Activism

First published in 1976, Raymond Williams’s Keywords captures the spirit of his times. The 110 entries in the first edition include radical, revolution, and violence. Liberation is one of the 21 entries added to the second edition in 1983. These words linked together the worldwide revolutionary movements of the 1960s and early 1970s. From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, however, the absence of the word activism in Williams’s classic is conspicuous. In the decades since its first publication, but especially since the 1990s, activism has become a popular word in contemporary cultural and political discourse. It is used