[Ads-l] Antedating of "The Establishment"

[Shapiro, Fred]

The OED's first use for _establishment_, 8.b., is dated 1923.  This is the sense: "a social group exercising power generally, or within a given field or institution, by virtue of its traditional superiority, and by the use esp. of tacit understandings and often a common mode of speech, and having as a general interest the maintenance of the status quo."  The OED entry identifies a 1955 article by Henry Fairlie as the locus classicus of this sense.


Fairlie himself later (in the New Yorker, 19 Oct. 1968) traced use of "the establishment" in this sense to a 9 Dec. 1841 lecture by Ralph Waldo Emerson, titled "The Conservative."


Fred Shapiro


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