without political or immediately political implications. (In this latter use marxist is often an internal or external euphemism for communist or revolutionary socialist, though the marxist principle of the union of theory and practice gives the frequency of its contemporary use some significance.)
See SOCIALISM
Community has been in the language since C14, from fw comuneté, oF, communitatem, L – community of relations or feelings, from rw communis, L – COMMON (q.v.). It became established in English in a range of senses: (i) the commons or common people, as distinguished from those of rank (C14–C17); (ii) a state or organized society, in its later uses relatively small (C14–); (iii) the people of a district (C18–); (iv) the quality of holding something in common, as in community of interests, community of goods (C16–); (v) a sense of common identity and characteristics (C16–). It will be seen that senses (i) to (iii) indicate actual social groups; senses (iv) and (v) a particular quality of relationship (as in communitas). From C17 there are signs of the distinction which became especially important from C19, in which community was felt to be more immediate than SOCIETY (q.v.), although it must be remembered that society itself had this more immediate sense until C18, and civil society (see CIVILIZATION) was, like society and community in these uses, originally an attempt to distinguish the body of direct relationships from the organized establishment of realm or state. From C19 the sense of immediacy or locality was strongly developed in the context of larger and more complex industrial societies. Community was the word normally chosen for experiments in an alternative kind of group-living. It is still so used and has been joined, in a more limited sense, by commune (the French commune – the smallest administrative division – and the German Gemeinde – a civil and ecclesiastical division – had interacted with each other and with community, and also passed into socialist thought (especially commune) and into sociology (especially Gemeinde) to express particular kinds of social relations). The contrast, increasingly expressed in C19, between the more direct, more total and therefore more significant relationships of community and the more formal, more abstract and more instrumental relationships of state, or of society in its modern sense, was influentially formalized by Tönnies (1887) as a contrast between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, and these terms are now sometimes used, untranslated, in other languages. A comparable distinction is evident in mC20 uses of community. In some uses this has been given a polemical edge, as in community politics, which is distinct not only from national politics but from formal local politics and normally involves various kinds of direct action and direct local organization, ‘working directly with people’, as which it is distinct from ‘service to the community’, which has an older sense of voluntary work supplementary to official provision or paid service.
The complexity of community thus relates to the difficult interaction between the tendencies originally distinguished in the historical development: on the one hand the sense of direct common concern; on the other hand the materialization of various forms of common organization, which may or may not adequately express this. Community can be the warmly persuasive word to describe an existing set of relationships, or the warmly persuasive word to describe an alternative set of relationships. What is most important, perhaps, is that unlike all other terms of social organization (state, nation, society, etc.) it seems never to be used unfavourably, and never to be given any positive opposing or distinguishing term.
See CIVILIZATION, COMMON, COMMUNISM, NATIONALIST, SOCIETY
Consensus came into English in mC19, originally in a physiological sense, which from C16 had been a specialized sense of the fw consensus, L – an agreement or common feeling, rw con, L – together, sentire – feel. Thus in a use in 1861: ‘there is a general connexion between the different parts of a nation’s civilization; call it, if you will, a consensus, provided that the notion of a set of physical organs does not slip in with that term’. Consensual is earlier, from mC18, in two special contexts: legal – the consensual contract of Roman law; physiological, of involuntary (sympathetic) or reflex actions of the nervous system. Consensus and, later, consensual were steadily developed, by transfer, to indicate general agreement: ‘the consensus of the Protestant missionaries’ (1861). There are supporting subsidiary uses, in more defined forms, such as consensus of evidence, from the same period.
The word has become much more common in C20 and has been an important political term in mC20. The general use, for an existing agreement of opinion, is often subtly altered in its political application. Consensus politics can mean, from the general sense, policies undertaken on the basis of an existing body of agreed opinions. It can also mean, and in practice has more often meant, a policy of avoiding or evading differences or divisions of opinion in an attempt to ‘secure the centre’ or ‘occupy the middle ground’. This is significantly different, in practice, from coalition (originally the 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
In modern English consumer and consumption are the predominant descriptive nouns of all kinds of use of goods and services.
