Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Raymond Williams

was used in the plural. This is later with civilizations than with cultures; its first clear use is in French (Ballanche) in 1819. It is preceded in English by implicit uses to refer to an earlier civilization, but it is not common anywhere until the 1860s.

      In modern English civilization still refers to a general condition or state, and is still contrasted with savagery or barbarism. But the relativism inherent in comparative studies, and reflected in the use of civilizations, has affected this main sense, and the word now regularly attracts some defining adjective: Western civilization, modern civilization, industrial civilization, scientific and technological civilization. As such it has come to be a relatively neutral form for any achieved social order or way of life, and in this sense has a complicated and much disputed relation with the modern social sense of culture. Yet its sense of an achieved state is still sufficiently strong for it to retain some normative quality; in this sense civilization, a civilized way of life, the conditions of civilized society may be seen as capable of being lost as well as gained.

      See CITY, CULTURE, DEVELOPMENT, MODERN, SOCIETY, WESTERN

CLASS

      Class is an obviously difficult word, both in its range of meanings and in its complexity in that particular meaning where it describes a social division. The Latin word classis, a division according to property of the people of Rome, came into English in lC16 in its Latin form, with a plural classes or classics. There is a lC16 use (King, 1594) which sounds almost modern: ‘all the classics and ranks of vanitie’. But classis was primarily used in explicit reference to Roman history, and was then extended, first as a term in church organization (‘assemblies are either classes or synods’, 1593) and later as a general term for a division or group (‘the classis of Plants’, 1664). It is worth noting that the derived Latin word classicus, coming into English in eC17 as classic from fw classique, F, had social implications before it took on its general meaning of a standard authority and then its particular meaning of belonging to Greek and Roman antiquity (now usually distinguished in the form classical, which at first alternated with classic). Gellius wrote: ‘classicus … scriptor, non proletarius’. But the form class, coming into English in Cl7, acquired a special association with education. Blount, glossing classe in 1656, included the still primarily Roman sense of ‘an order or distribution of people according to their several Degrees’ but added: ‘in Schools (wherein this word is most used) a Form or Lecture restrained to a certain company of Scholars’ – a use which has remained common in education. The development of classic and classical was strongly affected by this association with authoritative works for study.

      From lC17 the use of class as a general word for a group or division became more and more common. What is then most difficult is that class came to be used in this way about people as well as about plants and animals, but without social implications of the modern kind. (Cf. Steele, 1709: ‘this Class of modern Wits’.) Development of class in its modern social sense, with relatively fixed names for particular classes (lower class, middle class, upper class, working class and so on), belongs essentially to the period between 1770 and 1840, which is also the period of the Industrial Revolution and its decisive reorganization of society. At the extremes it is not difficult to distinguish between (i) class as a general term for any grouping and (ii) class as a would-be specific description of a social formation. There is no difficulty in distinguishing between Steele’s ‘Class of modern Wits’ and, say, the Declaration of the Birmingham Political Union (1830) ‘that the rights and interests of the middle and lower classes of the people are not efficiently represented in the Commons House of Parliament’. But in the crucial period of transition, and indeed for some time before it, there is real difficulty in being sure whether a particular use is sense (i) or sense (ii). The earliest use that I know, which might be read in a modern sense, is Defoe’s ‘’tis plain the clearness of wages forms our people into more classes than other nations can show’ (Review, 14 April 1705). But this, even in an economic context, is far from certain. There must also be some doubt about Hanway’s title of 1772: ‘Observations on the Causes of the Dissoluteness which reigns among the lower classes of the people’. We can read this, as indeed we would read Defoe, in a strictly social sense, but there is enough overlap between sense (i) and sense (ii) to make us pause. The crucial context of this development is the alternative vocabulary for social divisions, and it is a fact that until lC18, and residually well into C19 and even C20, the most common words were rank and order, while estate and degree were still more common than class. Estate, degree and order had been widely used to describe social position from medieval times. Rank had been common from lC16. In virtually all contexts where we would now say class these other words were standard, and lower order and lower orders became especially common in C18.

      The essential history of the introduction of class, as a word which would supersede older names for social divisions, relates to the increasing consciousness that social position is made rather than merely inherited. All the older words, with their essential metaphors of standing, stepping and arranging in rows, belong to a society in which position was determined by birth. Individual mobility could be seen as movement from one estate, degree, order or rank to another. What was changing consciousness was not only increased individual mobility, which could be largely contained within the older terms, but the new sense of a SOCIETY (q.v.) or a particular social system which actually created social divisions, including new kinds of divisions. This is quite explicit in one of the first clear uses, that of Madison in The Federalist (USA, c. 1787): moneyed and manufacturing interests ‘grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views’. Under the pressure of this awareness, greatly sharpened by the economic changes of the Industrial Revolution and the political conflicts of the American and French revolutions, the new vocabulary of class began to take over. But it was a slow and uneven process, not only because of the residual familiarity of the older words, and not only because conservative thinkers continued, as a matter of principle, to avoid class wherever they could and to prefer the older (and later some newer) terms. It was slow and uneven, and has remained difficult, mainly because of the inevitable overlap with the use of class not as a specific social division but as a generally available and often ad hoc term of grouping.

      With this said, we can trace the formation of the newly specific class vocabulary. Lower classes was used in 1772, and lowest classes and lowest class were common from the 1790s. These carry some of the marks of the transition, but do not complete it. More interesting because less dependent on an old general sense, in which the lower classes would be not very different from the COMMON (q.v.) people, is the new and increasingly self-conscious and self-used description of the middle classes. This has precedents in ‘men of a middle condition’ (1716), ‘the middle Station of life’ (Defoe, 1719), ‘the Middling People of England … generally Good-natured and Stout-hearted’ (1718), ‘the middling and lower classes’ (1789). Gisborne in 1795 wrote an ‘Enquiry into the Duties of Men in the Higher Rank and Middle Classes of Society in Great Britain’. Hannah More in 1796 wrote of the ‘middling classes’. The ‘burden of taxation’ rested heavily ‘on the middle classes’ in 1809 (Monthly Repository, 501), and in 1812 there was reference to ‘such of the Middle Class of Society who have fallen upon evil days’ (Examiner, August). Rank was still used at least as often, as in James Mill (1820): ‘the class which is universally described as both the most wise and the most virtuous part of the community, the middle rank’ (Essay on Government), but here class has already taken