Social and Political Movements

The use of the word to refer to social and political phenomena first appeared in English in the early nineteenth century. The large-scale social changes and new forms of human distress that came with early industrialism were accom­ panied by a semantic reevaluation of such terms as capitalism, ideology, masses, culture, revolutionary, and many more (Williams 44, pp. 16-17). Movement came to be used to describe group responses to the social and cultural . crises produced by the conditions of factory labor and urban life during the indus­ trial revolution. There were, of course, recognizable movements in preindustrial societies. The archetypal movements in Western cultural tradition are the great Biblical ones: the movement of the Jews out of Egypt, led by Moses, and their return to the Promised Land; and the spread of early Christianity. These ancient movements have provided persistent paradigms for movements in the West and have been made available to other cultural traditions by Christian missionaries and European colonialism, by the expansion of Islam, and by the diaspora of the Jews. Thus, many of the recurrent features of movements-patterns of prophecy and eschatology-have a common cultural origin. These constant features, however, are imbedded in a wide variety of unique ideological formulations. Each ideology expresses the unique situation of a people whose life has been unalterably changed, makes this change intelligible, and prescribes action appropriate to the changed world.