The Early Modern English Formation of the Term “Society”:

A Text-Mining Analysis

Abstract

This article aims to elucidate the Early Modern English conception of “society” through the process of data-mining of a vast corpus (125 e-texts of over 260,000 sentences from political literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries). The analysis displays the following facts.

First, early modern English literates considered “society” a foreign term particular to Neo-classicism found in other parts of Western Europe, so they equated “society” with their own vernacular words such as “fellowship” and “company”.

Second, throughout the two centuries “society” functioned as a general term encompassing all types of urban associations such as face-to-face relationships, religious groups, corporate bodies, and many others.

Third, there are several non-uniform chronological distributions of the above references to the use of “society”. For instance, in the early sixteenth century, the word implied transient relationships between two individuals. From mid-century onwards, it tended to denote more durable organizations. At the dawn of the next century, organizations and corporate bodies were predominantly thought of as “societies”. Finally by the late seventeenth century, the word came to be associated with the terms concerning central authorities such as “state”, “government”, “politic”. And simultaneously, the term “virtue”, which had once associated strongly with “society”, lost its influence. As the Early Modern Period waned, increases were also seen in the “protection of property” as the only and sole raison d'être for an engaged “political society.”

Today some leading social scientists negate the academic value of the term “society”. They disparage its use since it is synonymous with “nation-state”, which is seen as an outmoded concept. Nevertheless, the above facts suggest “society” continues to be a resilient and flexible term that will endure as a monitoring device for the process of extensive structural change.