Indeed. :) Mussolini coined it and wore it proudly, and the word meant something specific for about twenty-five years, while people were still willing to claim it in the first person.
Fascism had defenders, so it had edges. The defenders got killed, jailed, or shamed into silence, and within a decade Orwell is writing that it means nothing except "something not desirable." I should have written "no longer has anybody standing up." You caught the tense...
Obviously I was joking, but also not. The malleability of "fascist" is due to a very different mechanism than the malleability of "liberal". The latter is for the reasons you lay out above. The former is because it serves no purpose other than to call someone Hitler without actually saying "Hitler".
See? See! As a thieves' cant for tenured radicals, a crutch for undergraduates who try feebly to use moral relativism as cover for their own lazy dogmatism, or a translation of the Frankfurt school from German into Gibberish, postmodernism mostly deserves the criticism it comes in for, but taken narrowly, as particular position in the philosophy of language, it can be very useful.
you've put it better than I did. The narrow claim about words is just true, and I don't think you need any French theory to get there, which is sort of my point about the dates. The trouble starts when a claim about vocabulary gets promoted into a claim about everything, and then into a permission slip.
"Thieves' cant for tenured radicals" is going in my notes, by the way.
You don't need French theory to get to the basic insight, but most philosophy starts from some obvious idea and then digs in deep, so I'm happy to follow where the professionals take me.
But just when you thought all was lost, "progressive" leaps into the breach. A musty term dug out of the attic from behind great-grandma's old hat boxes now perfectly fills the "nominally Marxist and totally Woke" niche. These days a certain kind of American can describe themselves with perfect clarity simply by saying, "I'm a liberal, not a progressive." Language has a wisdom all its own.
This is the best objection anyone's raised, and I think it's partly right. The distinction survives even when the word doesn't. When "liberal" went slack, the language grew a second term so people could say the thing they still needed to say, and "I'm a liberal, not a progressive" does communicate, cleanly, right now.
Two hesitations, though.
The first is that the test case is already in the essay. Dean Russell tried this deliberately in 1955: the old word is spoiled, let's get a clean one and bolt it down. He picked "libertarian." Leonard Read built it out, and lived long enough to write that it had been expropriated just as thoroughly. Differentiation buys time, and the meter is running on "progressive" already.
The second is that it fixes your problem rather than the word's. You and I can hear "liberal, not progressive" precisely, but the clarity is living in the contrast, and a contrast needs both terms to hold still. When "progressive" drifts, and it will, the sentence stops working and we need a third word.
Still, "language has a wisdom all its own" is a fairer description than my ending allows for. I counted the losses and skipped the workarounds, and you're right that the workarounds keep showing up.
I'm trained as a linguist. Our official position is that meaning always changes. When a word connotes something people have strong feelings about—like, say, a political ideology—the change might be more rapid and more obvious, but no definition is ever fixed. Your etymology of "liberal" is politically illuminating, but the circuitous path it follows is the norm.
A few general linguistic principles that you have illustrated here: first, meaning change is conditioned by rhetorical utility. When there is a semantic gap, some word will slide in to fill it, just as when two words overlap for too long, one will eventually slink away. Language exists in a dynamic steady state. Linguists expect the losses and workarounds to sum to zero.
The second is that language is a system of differences. "…the clarity [of the liberal/progressive distinction] is living in the contrast, and a contrast needs both terms to hold still" Exactly. All meaning "liv[es] in the contrast". That was the key insight of Ferdinand de Saussure in his 1916 "Course in General Linguistics", a book that has become both a program statement for modern linguistics and a founding document of the "linguistic turn" of 20th century philosophy.
Finally, your observation that "a contrast needs both terms to hold still" is a very linguistic turn sort of claim. Many 20th century philosophers would have agreed, and the postmodern ones would have gone on to add, "Good luck with that, buddy!"
So more essays like this. Us linguists can't get enough of em!
Thank you for writing this. Slippery language is what makes politics so difficult. It is disappointing how often the news media simply repeats political accusations and denials without attempting to investigate what's behind them. A literate public is required for democracies, but the lack of a common vocabulary makes it very difficult to discuss public affairs outside of political bubbles.
In other disciplines, the academic role is to develop a technical vocabulary that enables a disinterested approach to the subject. But democracy with universal suffrage makes everyone a participant in politics, which leads to the politization of everything. Someday people will realize that's not a good thing.
Thank you, and the technical-vocabulary point is one I wish I'd made explicitly, because it's exactly what the roll-call measures are. We couldn't trust what legislators called themselves, so the discipline built a measure out of what they actually did. That's a technical vocabulary doing the job the folk vocabulary stopped doing. It works, and it only works where there's a record.
On the media piece I'd go further than you did. Repeating an accusation and a denial without adjudicating between them does more damage than laziness would. It makes the accusation free, which is the whole mechanism I was after. If using a word wrong never draws a correction, there's no reason to use it right.
Where I'd push back a little: I don't think mass participation is what politicizes the vocabulary. Every word in the piece got wrecked by elites, not by voters. Universal suffrage gives everyone a stake in the outcome. It doesn't seem to be what's corroding the terms though?
Yes, elites take the lead with word games. They write the dictionaries, too. The masses are left without a language to score the games. A population outside of the politics, monasteries or whatever, could act as referees.
Worth every cup of coffee!
You know who else called himself a fascist? HITLER!
Indeed. :) Mussolini coined it and wore it proudly, and the word meant something specific for about twenty-five years, while people were still willing to claim it in the first person.
Fascism had defenders, so it had edges. The defenders got killed, jailed, or shamed into silence, and within a decade Orwell is writing that it means nothing except "something not desirable." I should have written "no longer has anybody standing up." You caught the tense...
Obviously I was joking, but also not. The malleability of "fascist" is due to a very different mechanism than the malleability of "liberal". The latter is for the reasons you lay out above. The former is because it serves no purpose other than to call someone Hitler without actually saying "Hitler".
See? See! As a thieves' cant for tenured radicals, a crutch for undergraduates who try feebly to use moral relativism as cover for their own lazy dogmatism, or a translation of the Frankfurt school from German into Gibberish, postmodernism mostly deserves the criticism it comes in for, but taken narrowly, as particular position in the philosophy of language, it can be very useful.
you've put it better than I did. The narrow claim about words is just true, and I don't think you need any French theory to get there, which is sort of my point about the dates. The trouble starts when a claim about vocabulary gets promoted into a claim about everything, and then into a permission slip.
"Thieves' cant for tenured radicals" is going in my notes, by the way.
Postmodernists are really good at forging permission slips.
You don't need French theory to get to the basic insight, but most philosophy starts from some obvious idea and then digs in deep, so I'm happy to follow where the professionals take me.
But just when you thought all was lost, "progressive" leaps into the breach. A musty term dug out of the attic from behind great-grandma's old hat boxes now perfectly fills the "nominally Marxist and totally Woke" niche. These days a certain kind of American can describe themselves with perfect clarity simply by saying, "I'm a liberal, not a progressive." Language has a wisdom all its own.
This is the best objection anyone's raised, and I think it's partly right. The distinction survives even when the word doesn't. When "liberal" went slack, the language grew a second term so people could say the thing they still needed to say, and "I'm a liberal, not a progressive" does communicate, cleanly, right now.
Two hesitations, though.
The first is that the test case is already in the essay. Dean Russell tried this deliberately in 1955: the old word is spoiled, let's get a clean one and bolt it down. He picked "libertarian." Leonard Read built it out, and lived long enough to write that it had been expropriated just as thoroughly. Differentiation buys time, and the meter is running on "progressive" already.
The second is that it fixes your problem rather than the word's. You and I can hear "liberal, not progressive" precisely, but the clarity is living in the contrast, and a contrast needs both terms to hold still. When "progressive" drifts, and it will, the sentence stops working and we need a third word.
Still, "language has a wisdom all its own" is a fairer description than my ending allows for. I counted the losses and skipped the workarounds, and you're right that the workarounds keep showing up.
I'm trained as a linguist. Our official position is that meaning always changes. When a word connotes something people have strong feelings about—like, say, a political ideology—the change might be more rapid and more obvious, but no definition is ever fixed. Your etymology of "liberal" is politically illuminating, but the circuitous path it follows is the norm.
A few general linguistic principles that you have illustrated here: first, meaning change is conditioned by rhetorical utility. When there is a semantic gap, some word will slide in to fill it, just as when two words overlap for too long, one will eventually slink away. Language exists in a dynamic steady state. Linguists expect the losses and workarounds to sum to zero.
The second is that language is a system of differences. "…the clarity [of the liberal/progressive distinction] is living in the contrast, and a contrast needs both terms to hold still" Exactly. All meaning "liv[es] in the contrast". That was the key insight of Ferdinand de Saussure in his 1916 "Course in General Linguistics", a book that has become both a program statement for modern linguistics and a founding document of the "linguistic turn" of 20th century philosophy.
Finally, your observation that "a contrast needs both terms to hold still" is a very linguistic turn sort of claim. Many 20th century philosophers would have agreed, and the postmodern ones would have gone on to add, "Good luck with that, buddy!"
So more essays like this. Us linguists can't get enough of em!
I know exactly what kind of liberal I am. I'm just not sure whether to capitalize the "L".
that would put you in different parties in Denmark, sir.
Thank you for writing this. Slippery language is what makes politics so difficult. It is disappointing how often the news media simply repeats political accusations and denials without attempting to investigate what's behind them. A literate public is required for democracies, but the lack of a common vocabulary makes it very difficult to discuss public affairs outside of political bubbles.
In other disciplines, the academic role is to develop a technical vocabulary that enables a disinterested approach to the subject. But democracy with universal suffrage makes everyone a participant in politics, which leads to the politization of everything. Someday people will realize that's not a good thing.
Thank you, and the technical-vocabulary point is one I wish I'd made explicitly, because it's exactly what the roll-call measures are. We couldn't trust what legislators called themselves, so the discipline built a measure out of what they actually did. That's a technical vocabulary doing the job the folk vocabulary stopped doing. It works, and it only works where there's a record.
On the media piece I'd go further than you did. Repeating an accusation and a denial without adjudicating between them does more damage than laziness would. It makes the accusation free, which is the whole mechanism I was after. If using a word wrong never draws a correction, there's no reason to use it right.
Where I'd push back a little: I don't think mass participation is what politicizes the vocabulary. Every word in the piece got wrecked by elites, not by voters. Universal suffrage gives everyone a stake in the outcome. It doesn't seem to be what's corroding the terms though?
Yes, elites take the lead with word games. They write the dictionaries, too. The masses are left without a language to score the games. A population outside of the politics, monasteries or whatever, could act as referees.