Читать книгу Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society - Raymond Williams - Страница 33

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