Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Raymond Williams

growing together of parts, from Cl7; fw coalitionem, L from coalescere – to grow together, a sense still represented in coalesce; but from C17 the union or combination of parties, and from C18 combination by deliberate, often formal agreement). The negative sense of consensus politics was intended to describe deliberate evasion of basic conflicts of principle, but also a process in which certain issues were effectively excluded from political argument – not because there was actual agreement on them, nor because a coalition had arrived at some compromise, but because in seeking for the ‘middle ground’ which the parties would then compete to capture there was no room for issues not already important (because they were at some physical distance from normal everyday life – faraway or foreign, or because their effects were long-term, or because they affected only minorities). Consensus then, while retaining a favourable sense of general agreement, acquired the unfavourable senses of bland or shabby evasion of necessary issues or arguments. Given this actual range it is now a very difficult word to use, over a range from the positive sense of seeking general agreement, through the sense of a relatively inert or even UNCONSCIOUS (q.v.) assent (cf. orthodox opinion and conventional wisdom), to the implication of a ‘manipulative’ kind of politics seeking to build a ‘silent majority’ as the power-base from which dissenting movements or ideas can be excluded or repressed. It is remarkable that so apparently mild a word has attracted such strong feelings, but some of the processes of modern electoral and ‘public opinion’ politics go a long way to explain this.

      It is worth noticing that the word is now often spelled concensus, in some surprising places, including some which complain generally about a modern inability to spell. It is probable that this is from association with census, which if so is interesting in that it indicates a now habitual if unconscious connection with the practice of counting opinions, as in public opinion polls. But there has been a long confusion between c and s in words of this kind (cf. British defence and American defense, which go back to mE variations). Consent itself was often spelled concent to C16.

      See CONVENTIONAL

CONSUMER

      In modern English consumer and consumption are the predominant descriptive nouns of all kinds of use of goods and services. The predominance is significant in that it relates to a particular version of economic activity, derived from the character of a particular economic system, as the history of the word shows.

      Consume has been in English since C14, from fw consumer, F, and the variant consommer, F (these variants have a complicated but eventually distinct history in French), rw consumere, L – to take up completely, devour, waste, spend. In almost all its early English uses, consume had an unfavourable sense; it meant to destroy, to use up, to waste, to exhaust. This sense is still present in ‘consumed by fire’ and in the popular description of pulmonary phthisis as consumption. Early uses of consumer, from C16, had the same general sense of destruction or waste.

      It was from mC18 that consumer began to emerge in a neutral sense in descriptions of bourgeois political economy. In the new predominance of an organized market, the acts of making and of using goods and services were newly defined in the increasingly abstract pairings of producer and consumer, production and consumption. Yet the unfavourable connotations of consume persisted, at least until lC19, and it was really only in mC20 that the word passed from specialized use in political economy to general and popular use. The relative decline of customer, used from C15 to describe a buyer or purchaser, is significant here, in that customer had always implied some degree of regular and continuing relationship to a supplier, whereas consumer indicates the more abstract figure in a more abstract market.

      The modern development has been primarily American but has spread very quickly. The dominance of the term has been so great that even groups of informed and discriminating purchasers and users have formed Consumers’ Associations. The development relates primarily to the planning and attempted control of markets which is inherent in large-scale industrial capitalist (and state-capitalist) production, where, especially after the depression of lC19, manufacture was related not only to the supply of known needs (which customer or user would adequately describe) but to the planning of given kinds and quantities of production which required large investment at an early and often predictive stage. The development of modern commercial advertising (persuasion, or penetration of a market) is related to the same stage of capitalism: the creation of needs and wants and of particular ways of satisfying them, as distinct from and in addition to the notification of available supply which had been the main earlier function of advertising (where that kind of persuasion could be seen as puff and puffery). Consumer as a predominant term was the creation of such manufacturers and their agents. It implies, ironically as in the earliest senses, the using-up of what is going to be produced, though once the term was established it was given some appearance of autonomy (as in the curious phrase consumer choice). It is appropriate in terms of the history of the word that criticism of a wasteful and ‘throw-away’ society was expressed, somewhat later, by the description consumer society. Yet the predominance of the capitalist model ensured its widespread and often overwhelming extension to such fields as politics, education and health. In any of these fields, but also in the ordinary field of goods and services, to say user rather than consumer is still to express a relevant distinction.

      See WEALTH

CONVENTIONAL

      A convention was originally a coming together or assembly, from fw convention, F, conventionem, L – assembly, rw convenire, L – to come together. As such it has been used in English since C16, and is still quite often used in this sense. There is a natural extension of use to mean an agreement, and this has been common in English since C15.

      The more difficult uses of convention and especially conventional relate to an extension of the sense of agreement to something implicitly customary or agreed, and to a different kind of extension, especially in literature and art, to an implicit agreed method. The extension to the sense of custom is from lC18. It was important in the political controversy about rights, which ironically were being elsewhere (in the United States and France) formally defined by Conventions. But its most common use was in questions of manners and behaviour, and an unfavourable sense soon appeared, in which conventional meant artificial or formal, and by derivation merely old-fashioned. Complaints against conventions and conventional ideas can be readily found from mC19 onwards. Most of the early special uses in art and literature are in the same sense, as part of a normal ROMANTIC (q.v.) preference for spontaneity and innovation. But a more technical sense, in which it was seen that all forms of art contain fundamental and often only implicit conventions of method and purpose, is also evident from mC19 and has since been important in specialized discussion. The degree of formality originally important in convention is now almost wholly lost, except in this specialized use. In normal use convention is indeed the opposite of formal agreement, and can be used quite neutrally. Conventional, however, usually expresses the unfavourable sense. On the other hand, after the invention of the atom and hydrogen bombs, conventional weapons were favourably contrasted (from c. 1950) with nuclear weapons.

      See CONSENSUS

COUNTRY

      Country has two different meanings in modern English: broadly, a native land and the rural or agricultural