Using a text, newspaper article or T.V. programme that relates to our key terms: democracy, class, industry, art and culture. Do these terms one or all have significance at the beginning of this century?
Firstly it seems important to define these terms which Raymond Williams does, in his book 'Culture and Society.' In the first half of the 18th century, through to the beginning of the 19th, these terms; democracy, industry, art, class and culture have become of growing importance and came for the first time into the common English language. It can be seen that not only their usage changes but also their meaning; these changes bear witness to a change in our common life.
These changes can be seen firstly in the word industry and the time in which this word changed; the Industrial Revolution. Before this period industry was the name for a particular human attribute; a skill, assiduity, perseverance, diligence.
It is still used in this way but by the end of the 18th century it came to be a collective word for our manufacturing and productive institutions and its general activities. It is Adam Smith who first used the word in this way in his book 'The Wealth of Nations' (1776.) The dictionary definition of the word is 1. the work and process involved in manufacture, 2. a branch of commercial enterprise concerned with the manufacture of a specified, 3. the quality of working hard.
Industry, to indicate an institution begins about 1776; democracy as a principle word can be dated from around the same time. Democracy comes from a Greek term to mean 'government by the people' but only came to be used in the English language at the same time as the French and American Revolutions. According to Williams, England...