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Isms

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

H. M. Höpfl
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Extract

This essay is the relic of a projected history of ‘individualism in politics’. That enterprise – the reasons for abandoning it will be transparent from what follows – prompted some reflections which may be of more general interest. For no habit is better established in the humanities and social sciences, as well as in political speech, than that of constituting a subject-matter for oneself by means of an -ism. And while there may be instances where the context makes this practice unproblematic, a survey of the past and contemporary record of -isms gives grounds for suspicion and reservations.

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Articles
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British Journal of Political Science , Volume 13 , Issue 1 , January 1983 , pp. 1 - 17
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1983

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References

1 ‘-Isme’ is the universal English orthography of the suffix until the late seventeenth century. Does this indicate that the habit (like so much else) was imported from France, that it was felt that an obeisance ought to be made to the Latin derivation, or merely that the pronunciation was -isme and not -isem, unlike modern English?

2 Examples, approximate dates of appearance in brackets, from the sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century: Lutheranisme, Lutherisme (Fr., 1554), Lutherienisme (Fr., 1570), Calvinisme (Fr. 1562, Latin, 1575), Anabaptisme (Fr., 1564), papisme (used by Calvin in 1541), Romanisme (apparently later than papisme), puritanisme (mid-1560s), Brownisme (established by 1580), separatism (established by 1600), atheisme (Fr., 1555, rare German occurrence, 1596), Muhammadanism (1584). Terms well established by 1640 include antinomianisme, Socinianisme, millenialisme, Arianisme, Donatisme, Platonisme, scholasticisme, Protestantisme, enthusiasme, libertinisme, Erastianisme, gentilisme.

3 F-F. Rosenfeld (in Maurer, F. and Rupp, H., eds, Deutsche Wortgeschichte (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 1974), Vol. I, p. 419Google Scholar) asserts that ‘it appears that abstract substantives in -ismus [were] already common among the Church Fathers, [and that for example] Erasmus liked to employ them in his Latin polemical writing.’ While Rosenfeld's other comments are generally helpful, this assertion is infuriating: I find no examples of -isms in Erasmus's polemical writings and none in the Church Fathers, although both he and they were happy enough to brand opponents as ‘-ists’ or ‘-(i)ans’. Erasmus uses ‘Ciceronianus’ and ‘Barbarus’ (which had an established -ism (barbarism) in both Greek and Latin) in book-titles, but does not progress to an -ism in either work. But who knows what might be found in the hundred-odd volumes of Migne's Patrologia Latina and Patrologia Crocea or in the Erasmian corpus in toto. Cange, Du, Glossarium Mediae et Infimae Latinitatis, 1678 (repr. Graz: Akademische Verlagsanstalt, 1954)Google Scholar, notes no -ism formations at all to go with the personal suffix, and neither does any other dictionary of late or medieval Latin or Greek that I have consulted.

4 The Thomason Collection, a treasure-trove of pamphlets, sermons, books, speeches and official statements assembled between 1640 and 1661 and running to about 20,000 titles, lists scarcely any containing an -isme, except of course terms like catechisme, baptisme. A pamphlet of 1641 listed there and entitled ‘A Discovery of twenty-nine Sects.…’ gives all the names of the sects in -ists, -(i)ans, or -ites. Thomas Edwards's celebrated Gangraena (1646), describing itself as a ‘Catalogue and Discovery of many of the errours, heresies, blasphemies and pernicious practices of the Sectaries’, not infrequently uses -ismes like Socinianisme, antinomianisme, Arminianisme, Familisme (the heresy of the Family of Love), etc., but far more usually uses the personal -ists. And while -ismes are common in the texts of the tracts listed in the collection, the titles containing -isme can be counted on the fingers of two hands. See The Catalogue of the pamphlets, books… collected by George Thomason 1640–1661 (London: British Museum, 1908).Google Scholar

5 The Acts of the Apostles, 11:26Google Scholar, records that the Christiani were first so described at Antioch; whether the title was originally merely designative or also derogatory is not clear.

6 2 Machabeus, 2:21Google Scholar, and elsewhere: the meaning is the religion of the Jews. Reference in OED, entry ‘-ism’.

7 The OED attributes it to Justin Martyr, c. 150 AD, which merely illustrates the perfectly indemonstrable nature of assertions about first appearances of a word. Ignatius's writings are extant in two forms in Latin and Greek each, but Christianismus (-os) appears in all versions. See Patrum Apostolicorum Opera, ed. Dressel, A. R. M. (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1857), pp. 148–9, 166–7.Google Scholar

8 The OED entry for -ism ought to have served as a model for dictionaries in all languages, but did not. The Trésor de la langue française, ed. Imbs, P. (Paris: CNRG, 1971–)Google Scholar, which is also exemplary, will have an entry under -isme, but has not got there yet. The entry in Robert, Paul, Dictionnaire alphabetique et analogique de la langue française, Vol. 4 (Paris: Société du Nouveau Littré, 1965–1970)Google Scholar, and Supplément, is flat and rather tendentious: ‘suffixe savant’ forsooth. German, Italian and Spanish dictionaries that I have consulted tend to have no entry for -ism at all.

9 Sophism, which is classical Greek and appears in all Western European languages via the Latin, never meant the doctrine of the Sophists, but always an argument or fallacy like those typical of a Sophist. Catechism, which according to von Wartburg derives from fourth-century patristic Greek, refers not specifically to doctrines, but to the art or product (and hence, presumably by analogical extension, the instrument) of catechesis. The medieval term dog- matismus, in the same way, meant the teaching of the Church.

10 Thus E. Huguet's admirable Dictionnaire de la langue fran¸aise au 16e Si`cle (Paris: Didier, 1928–1977)Google Scholar does not notice the occurrence of Anabaptismo, catechisme, Calvinisme, Machiavellisme or Judaisme, even though the last term had an idiomatic as well as an ordinary use. Lampe's, G. W.Patristic Greek Lexicon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961)Google Scholar ignores -ism formations, if indeed there are any to be ignored; so does the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae.

11 This term, first found in English about 1800, the French being considerably older, mimics the oldest Greek uses of -isms: resembling solecism, schism, exorcism, nepotism, aphorism, despotism.

12 Consider the history of the terms ‘revolution’ and ‘industry’ for example.

13 Rosenfeld, cited in footnote 3, notes the popularity of -ist (plural -isten) in sixteenth-century German, to which may be added Latin, French, English. Ad hoc formulations in -ist were everyday occurrences; Rosenfeld cites papist, bullist, Martinist, Lutherist, Summist, Interimist, Concordists. He asserts that this ending became popular in the medieval conflicts between Realists and Nominalists; according to Du Cange, however, the medieval terms were reales and nominales, not realista and nominalista (Glossarium Mediae et Infimae Latinitatis).

14 A term first used in this sense by Huguenots. See, for example, the ‘Lettre de Pierre Carpentier’ of 1572, reproduced in Goulart, Simon, Memoires de L'Estat de France sous Charles Neufiesme (‘Meidelbourg’, 1576), Vol. I, p. 357Google Scholar: ‘ceux qui nourroisoyent les factions et conspirations qu'on apelle la Cause.’

15 This is implicit in the fact that -isms designated heresies.

16 As some of the examples given in footnote 18 below illustrate, an extension of -isms to designate political referents was easy, given the interdependence of religion and politics of the time. An additional example would be ‘statism’, attested by the OED for 1609, whose meaning is roughly the political attitude of Politiques.

17 Luther habitually spoke of ‘das Papsttum’, or ‘die Romanisten’. The Catalogue of the Thomason Collection, cited in footnote 4, contains many illustrations of the suffix -cy or -ty being used where the modern equivalent would be or is -ism: ‘episcopacy’ (for ‘episcopalianism’), ‘malignancy’ (the practice of being a ‘Malignant’ or royalist), ‘prelacy’ or ‘prelaty’, ‘Independency’ (Independentism), ‘popery’ or ‘papistry’, and even ‘antinomy’ (for ‘antinomianism’). ‘Democracy’ shares the features of this use of the suffix.

18 Anti-Cavalierisme was the title of a pamphlet of 1642 by John Goodwin; the term does not recur in the text but it meant that ‘colluvies… heap… or gathering together of the scum, the drosse, and garbage of the land…, Jesuits, Papists and Atheists… commonly known by the name of Cavaliers.’ (Haller, W., ed., Tracts on Liberty in the Puritan Revolution (reprinted New York: Octagon, 1965), Vol. 2, p. 2.)Google Scholar Goodwin also invented ‘Babylonisme’ along the way (p. 32). For Anti-Normanisme see Hare, John, St Edward's Ghost, or Anti-Normanisme (1647).Google ScholarJesuitism seems first to have been devised by a German writing in Latin in 1576: ‘Assertio veteris ac veri Christianismi adversus novum et fictum Jesuitismum, seu Societatem Jesu’. The English translation of the pamphlet merely had ‘new and counterfaicte secte of Jesuites’. Clearly the cunning, underhand and treacherous practices imputed to the Jesuits, and not their doctrines, were at issue here. ‘Machiavellisme’ is late sixteenth-century (1592 according to OED), Machiavellianisme appears in the 1620s. The apparent reference of the term to the teachings of Machiavelli is of course entirely spurious.

19 Examples include ‘theism’ or ‘deism’, ‘optimism’, ‘materialism’, ‘fatalism’.

20 The article on Atomisme redescribes its subject as ‘doctrine des atomes’. Articles, mostly by Diderot, on -isme include: Epicuréisme, Héraclitisme, Hobbisme, Jansenisme, Leibnitzianisme, Scepticisme, Stoicisme, Platonisme, Phyronisme, Pythagorisme; usually (unlike modern practice) the suffix does not indicate a tradition, but rather the doctrine of one person.

21 All are freely used in the Encyclopédie. The article ‘Jésuite’ for example speaks of ‘ce système de fanatisme, d'indépendance [sc.: of the state] et de machiavélisme’ and also of ‘despotisme’. For Hume's use of ‘enthusiasm’, ‘fanaticism’ see for example the (1754) History of Great Britain, ed. Forbes, D. (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1970), pp. 71, 72, 73, 227, 616.Google Scholar The ‘Scotticisms’ which Scottish writers were anxious to eliminate from their prose were of course idioms, not doctrines. ‘Despotism’ seems to date from the late seventeenth century (Imbs, , ed., TrésorGoogle Scholar), and originally meant ‘toute autorité qui s'exerce de façon tyrannique’.

22 There appears to be no word or group of words incapable of sporting an -ism; I suggested ‘Ismism’ as the title for this paper. The OED has some choice examples of what it charmingly terms ‘nonce-formations’: L. S. Deism (a parody of Deism), Rule-Britanniaism, know-nothing-ism, to which one might add terms like hallelujahism, me-tooism, etc.

23 Helpful observations may be found in Williams, R., Culture and Society (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), pp. 13–16Google Scholar; Nisbet, R., The Sociological Tradition (London: Heinemann, 1970), p. 23Google Scholar; and Hobsbawm, E. J., The Age of Revolutions (London: Weidenfeld, 1962), pp. 17 ff.Google Scholar

24 In 1790, William Cowper wrote: ‘Let your divinity… be the divinity of the glorious Reformation! I mean in contradistinction to Arminianism, and all the other isms (sic) that were ever broached in this world of error and ignorance.’ (I owe this reference to Mr Russell Price.) This use of -ism as a substantive, which is still in reference to the original extended usage of -isms in religio-political controversy, had been anticipated in 1680: ‘Jesuitism, Puritanism, Quakerism and… all other Isms from Schism’ (OED, Supplement). But in 1793 Edmund Burke wrote of the conflict ‘between the rabble of systems, Fayettism, Condorcetism, Monarchism, or Democratism, or Federalism, on the one side, and the fundamental laws of France on the other’ (Policy of the Allies, in Works (London: J. C. Nimmo, 1899), Vol. IV, pp. 420–1.Google Scholar) Clearly, the reference here is exclusively to political ‘factions’ and ‘systems’.

25 Thus ‘socialism’, ‘communism’, ‘positivism’ seem all to have been devised to designate approved doctrines, tenets, policies, etc.

26 I do not know why Methodism, originally an opprobrious term, was accepted by Methodists, whereas ‘Quakerism’ has never quite appealed to the ‘Society of Friends (Quakers)’, even though the original imputation of a propensity to convulsive fits is now quite lost. In the same way Roman Catholics accept ‘Roman Catholicism’ but never ‘Romanism’ or ‘papism’. The derogatory connotation of the suffix, at any rate, is not quite dead: thus ‘democratism’ (attributed to Burke, 1793 (OED), and also found in French in the same year and occasionally subsequently (Imbs, ed., Trésor)) has never ‘taken’, and nor has Bentham's attempted neologism, ‘religionism’.

27 For example, SirFilmer, Robert, Pariarcha (late 1630s), ed. Laslett, P. (Oxford: Blackwells, 1949), p. 54Google Scholar: ‘I have nothing to do to meddle with the mysteries of the present state. Such arcana imperii or cabinet councils, the vulgar may not pry into’.

28 De Cive, ed. Lamprecht, S. (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1949), p. 17Google Scholar: ‘that monarchy is the most commodious government [is] the one thing alone I confess in this whole book not to be demonstrated, but only probably stated.’ This admission is not repeated in Leviathan, but De Cive was reissued by Hobbes in the same year.

29 This usage was anticipated by Hobbes, who in Leviathan (Chap. 22) used ‘system’ to refer to ‘any number of men joined in one interest, or business’, and who therefore also described the commonwealth or state as a ‘system’,-although he did not actually refer to ‘political systems’. A worthy contemporary of the ‘Metaphysical’ poets and preachers, he was apparently pleased by this ‘conceit’ as a new version of the well-worn body/body politic analogy or similitude or correspondence. He soon tired of it and reverted in the rest of the chapter to talk of ‘bodies’.

30 See (representatively): Smith, A., Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) (London: George Routledge and Sons, n.d.)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, ‘Bk. IV. Systems of Political Economy’; Chap. I: ‘Of the Principle of the Commercial or Mercantile System’; Chap. IX: ‘Agricultural Systems’; in these cases the reference is to doctrines, but (Bk, IV, Chap. IX), p. 540: ‘All systems either of preference or of restraint being thus completely taken away, the obvious and simple system of natural liberty establishes itself of its own accord’ (my italics), where the first reference implies the philosophe term of abuse ‘esprit de système’ and the second is to a set of arrangements. See also Robertson, W., History of the Reign of Charles the Fifth, ed. Prescott, W. H. (London: George Routledge, 1857)Google Scholar: ‘feudal system’ (pp. 6, 10), ‘the vast system’ of Charlemagne (p. 8); Ferguson, A., An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1980)Google Scholar: ‘system of laws’ (p. 121)Google Scholar, ‘happy system of policy’ (p. 133)Google Scholar, ‘system of national virtues’ (p. 151)Google Scholar; Rousseau, J-J., Du Contrat Social (1762), Bk. I, Chap. 9Google Scholar, ‘syst`me social’; D'Holbach, , Système de la Nature (1770) (repr. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1966)Google Scholar, where ‘système’ is used in neutral fashion in the title, but derogatorily (‘systèmes enfantés par l'imagination’, Vol. I, p. 1) in most of the text; e.g. Vol. I, Chap. 7, Vol. II, Chap. 11.

31 The equivalence is apparent in the quotations from Burke and Smith, footnotes 24 and 30 above.

32 Damourette, J. and Pichon, E., Des Mots à la Pensée (Paris: D'Artrey, 1911–1927), Vol. I, pp. 384–5, s. 323.Google Scholar

33 They saw a ‘sexuisemblance’ in the fact that the -ism suffix is masculine in gender in all European languages that have genders. Dutch is the sole exception. One hesitates to join them in this bear-pit.

34 The term ‘principle’ had already attained unparalleled confusion of meaning in the eighteenth century. The confusions are faithfully portrayed by Bentham in a footnote to his Principles of Morals and Legislation (Chap. I, footnote 2), characteristically entitled ‘a principle, what [sc.: what is it?]’.

35 The notion of a ‘rhetoric’ is perhaps unfamiliar. An example of it would be what might be called the ‘rhetoric of Protestant patriotism’ of seventeenth-century England. It is not a tradition except in the sense that anything having a continuous history might be called a tradition, but rather a complex of trigger-words to which Englishmen of that time were expected to respond predictably. It included terms like ‘the glorious reformation’, ‘the example of the best reformed churches’, ‘our Protestant brethren [abroad]’, ‘the Antichrist’ (sc. the pope and his agents), ‘the machinations of Papists, popish priests, Jesuites’, ‘conspiracies’, ‘plots’, ‘treasons’, the ‘liberty of Protestant Englishmen’, etc. Such language might as easily be used by Filmer (compare his link, d'ailleurs a familiar polemical ploy, between Jesuits and Puritans) as by Milton or the Levellers.

36 See for example the sensible distinction in O'Sullivan, N., Conservatism (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1976), p. 9Google Scholar, between a conservative attitude and a conservative ideology.

37 The term was invented (it seems) by de Maistre in 1820. See Lukes, S., ‘The Meanings of Individualism’, Journal of the History of Ideas, XXXII (1971), 45–66passim, especially p. 46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

38 Note should also be taken of the objections to imputations of essences (the particular instance being ‘socialism’) offered by Greenleaf, W. H.: ‘Laski and British Socialism’, History of Political Thought, 11 (1981), 574–6.Google Scholar