ABSTRACT
Although it seems to have been used for the first time by Ford Madox Ford around 1920, the expression ‘the Establishment’ only became current usage in 1954 when Henry Fairlie’s use of it in his political column in The Spectator suddenly made it popular. Since then it has been used quite at random, often in an offensive sense, so that its meaning has become obscured. The word in its original, historic sense was used to designate the officially ‘established’ Church of England, but in its extended, secular sense it has come to mean the group of traditionally ruling bodies entrenched in the citadels of their institutions and quasi-hereditary privileges. Such are the Crown, the Court, the aristocracy, the Church, the judicature, the senior civil servants, Oxbridge, the General Staff, the City, the heads of the banking world and of industry, the big public corporations…
