Socialism

Raymond williams collected notes on the usage of particular words that he felt were socially and politically significant and published a set of essays about them in his 1976 book Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Williams's reputation as one of Britain's foremost socialist intellectuals of the 20th century no doubt explains [Page 1625]why the term socialist is one of the keywords he included. About the variations, usage and meanings of the term, Williams suggested that by the 1840s, socialist and socialism were associated with notions like cooperative, mutualist, associationist, societarian, phalansterian, agrarianist, and radical. He also pointed out that as late as 1848, Webster's Dictionary defined socialism as “a new term for agrarianism.” As useful as Webster's is for seeing the link between ...