ABSTRACT
It is perhaps ironic that when racism had become scientistic ideology in the middle of the nineteenth century, both racism and slavery were looked upon as “positive,” until Marx and Engels began dismantling the grounds of positivist social theory. Apart from the notion of ideology, Raymond Williams uses brilliantly a number of English “key words” which characterize the consolidation of bourgeois hegemony in the later eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth centuries in order to “map” the changes wrought in Western industrial social formations. By the 1830s, both capitalist slavery and the ideology of racism were being couched in the most positive terms in the United States and elsewhere in the capitalist world.
