descriptions of some areas of work and promotion as the rat-race. But of course the derogatory sense is directly present in the derived words careerism and careerist, which are held carefully separate from the positive implications of career. Careerist is recorded from 1917, and careerism from 1933; the early uses refer to parliamentary politics.

      See LABOUR, WORK

CHARITY

      Charity came into English, in C12, from fw charité, oF, caritas, L, rw cants – clear. Forms of the Latin word had taken on the sense of clearness of price as well as affection (an association repeated and continued in clear itself, from oE onwards). But the predominant use of charity was in the context of the Bible. (Greek agape had been distinguished into dilectio and caritas in the Vulgate, and Wyclif translated these as love and charity. Tyndale rendered caritas as love, and in the fierce doctrinal disputes of C16 this translation was criticized, the ecclesiastical charity being preferred in the Bishop’s Bible and then in the Authorized Version. Love was one of the key terms of the C19 Revised Version.) Charity was then Christian love, between man and God, and between men and their neighbours. The sense of benevolence to neighbours, and specifically of gifts to the needy, is equally early, but was at first directly related to the sense of Christian love, as in the Pauline use: ‘though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor … and have not charity, it profiteth me nothing’ (1 Corinthians 13) where the act without the feeling is seen as null. Nevertheless, charity in the predominant sense of help to the needy came through steadily; it is probably already dominant in C16 and is used with a new sense of abstraction from lC17 and eC18. A charity as an institution was established by lC17. These senses have of course persisted.

      But there is another movement in the word. Charity begins at home was already a popular saying in eC17 and has precedents from C14. More significant is cold as charity, which is an interesting reversal of what is probably the original use in Matthew 24:12, where the prophecy of ‘wars and rumours of wars’ and of the rise of ‘many false prophets’ is capped by this: ‘because iniquity shall abound, the love of many shall wax cold’. This is the most general Christian sense. Earlier translations (e.g. Rhemish, 1582) had used: ‘charity of many shall wax cold’. Browne (1642) wrote of ‘the general complaint of these times … that Charity grows cold’. By lC18 the sense had been reversed. It was not the sense of a drying-up or freezing of love or benevolence; it was the more interesting sense of what the charitable act feels like to the recipient from prolonged experience of the habits and manners of most charitable institutions. This sense has remained very important, and some people still say that they will not ‘take charity’, even from public funds to which they have themselves contributed. It is true that this includes an independent feeling against being helped by others, but the odium which has gathered around charity in this context comes from feelings of wounded self-respect and dignity which belong, historically, to the interaction of charity and of class-feelings, on both sides of the act. Critical marks of this interaction are the specialization of charity to the deserving poor (not neighbourly love, but reward for approved social conduct) and the calculation in bourgeois political economy summed up by Jevons (1878): ‘all that the political economist insists upon is that charity shall be really charity, and shall not injure those whom it is intended to aid’ (not the relief of need, but its selective use to preserve the incentive to wage-labour). It is not surprising that the word which was once the most general expression of love and care for others has become (except in special contexts, following the surviving legal definition of benevolent institutions) so compromised that modern governments have to advertise welfare benefits (and with a wealth of social history in the distinction) as ‘not a charity but a right’.

CITY

      City has existed in English since C13, 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 C16. The later indication and distinction are obviously related to the increasing importance of urban life from C16 onwards, but until C19 this was often specialized to the capital city, London. The more general use corresponds to the rapid development of urban living during the Industrial Revolution, which made England by mC19 the first society in the history of the world in which a majority of the population lived