ABSTRACT
Society—a unified collectivity once designated as the commonwealth (e.g., common in the seventeenth century or even today, such as naming the reconfigured associations between for mer colonies of the British Empire)—is therefore the basis for the scholar’s work as well as being the object of study, indicating that some care should be taken. In its various early spellings, the noun “society”—a term of increasingly prominent use across the second half of the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century—entered into English in the fifteenth century from the French. Instead, the abstraction and generalization necessary to produce statements about society are always done from a specific viewpoint, which encourages readers to overlook any number of stratified or even happenstance differences, such as those between the subgroups known as the classes, the cultures, the races, the genders, the geographic regions, etc.
