Some words do not merely describe our public life. They organize it. They gather history, pain, accusation, memory, and moral judgment into a single utterance before a conversation has really begun. Racism is one of those words.

That is one reason it is so difficult to talk about. It is not a minor or technical term. It belongs to the vocabulary through which modern societies try to name some of their gravest injustices. It is a word people use to describe injury, domination, structure, exclusion, and complicity. It is also a word people hear as accusation, condemnation, and sometimes exile from the company of the decent. For a term with such moral force, it has remarkably unstable public meanings.

That instability matters. Not because the word is empty, and not because the realities it names are unreal, but because communication depends on some degree of shared intelligibility. When a word this central carries several meanings at once, people can appear to be arguing about reality when they are first struggling over language. One speaker means prejudice. Another means institutions. Another means historical structure. Another means privilege, defensiveness, or complicity. Another means the stories and symbols through which a society teaches who belongs and who does not. These meanings overlap, but they are not identical.

The aim here is not to flatten the word into one final definition. Nor is it to deny the reality of racism by dwelling on semantics. The point is almost the opposite. If racism is one of the words by which we attempt to name grave injustice, then we owe one another enough clarity to say which meaning we intend. To speak carefully about racism is not to weaken the moral seriousness of the subject. It is to honour it.

One way to begin is by admitting that racism now moves through several different registers. The map matters. Without it, we are left with a public argument in which speakers assume their own meaning is self-evident, listeners attach a different one, and both sides mistake confusion for bad faith.

Interpersonal racism

The oldest and most familiar meaning is interpersonal. Here racism refers to prejudice, hostility, stereotyping, exclusion, or discriminatory treatment between persons. A slur. A refusal. A degrading assumption. An act of unequal treatment. The scene is usually easy to grasp because the actor is visible.

This is still the meaning many ordinary speakers reach for first, and there is a reason for that. It is concrete. It is morally legible. It fits the everyday intuition that injustice often takes the form of one person mistreating another. In this register, racism is usually understood as something like animus, contempt, or explicit discriminatory intent.

But this clarity has its limits. If racism means only personal hostility, then much of what people are trying to name in contemporary life becomes difficult to describe. Persistent inequalities can remain in view, yet slip out of conceptual reach. That is one reason the meaning of the word did not stay here.

Internalized racism

The meaning widens when the focus moves inward. Internalized racism refers not first to what one person does to another, but to what a racial hierarchy does within the people who live inside it.

People do not merely inhabit social worlds. They absorb them. Members of subordinated groups may internalize shame, inferiority, low expectation, or doubt. Members of dominant groups may internalize centrality, entitlement, innocence, or a sense that their own standpoint is simply normal, neutral, and unmarked. By this point, racism is no longer just a matter of conduct. It becomes a matter of formation.

This is an important shift because it shows that hierarchy does not remain outside the self. It enters aspiration, self-understanding, fear, desire, and perception. Once that is seen, the word racism can no longer be confined to visible acts alone. It begins to name the interior life of a social order.

Institutional racism

The meaning widens again when we move from persons to organizations. Institutional racism refers to the rules, routines, professional norms, and habitual practices of particular institutions that produce unequal treatment or unequal outcomes across racial lines. A school. A police service. A hospital. A court. A workplace.

This matters because institutions can sort people unevenly even when no one involved thinks of themselves as overtly prejudiced. The problem is not always a malicious actor. Sometimes it is a patterned result. A procedure that looks neutral on paper may not be neutral in effect. A professional culture may reward some forms of speech, behavior, and belonging while quietly disadvantaging others.

This is also where communication often begins to break down. Many listeners hear “institutional racism” as a blanket accusation against every individual inside the institution. But conceptually, the claim is usually different. It is about organized effects, not the private moral purity or corruption of every participant. If that distinction is not made explicit, the term is almost guaranteed to be heard more personally than it is intended.

Structural racism

From there, the frame widens further still. Structural racism does not ask only what happens within one institution. It asks how many institutions, histories, and policies interact over time.

Housing affects school quality. School quality affects employment. Employment affects income and wealth. Wealth affects health, neighborhood stability, political influence, and intergenerational opportunity. Add policing, lending, zoning, transportation, environmental exposure, and representation, and the picture becomes much larger than any one event or decision.

At this point, the word racism has moved a long way from what many ordinary speakers think they are hearing. It no longer names merely an insult, a hostile intention, or a visible act of exclusion. It names a patterned social order. For some, that widening is essential because it allows them to describe durable inequality with greater accuracy. For others, it feels like the word is being stretched too far, especially if they are still hearing it in interpersonal terms.

That hearing gap is not trivial. It is one of the reasons contemporary arguments about racism so often become tense before they become illuminating.

Symbolic racism

Another register emerges from political psychology. Symbolic racism is especially important because it tries to account for what happens after overtly racist language has become less publicly acceptable.

In this literature, racism no longer appears mainly as blunt assertions of superiority or inferiority. Instead, it appears in a subtler fusion of negative affect and moral judgment. The target is described as not trying hard enough, asking for too much, moving too quickly, or receiving benefits not truly deserved. The language of old hostility gives way to the language of violated values, hard work, discipline, self-reliance, fairness.

This is a more specialized and carefully operationalized use of the term than many public discussions acknowledge. Scholars such as David Sears and P. J. Henry were not simply using racism as a moral insult. They were trying to name and measure a contemporary form of racialized resentment that persists under changed social norms.

That matters for communication because this meaning is both scholarly and politically portable. It leaks from research into public rhetoric. And once it does, the word racism begins to carry not only the older meanings of hatred and exclusion, but also the newer sense of moralized resentment disguised as principle.

Recent expansions

But the meaning has not stopped there. More recent anti-racist writing has widened the public use of the word further still, especially through the languages of privilege, complicity, defensiveness, and moral obligation.

Peggy McIntosh helped popularize a crucial shift by urging readers to see racism not only as something that disadvantages others, but also as a system of unearned advantage for whites. Her language of white privilege made visible what she described as an “invisible” set of assets and permissions that often go unacknowledged by those who benefit from them. Robin DiAngelo then pushed the discussion toward white defensiveness itself, arguing that many white people define racism so narrowly that only obvious extremists qualify, and that this narrow definition helps protect them from serious reflection. Ibram X. Kendi sharpened the term again by rejecting “not racist” as a meaningful resting place and insisting instead on the distinction between racist and antiracist policies, ideas, and alignments.

By this point, racism often means more in public life than prejudice or structure alone. It can also mean privilege, denial, defensiveness, passivity, or failure to oppose inequity actively enough. That gives the word real moral power. But it also changes how the word lands. People may hear not only analysis, but accusation. They may hear not only description, but an expectation of confession, repositioning, or active alignment.

Cultural-discursive racism

There is yet another layer. Racism is also carried in language, symbol, image, framing, and story. It lives in what might be called the cultural-discursive register.

Here the term no longer refers only to attitudes, institutions, or structures. It refers to the codes through which a society learns to read bodies, accents, neighborhoods, customs, names, and religions. It appears in who is marked as articulate, threatening, civilized, suspicious, moderate, or foreign. It appears in what is treated as normal and what is treated as deviation.

A society does not reproduce hierarchy by law alone. It reproduces hierarchy through meaning. Through headlines. Through metaphors. Through omissions. Through what sounds authoritative and what sounds suspect. Through what is granted the dignity of complexity and what is flattened into type.

And once that is visible, another question arises. Whose understanding of racism has become dominant in the first place?

When definitions travel badly

This is where the intercultural problem comes into view. The meanings of racism did not emerge from nowhere. They were shaped by particular scholarly traditions, political struggles, and social worlds. Some of those worlds have more authority than others.

Much of the scholarship that shapes public discussion comes from WEIRD societies, Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic settings, where the individual person is often treated as the obvious unit of moral and social analysis. That makes it easier to define racism as prejudice, stereotyping, or discriminatory choices lodged in particular minds. It makes it harder to see racism as something embedded in institutions, cultures, historical worlds, or colonial orders.

Salter, Adams, and Perez are especially useful here. They argue that mainstream Western psychology has often defined racism too narrowly in individualist terms, and that this narrowing reflects culturally specific assumptions rather than timeless universals. Musa al-Gharbi adds a different but complementary insight. His concern is less the formal definition of racism than the public life of moral language, who gets to define the terms, which vocabularies confer status, and how elite institutions turn certain ways of speaking into markers of seriousness and virtue. Put together, these perspectives help explain why some meanings of racism come to feel morally authoritative and self-evident, even when they remain culturally and philosophically situated.

Fanon widens the frame more dramatically still. In his work, racism is not simply a bad attitude, nor even merely an institutional pattern. It is part of a colonial order that reaches into language, selfhood, embodiment, desire, and the very terms on which people are recognized as human. In a colonial or postcolonial setting, the word racism cannot be contained within the moral psychology of individual bias. It names a world.

Once that becomes clear, the problem is not only that racism has many meanings. It is that some academic and public traditions have mistaken their own culturally and philosophically specific understanding of the word for a universal one.

How the words land

If definitions travel badly, accusations do too. Words like racism and white supremacy do not land on neutral ground. They are heard through prior definitions, status anxieties, moral worlds, and the pressures of acculturation.

For many white listeners, especially those who understand themselves as decent, cautious, and procedurally fair, the accusation of racism is often heard through the narrow interpersonal definition. They do not hear, “You are participating in a historically unequal structure.” They hear, “You are a bad person.” The phrase white supremacy may land harder still. In some scholarly and activist registers, it refers to a broad historical order. In ordinary hearing, however, many people take it as an accusation that they are morally equivalent to explicit racial extremists.

This helps explain why caution and incrementalism are so easily drawn into the conflict. Some forms of caution do protect unjust arrangements, and history gives ample reason to be suspicious of calls to go slow. But not everyone who is cautious understands themselves to be defending hierarchy. Some are worried about volatility, backlash, procedural fairness, standards, or unintended consequences. When every hesitation is heard as racism, and every gradualism as white supremacy, the language becomes too blunt to distinguish bad-faith obstruction from sincere notes of caution or disagreement. The result is often reacting rather than understanding.

Newcomers to Western societies often hear these words differently again. Many encounter racism not first as theory, but as navigation: accent bias, credential discounting, exclusion in hiring or housing, anti-Black treatment, or the quiet humiliation of being perpetually read as not quite from here. For them, the word can be a useful name for barriers they are trying to understand. But it can also feel like a morally charged public vocabulary already in motion before they arrived, one they must learn carefully if they are to participate without losing face, relationships, or footing.

And newcomers are not blank slates. They arrive with their own histories of ethnicity, religion, caste, region, colonial memory, and in-group preference. They may be vulnerable to racism in the host society while also holding strong internal norms about kinship, gender, status, marriage, or communal loyalty. That makes acculturation morally complicated. A person may welcome anti-racist language as a shield against exclusion from the majority while remaining uncertain about how, or whether, that language applies to exclusions within their own community.

At that point, the communicative problem is impossible to ignore. People are not only disagreeing about facts. They are hearing the words through different definitions, different social histories, and different expectations about what the words are doing.

What kind of power?

There is another reason these conversations so often derail. People are not only using different meanings of racism. They are often talking about different kinds of power.

Under a broad interpersonal definition, it is not difficult to say that anyone can act in racially prejudicial or hostile ways toward another person. In that sense, people of colour can be racist too. But many structural definitions are asking a different question. They are not asking only who expresses hostility. They are asking which groups hold durable institutional, cultural, and political power in a given society, and how that power shapes life chances over time.

That distinction matters because it helps explain why one person hears a simple truth while another hears a category mistake. The first is speaking at the level of interpersonal conduct. The second is speaking at the level of social structure. Once those levels are blurred, the conversation becomes needlessly combustible.

There is a further complication. Race is not the only axis of power. Wealth matters. Class matters. Institutional authority matters. Cultural capital matters. In an era marked by upward wealth transfer and the hollowing out of working- and middle-class life, it is reasonable to ask whether some abuses of power are being described too exclusively in racial terms when economic concentration is also doing enormous explanatory work.

Asked badly, that question can become a dodge. Asked carefully, it can be part of a more truthful analysis. The danger in the current climate is that questions about scale, class, changes over time, location, and competing forms of power are sometimes heard not as efforts at clarification, but as signs of defensiveness or denial. But a democratic culture that cannot distinguish a bad-faith evasion from a serious question about definition is a culture already in communicative trouble.

Why these meanings collide

Once the map is in view, a good deal of the heat in public argument becomes easier to understand. People are often not talking about the same thing.

One person hears racism and thinks of an overt insult. Another thinks of entrenched institutional rules or routines. Another thinks of historical structure. Another thinks of symbolic resentment masked as principle. Another thinks of privilege, defensiveness, and complicity. Another thinks of public narratives and cultural codes. These meanings overlap. They are related. But they are not interchangeable.

This is why arguments about racism can become so emotionally charged so quickly. A person who is listening for evidence of explicit malice may sincerely think the charge is false. A person who is listening for patterned inequality may sincerely think the evidence is overwhelming. A person formed by recent anti-racist pedagogy may hear neutrality or references to evidence as complicity. A newcomer may hear both a warning about exclusion and a language game whose rules are obtuse and still being learned.

None of this makes communication impossible. But it does mean communication cannot be taken for granted. It has to be worked for.

A small civic discipline

The answer is not to stop using the word racism. It is too important for that. The better answer is to use it with greater care.

Before making the charge, say what is meant. Does the speaker mean direct discriminatory treatment by a person, the internalization of hierarchy, the practices of a particular institution, the broader interaction of institutions, a symbolic attitude structure, unconscious bias, the privileges and complicities emphasized in recent anti-racist writing, or the language and narratives through which racial ranking becomes culturally normal?

That may sound like a small discipline. It is not. In a diverse society, where people come from different histories, different moral worlds, and different levels of immersion in elite vocabularies, clarity is not a decorative virtue. It is one of the conditions of communication itself.

To speak carefully about racism is not to retreat from justice. It is to refuse the degradation of public speech into a contest of reflex, posture, and mutual estrangement. A word this morally weighty should not be wielded as though precision were optional. If communication is itself something worth defending, then clarity is not the enemy of moral seriousness. It is one of the ways moral seriousness becomes speakable at all.

Endnotes and References

1. For further exploration of the various meanings of the word racism through a sociological lens, see Shiao, J., & Woody, A. (2021). The Meaning of “Racism”. Sociological Perspectives, 64(4), 495-517.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10.1177/0731121420964239

2. A quick explanation from the Center for Assessment and Policy Development, “Four Levels of Racism,” on internalized, interpersonal, institutional, and structural racism. https://www.cacgrants.org/assets/ce/Documents/2019/FourLevelsOfRacism.pdf

3. Carmichael, S., Hamilton, C. V. (1967). Black power. New York: Random House.

4. Lawrence, C. R. (1987). The id, the ego, and equal protection: Reckoning with unconscious racism. Stanford Law Review, 317-388.

5. Bell, D. (1992). Faces at the bottom of the well: The permanence of racism. Hachette UK.

6. Fanon, F. (2016). Black skin, white masks. In Social theory re-wired (pp. 394-401). Routledge.

7. Jones, C. P. (2000, August). Levels of racism: A theoretic framework and a gardener’s tale. American journal of public health. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1446334/

8. Braveman, P. A., Arkin, E., Proctor, D., Kauh, T., & Holm, N. (2022). Systemic And Structural Racism: Definitions, Examples, Health Damages, And Approaches To Dismantling: Study examines definitions, examples, health damages, and dismantling systemic and structural racism. Health affairs, 41(2), 171-178.

9. Norton, M. I., & Sommers, S. R. (2011). Whites see racism as a zero-sum game that they are now losing. Perspectives on Psychological science, 6(3), 215-218.

10. Milner A, Franz B, Henry Braddock J. We Need to Talk About Racism-In All of Its Forms-To Understand COVID-19 Disparities. Health Equity. 2020 Sep 25;4(1):397-402. doi: 10.1089/heq.2020.0069. PMID: 32999950; PMCID: PMC7520651.

11. Sears, D. O., & Henry, P. J. (2003). The origins of symbolic racism. Journal of personality and social psychology, 85(2), 259.

12. Symbolic racism policy prediction test. IDRlabs. (n.d.). https://www.idrlabs.com/racism/test.php

13. Shulman, H. C., Holt, L. F., Riggs, E. E., & Wade, R. B. (2025). The Role of Framing, Race, and Symbolic Racism in Policy Support. Political Communication, 42(5), 838–860. https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2025.2463923

14. McConahay, J. B., Hardee, B. B., & Batts, V. (1980). Modern Racism Scale (MRS) [Database record]. APA PsycTests https://doi.org/10.1037/t03873-000 https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mark-Kiss-2/publication/318138851_Modern_Racism_Scale/links/5e285a21299bf15216742334/Modern-Racism-Scale.pdf

15. McIntosh, P. (1990). White privilege: Unpacking the invisible knapsack.https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/community.30714426.pdf

16. DiAngelo, R. (2018). White fragility: Why it’s so hard for white people to talk about racism. Beacon press.

17. Kendi, I. X. (2023). How to be an antiracist. One world. Kendit asserts that there is no neutral “not racist” position, only racist or antiracist ideas, policies, and alignments.

18. Cole, N. L. (2019, July 19). Defining Racism Beyond its Dictionary Meaning: A System of Power, Privilege, and Oppression. https://racism.org/articles/defining-racism/3115- defining-racism-beyond?start=3.

19. National Education Association. (N.D.) Coded Language. https://neaedjustice.org/socialjustice-issues/racial-justice/coded-language/.

20. Salter, P. S., Adams, G., & Perez, M. J. (2018). Racism in the structure of everyday worlds: A cultural-psychological perspective. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 27(3), 150-155.

21. Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., & Norenzayan, A. (2010). The weirdest people in the world?. Behavioral and brain sciences, 33(2-3), 61-83. WEIRD—an acronym for “Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic”—has become a widely prominent concept. It was originally proposed by Joseph Henrich and colleagues in 2010 as a mnemonic describing a collection of features of societies, especially the United States, overrepresented in samples used in cross-cultural research. Originally, it was directed toward correcting this research bias, but since that time, Henrich has extended WEIRD to represent an underlying sociohistorical dynamic that has propelled those societies to dominant positions in the world. See also: Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., & Norenzayan, A. (2010). Most people are not WEIRD. Nature, 466(7302), 29-29.

22. Al-Gharbi, M. (2025). We have never been woke: The cultural contradictions of a new elite. (On the public life of moral claims, symbolic capitalists, and elite discourse).

23. Szaflarski M, Bauldry S. The Effects of Perceived Discrimination on Immigrant and Refugee Physical and Mental Health. Adv Med Sociol. 2019;19:173-204. doi: 10.1108/S1057-629020190000019009. PMID: 31178652; PMCID: PMC6553658.

24. Gonçalves, C., Ip, K. I., Stanton, C. A., Bamwine, P., Williams, D. R., Rao, U., & Murry, V. M. (2026). A review of the impact of structural racism on lived experiences of adolescents of African descent: Implications for development, brain structure, and health. Neuropsychopharmacology, 51(1), 203-218.

We argue about “conservatives,” “conservative values,” and “conservatism” all the time. Commentators warn of “a conservative backlash,” parties brand themselves as conservative, and families fall out over who has become too conservative. Yet almost nobody pauses to say what they mean by conservative.

In this series, we’ve been looking at polysemic colossi … big, emotionally loaded words that loom over our civic landscape, even as their meanings multiply and drift. Conservative is one of them. It is a single, heavily charged word with multiple, historically layered senses that different groups treat as obvious and morally self‑evident.

When a colossal word like conservative is left vague in English, politics becomes harder to learn, harder to join, and easier to game. For newcomers to English, for people raised in other political traditions, and even for long‑time citizens, this is not a minor semantic quibble. When conservative can mean “defender of liberal institutions” in one conversation, “social traditionalist” in another, and “hard‑right populist” in a third, public debate turns into insider shorthand that fails to communicate clearly.

The ambiguity is not just about how we conserve, but what we are trying to conserve. For some, conservative names an effort to protect liberal institutions: constitutions, rights, and the rule of law. For others, it signals the defence of traditional gender roles, religious norms, national identities, or conservative power structures inside minority communities: expectations around gender, sexuality, or caste. For still others, it marks a willingness to resist or roll back progressive changes in law and culture. If we never ask “Which order, whose norms, and whose freedoms are we conserving?”, the same word can quietly carry very different projects - and very different winners and losers - inside it.

Where the word conservative comes from

The everyday meaning of conservative is straightforward: to conserve, to preserve, to be cautious about change. As a political term, conservatism emerged as a name for a disposition to uphold established order and resist rapid change.

Modern conservatism took shape in the shadow of the French Revolution. The Irish statesman Edmund Burke, writing in the 1790s, criticized what he saw as the Revolution’s abstract rationalism and its willingness to tear down long‑standing institutions in the name of universal principles. For Burke, society was not a machine to be redesigned from scratch but an “organic” inheritance, a partnership between the living, the dead, and those yet to be born. Sudden, sweeping changes imposed by theorists risked destroying practices and relationships that had evolved over centuries.

Early conservatives drew at least three lessons from revolutionary upheavals of the late 1700’s:

• Traditions and institutions often contain accumulated wisdom that individuals cannot fully articulate.

• There are limits to what reason and planning can achieve in complex societies.

• Rapid revolutions often bring violence, instability, and new forms of tyranny.

Out of this reaction emerged a recognisable conservative disposition: sceptical of grand schemes, attached to gradual reform, and concerned with maintaining social order. At this stage, conservative named a political response: a preference for continuity over rupture, for gradual adaptation over radical redesign, and for social order over revolutionary enthusiasm.

Conservatism’s core: tradition, order, caution

In the 19^th century, conservatism diversified. Historians often distinguish three overlapping strands:

1. Traditionalist conservatism

   • Defending monarchy, established churches, and aristocratic hierarchies against liberal and democratic pressures.

   • Emphasising deference, duty, and an ordered, hierarchical society.

2. Liberal conservatism

   • Accepting many liberal achievements—representative institutions, the rule of law, some economic freedom—while insisting on continuity and gradual change.

   • Willing to blend market reforms with protection of existing social institutions.

3. National conservatism

   • Treating the nation, its language, culture, and historical identity, as something to be conserved.

   • Sometimes aligned with romantic nationalism, sometimes with state‑centred projects.

Already, conservative could mean defending feudal privilege, cautiously managing liberal reforms, or nurturing a particular national story. The word, as a colossus, was acquiring multiple faces.

If we strip things down, early conservatism revolved around a few interlocking ideas:

• Society is an organic, complex inheritance, not a machine that can be easily redesigned.

• Traditions, institutions, and norms may be imperfect, but they often embody hard‑won wisdom.

• Rapid or utopian change risks unintended consequences and social breakdown.

• The state should support order, continuity, and the institutions (family, public schools and universities, church, community) that hold society together.

This is why conservatism is sometimes described as a disposition rather than a rigid doctrine: a cautious attitude toward change, grounded in respect for what already exists.

Liberalism and conservatism: entangled traditions

As liberal ideas spread about markets, rights, and constitutional government, conservatives had to decide how much of this new order to accept. Some remained hostile to liberalism altogether. Others became liberal conservatives, trying to reconcile respect for tradition and social order with elements of the liberal project.

This produced an interesting inversion during the 1800’s, a century of political and social change. In the early 1800’s, liberal could be the revolutionary pushing against monarchy and church while conservative defended them. However, by the late 1800’s, in some countries, liberal institutions themselves had become part of what conservatives sought to conserve. The question was no longer simply “liberal or conservative?” but “which parts of the liberal inheritance should be entrenched, and which changes should be resisted?”

Already the story overlaps with liberalism. Both classical liberals and many conservatives:

• Distrust absolute power and centralised control.

• Value property rights and some form of market economy.

• Prefer government that is limited and accountable.

But they diverge in their attitude to change and sources of authority. Classical liberals tend to place more weight on individual reason, rights, and free choice; they are more willing to tear down inherited hierarchies in the name of equality and liberty. Conservatives place more weight on tradition, social cohesion, and moral order.

So what happens when liberal institutions such as constitutions, bills of rights, free elections, market economies become the existing order? In many Western countries, that is exactly what happened. Liberalism won key battles, and its institutions became the status quo.

At that point, someone whose central goal is to preserve classical liberal institutions ends up wearing both labels:

• Liberal, in terms of what they value (individual rights, rule of law, markets).

• Conservative, in terms of what they are doing (trying to conserve those institutions).

They are liberal in what they love and conservative in how they approach change. In a world where liberal institutions have become the existing order, the person who wants to conserve them is simultaneously a liberal and a conservative. The labels only become confusing when we forget that we are talking about both a philosophical tradition and a posture toward the status quo.

Fusionism: markets and morals in the 20th century

In the mid‑20th century, especially in the United States and parts of the Anglosphere, there was an attempt to fuse two traditions:

• Classical liberalism: free markets, limited government, anti‑communism.

• Social conservatism: religious faith, traditional family structures, moral order.

Thinkers and strategists argued that both camps had a common enemy in collectivist ideologies and authoritarian states. This “fusionism” underpinned much post‑World War Two conservative politics: a coalition that promised to roll back the state in the economy while shoring up moral and social order.

From the outside, this coalition was often simply labelled conservative. Inside, tensions simmered: How far should markets be allowed to reshape communities? What happens when economic liberalisation undermines the very traditions conservatives want to conserve?

By the late 20th century, new fault lines appeared. Some conservatives embraced globalization, deregulation, and “neo‑liberal” economic policies, seeing them as the fulfilment of free‑market principles. Others worried that these policies hollowed out local communities, eroded national industries, and weakened social cohesion. In the early 21st century, these tensions surfaced in populist movements and nationalist projects across the West.

A gap opened between:

• Constitutionalist conservatives, whose primary goal is to conserve liberal‑democratic institutions such as independent courts, free media, civil liberties.

• Populist or national‑populist conservatives, who are more willing to challenge or bypass those institutions in the name of “the people” or cultural survival.

Both are called conservative, but their relationship to liberalism is very different: one seeks to conserve it; the other is more willing to bend or break liberal norms if they are seen as obstacles. That is the intellectual landscape into which today’s uses of the word conservative fall.

Conservative as partisan label

Over time, conservative also became a party label. In the UK, NZ, and Canada, the Conservative Party emerged as a successor to the old Tory party; in the US, conservative gradually attached itself to parts of the Republican coalition; in Australia, different aspects of conservativism are dispersed amoung many political parties.

Under the same conservative banner you might find:

• Economic free‑marketeers who look a lot like classical liberals.

• Social conservatives who focus on family structure, religion, and moral norms.

• Nationalists who emphasise sovereignty, borders, and cultural identity.

• Small‑c “conservatives” who mainly dislike rapid change of any kind.

In ordinary talk, conservative often functions as shorthand for this entire bundle—even though different voters and factions care about different strands. The result is another polysemic colossus: a single word that can mean “pro‑market, limited government,” or “strong law‑and‑order state,” or “traditionalist moral norms,” or “nationalist populist,” depending on who is speaking and when.

A useful question, then, is always: what is being conserved?

What does “conservative” conserve?

To untangle things, ask: conservative of what?

• Some conservatives want to conserve liberal institutions: constitutional government, the rule of law, free speech, and markets. Their enemies, in their view, are authoritarians and radicals of various stripes.

• Some want to conserve a particular moral and social order: traditional family roles, religious norms, gender hierarchies, or ethnic identities.

• Some want to conserve a national story: a certain memory of the past, a language, a set of symbols.

Without asking “conservative of what?”, we risk treating all of these as the same. This is especially dangerous in intercultural contexts, where the norms being conserved may clash sharply with liberal commitments to individual rights and equality.

Conservatism inside minority communities

This brings us to the intercultural lens. In many discussions of “diversity” and “multiculturalism,” minority communities are described primarily as targets of majority prejudice and structural disadvantage. That description is often accurate, but incomplete for some individual community members.

Within some communities, there are internal hierarchies and conservative norms that shape everyday life:

• In many religious traditions, gender roles are tightly defined, with strong expectations about women’s behaviour, dress, and responsibilities in family and community.

• Norms around sexuality can be highly restrictive, with strong taboos around LGBTQ+ identities and relationships.

• Older generations may enforce strict rules about marriage, honour, and obedience.

Women and LGBTQ+ people in these settings sometimes face intense internal pressure and sanctions if they question or leave conservative norms. Their experience is not just of majority discrimination; it is also of conservative power structures within their own communities.

A similar dynamic can appear with caste. Caste has Hindu roots but now structures social life across multiple South Asian religious communities: Hindu, Muslim, Sikh, Christian, and some Buddhist contexts. In some South Asian diasporic communities, lower‑caste members may still encounter caste‑based exclusions and expectations, even when public conversation in the majority society talks about their religion or ethnicity as if it is monolithic. They may be:

• Discouraged from marrying outside their caste.

• Subject to stigma in religious spaces or community organisations.

• Invisible in public discourse that treats “the community” as a single, homogenous victim group.

In practice, the most marginalised people—women, queer people, lower‑caste members—can be triply disadvantaged: by majority prejudice, by conservative internal norms, and by the blind spots of well‑meaning allies. Concepts of intersectionality and hybridity are useful tools of analysis, as is the practice of actively carving out spaces for many voices and epistemological locations and not limiting communication to leaders who claim to speak for the entire community according to their conservative viewpoint.

Indigenous resurgence: conserving what was nearly erased

There is another kind of conservation that does not fit neatly into standard left–right categories. Many Indigenous peoples have embraced their own cultures in what some describe as a post‑colonial renaissance or resurgence: a deliberate effort to reclaim their culture and ways of life that were attacked or suppressed by colonial states.

In this context, to “conserve” is not to defend the status quo; it is to revive what was nearly destroyed. Indigenous scholars and activists talk about renaissance, resurgence, survivance, and decolonization as intertwined projects: revitalizing languages, stories, ceremonies and spiritual practices; re‑establishing Indigenous forms of law and governance; and asserting self‑determination and cultural continuity in the face of ongoing colonial structures.

Here, cultural conservation is both political and personal. Conserving a language or a ceremony can be an act of resistance to assimilation, a way of rebuilding identity after residential schools or similar systems, and a way of grounding future generations in their own histories. Unlike some conservative projects that aim to preserve majority norms or dominant institutions, Indigenous resurgence often seeks to displace or transform the existing order so that Indigenous legal and cultural systems can flourish alongside or in place of colonial ones.

This raises a sharper version of the central question in this essay: when we talk about “conserving,” whose world are we trying to conserve? In one breath, conservative might describe efforts to maintain a liberal‑democratic constitution that imperfectly included Indigenous peoples; in another, it might describe attempts to conserve Indigenous laws and relationships to land against the very institutions that tried to erase them. Without saying which world we have in mind, whether settler institutions, Indigenous cultures, or some negotiated coexistence … we risk masking profound differences under a shared, comfortable word.

Progressive blind spots

Many progressives sincerely support diversity and want to stand with groups targeted by racism and xenophobia. But there is a recurring pattern in how some public conversations frame minority communities:

• “The community” is treated as a single, homogenous bloc.

• Power struggles within the community are downplayed or ignored.

• Internal conservative norms are framed as “culture,” and criticism of them (even from within the community) is treated as disrespect or betrayal.

The result is selective solidarity. Progressive institutions may challenge conservative norms when they appear in majority contexts, but defend or overlook similar norms when they appear inside minority communities. For example:

• A conservative pastor in the majority culture who opposes LGBTQ+ rights is critiqued as regressive.

• A conservative imam, priest, or elder in a minority community holding similar views may be shielded from critique under the banner of “respecting culture” or “not fuelling racism.”

• Women or LGBTQ+ people within that minority community who speak up can be accused of airing dirty laundry or giving ammunition to hostile majorities.

In this way, solidarity is often extended to “the community” as an abstract whole, but not to the women resisting forced marriages or FGM, the queer youth seeking a different life, or the lower‑caste members who question inherited hierarchies. Their struggles sit uneasily with a political vocabulary that treats any criticism of internal norms as a betrayal of multiculturalism.

The word conservative does a lot of hidden work here that should be rendered explicit. A conservative religious leader in a minority community and a conservative talk‑show host in the majority culture may both be called “conservative,” but progressive responses to them can be very different. When we do not say which conservative we are talking about, or whose norms we are shoring up, solidarity becomes selective and some of the most vulnerable people are left out of the conversation.

Conservative as a polysemic colossus

If we lay the main uses of conservative side by side, the colossus looks something like this:

• A philosophical disposition: respect for tradition, gradual change, social order, and scepticism about sweeping reforms.

• A political ideology: emphasising limited government, markets, and moral order (with different emphases in different countries).

• A party label: Conservative Party, Republicans, Tories, and their allies.

• A social position: attachment to traditional gender roles, family structures, religious norms, or national identity.

• A temperament: cautious, wary of novelty and unintended consequences, preferring familiar arrangements.

• A stigma or badge: depending on who is speaking.

Each of these meanings is anchored in real histories and communities. None of them is “wrong.” That is what makes conservative a polysemic colossus: a towering word we use to orient ourselves in public life, but that now has many meanings.

To follow what conservative means in any specific conversation, you often need:

• Background knowledge of political history and party systems.

• Sensitivity to local and intercultural religious and cultural norms.

• A sense of who is speaking, to whom, and in what register.

That is a lot to ask of someone who did not grow up in that context, has not taken political theory courses, or is still learning English.

A parallel civic norm: say which “conservative” you mean

As with liberal, there is no realistic way—nor any need—to force conservative back into a single definition. The point is not to police usage; it is to make communication intelligible and inclusive.

What is realistic is a simple, difficult norm: when we use polysemic colossi in public, especially in intercultural civic contexts, we say which meaning we intend. For conservative, that might sound like:

• “Here I’m using conservative in the philosophical sense: a preference for gradual change and respect for tradition.”

• “In this article, conservative refers to the current right‑of‑centre party coalition in this country.”

• “When I talk about conservative norms in this community, I mean specific expectations around gender roles and sexuality.”

• “In this section, conservative means someone who wants to preserve classical liberal institutions: constitutions, rights, and the rule of law.”

In writing, that clarification can be a short definition, a parenthetical remark, or an endnote. In speech, it can be a quick aside: “When I say conservative here, I mean…”“

The next time someone calls themselves conservative, what would happen if we gently asked: conserve what, and for whom?”

Clear communication creates inclusive civic dialogue

This kind of explicitness will not settle our ideological battles. It does something quieter and more basic: it lets people who were not in the room when the colossus was built follow the conversation without guesswork. It lowers the barrier to entry for newcomers, for people from other traditions, and for those who want to engage in civic life without already speaking fluent culture‑war code.

When we brandish conservative as an undefined weapon, we are not just hitting opponents. We are also signalling to everyone else—especially those at the margins—that public conversation is a private language game. If we care about inclusive civic life, we can at least begin by saying, as plainly as possible: this is what we are trying to conserve, and these are the people whose lives that choice will shape.

Endnotes

1. Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) is often treated as a foundational text of modern conservatism; he defends inherited institutions, gradual reform, and the “organic” character of society, and criticises revolutionary attempts to redesign political order on abstract principles.

2. For a philosophical overview of conservatism’s core ideas—tradition, gradual change, scepticism about rationalist schemes, and emphasis on social order—see the entry “Conservatism” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which traces the development of conservative thought from Burke onwards and distinguishes it from liberalism and other ideologies. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/conservatism/

3. On the conservative “disposition,” see Michael Oakeshott and Peter King’s writings: Oakeshott, M. (2024). On being conservative. In Ideals and Ideologies (pp. 199-208). Routledge. King, P. (2015). Keeping Things Close: Essays on the Conservative Disposition. Arktos.

4. For a late‑20th‑ and early‑21st‑century defence of conservatism as the project of conserving a particular cultural and institutional inheritance—including liberal‑democratic institutions—see Roger Scruton, How to Be a Conservative ( 2014), which reflects on tradition, nation, and the place of liberal institutions within a conservative outlook.

5. On “fusionism” and the attempt to unite free‑market liberalism with social conservatism in post‑war politics, especially in the United States, see Frank S. Meyer, In Defense of Freedom and Related Essays (1962), which argued for a synthesis of libertarianism’s dedication to personal freedom with traditionalist emphasis on virtue within conservatism.

6. For a liberal‑theoretical defence of multicultural, group‑differentiated rights, see Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (1995), which distinguishes different kinds of minority claims and argues for conditional group‑differentiated rights within a liberal framework.

7. On tensions between multiculturalism and gender equality, see Susan Moller Okin, “Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?” in Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? (1999), which argues that some multicultural policies can entrench patriarchal practices inside minority communities, and asks what happens when group‑rights protections collide with liberal commitments to women’s rights.

8. Martha C. Nussbaum, Sex and Social Justice (1999), develops a capabilities‑based critique of practices that restrict women’s opportunities, including those justified in the name of culture or tradition, and defends the idea that liberal commitments to individual flourishing sometimes require challenging conservative intra‑group norms.

9. Bhikhu Parekh, Rethinking Multiculturalism: Cultural Diversity and Political Theory (2000) critiques traditional Western political philosophy for its inability to cope with deep cultural diversity. He proposes a pluralist framework rooted in human commonality, cultural embeddedness, and intercultural dialogue to achieve a balanced, fair approach to citizenship and minority rights in modern democratic societies. He suggests a dialogical approach to multiculturalism, exploring how states might both respect cultural groups and respond to internal injustices within those groups, including gender and generational hierarchies.

10. For a concise map of debates about multiculturalism, group‑differentiated rights, and the tension between protecting minority cultures and protecting vulnerable individuals within those cultures (particularly women and LGBTQ+ people), see the entry “Multiculturalism” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which summarises both liberal and feminist critiques of multicultural arrangements. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/multiculturalism/

11. On women’s experiences within conservative religious communities, and the ways they negotiate agency and constraint within inherited norms, see empirical work collected in the Gendering the Study of Religion in the Social Sciences series (Routledge), a seven-book series that brings together studies of how religion and gender intersect in diverse contexts.https://www.routledge.com/Gendering-the-Study-of-Religion-in-the-Social-Sciences/book-series/GSRSS

12. For qualitative accounts of LGBTQ+ people navigating conservative minority communities and experiencing “double marginalisation” (from both their own communities and the wider society), see research on conservative ethnic‑minority LGBTQ+ populations, including: Zehavi, A., & Keshet, O. (2024). Conservative ethnic minority LGTBQ+: Facing the challenge of intersectionality in an inhospitable environment. Social Policy & Administration, 58(3), 443–457. https://doi.org/10.1111/spol.12976; Mariam Adeyeba, Sam Calvetti, Gabriel Lockett, Jules Sostre, Lindsay Slay, Jeremy T. Goldbach, Michele D. Kipke, Intersecting Identities: Exploring stigma, minority stress, resilience, and identity in sexual and gender diverse youths of color, SSM - Mental Health, Volume 7,2025,100458,ISSN 2666-5603, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssmmh.2025.100458

13. On the caste system in social hierarchies across South Asian diaspora, see: Poudyal, B. (2025). Challenging racism, perpetuating casteism: South Asian moral contradictions in the diaspora. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 111(3), 515-519.; Kishore, V., Goulding, S., & Lal, R. (2026). Caste across borders: Persistence and transformation in diaspora. Transitions: Journal of Transient Migration, 10(1), 3-11.; Giri, B. P., & Kumar, P. (2011). On South Asian Diasporas. South Asian Review, 32(3), 11-26.; Discrimination Based on Caste is Pervasive in Aouth Asian Communities Around the World – Now Seattle has Banned It. (2023, March 7). The Conversation. Retrieved from https://theconversation.com/discrimination-based-on-caste-is-pervasive-in-south-asian-communities-around-the-world-now-seattle-has-banned-it-200886.

14. For empirical evidence that politically salient concepts (such as liberal, conservative, violence, or racism) expand and shift in meaning across the political spectrum, see C. A. Harper, H. Purser, & T. Baguley, “Do Concepts Creep to the Left and the Right? Evidence for Ideologically Salient Concept Breadth Judgments Across the Political Spectrum,” Social Psychological and Personality Science 14(3), 319–332 (2023)

Across the English‑speaking world, people argue fiercely about “liberal values,” attack “liberal elites,” defend “liberal democracy,” and campaign under Liberal party banners.

In this series, we have explored words that function as polysemic colossi — towering conceptual landmarks we use to navigate civic life, but whose meanings have multiplied and diverged over time. The word liberal belongs squarely in this category. It is a polysemic colossus: a single, heavily loaded word with multiple, historically layered meanings that different groups treat as obvious, non‑negotiable, and morally charged. To delve into the meanings of the word liberal in a short post, it’s necessary to summarize centuries of thinking and linguistics, so please forgive the generalizations.

When liberal has multiple meanings, politics becomes harder to learn, harder to join, and easier to manipulate, not only within one country but across borders.

For newcomers to English, for citizens without a political theory degree, and for anyone trying to follow public debates in good faith, this is not a minor semantic quibble. When a colossus word like liberal can mean “free market minimal state” in one context and “big activist welfare state” in another, politics becomes functionally unlearnable at every level. If politics are unlearnable, they become dysfunctional and exclusive.

Where the word liberal comes from

The word liberal traces back to the ancient Latin liberalis, “befitting a free person,” related to liber, “free.” In Roman usage, liberalis evoked the status, education, manners, and generosity appropriate to a free citizen, in contrast to the servility expected of slaves. That root gave us the “liberal arts” — studies fit for free people — long before it gave us a political ideology.

When early modern European thinkers began to challenge absolute monarchy and hereditary privilege, they reached back to this vocabulary of freedom. In this context, liberal named a political project: replacing rule by kings and inherited estates with rule based on the natural freedom and equal worth and dignity of individual human beings.

Classical liberalism: liberty against kings

What many now call classical liberalism grew out of the European Enlightenment struggles against absolute monarchy and aristocratic privilege. Leading thinkers argued for religious tolerance, government by consent, natural rights, and popular sovereignty at the end of the 17th century. They explored popular sovereignty and the “general will” as foundations for a free society.

These concepts were applied to the production and exchange of goods and services, laying the groundwork for economic liberalism, arguing that markets, when left relatively free, can coordinate economic activity more effectively than heavy-handed state control. A powerful defence of individual freedom and autonomy in social and political life was embraced: the “harm principle”- power should only be used against someone’s will to prevent harm to others.

Combined, the ideas explored between the 17th and 19th centuries in the West developed an explicitly liberal program: free markets, private property, limited government, civil liberties, and the rule of law- what later came to be called classical liberalism.

In this sense, to be liberal meant:

• Government exists to protect pre‑existing individual rights.

• Economic life should be governed mainly by free contracts and markets.

• State power should be constrained by constitutions, rights, and checks and balances.

This is the meaning many historians and economists still have in mind when they use phrases like classical liberal or economic liberal: a politics of negative liberty — freedom from interference — in both civil and economic life.

In this classical sense, to be liberal was to support limited government, free markets, civil and political rights, and legal equality — defining itself against absolutism and feudal privilege of aristocracy and monarchy.

Social liberalism: freedom needs support

Late in the 19th century, industrialization, urbanization, and the rise of wage labour exposed the limits of classical liberalism’s “you’re free because the state leaves you alone” view of liberty as freedom from interference.

If you are formally free but trapped in grinding poverty, unable to access education or health care, or structurally excluded by discrimination, how meaningful is that freedom?

Idealist thinkers argued that the state might need to act not only to protect freedom, but to enable it by removing social barriers to self‑realization. The state has a role in securing the common good and enabling individuals to realize their potential — and that is true liberty.

In the early 20th century, following severe economic upheaval and depression following World War I, it was noticed that a huge swath of the population’s lives were ruined. The case was made for active government intervention to stabilize economies and reduce the human cost of recessions. In practice, this shifted liberal people toward:

• Social insurance and welfare programs

• Worker protections and labour standards

• Public education, health systems, and infrastructure

• Civil‑rights protections for historically marginalized groups

In this social‑liberal sense, liberal now meant not only freeing people from oppressive states, but also empowering them through education, health care, social insurance, and labour protections. The word shifted from “keep the state small” toward “use the state to make freedoms real” by deepening welfare‑state commitments to redistribution, public services, and regulation in the name of social justice and equality.

In practice, these ideas fed a more activist version of liberalism that became especially prominent in early-mid 20th‑century North America and Western Europe, often associated with social‑democratic reforms, and welfare‑state policies such as Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s, which combined economic intervention and social programs under a broadly “liberal” banner.

Two kinds of liberty inside liberalism

Mid‑20th‑century theorists began naming this internal tension and the same word liberal could mean either “keep the state small and markets free” or “use the state to correct market failures and injustices”.

Public intellectuals distinguished between negative liberty — freedom from interference — and positive liberty — freedom to act or to become the kind of person one has reason to be. They did not think one was automatically good and the other bad, but warned that positive liberty can, if misused, justify paternalistic or coercive policies “for your own good, while negative liberty can fail to free people from the potential-destroying constraints of poverty and ill health.

Respected economists reasserted the classical view: minimal government intervention, strong property rights, free markets, and skepticism about welfare states. They argued expansive government programs threatened economic efficiency and individual freedom.

This distinction created a situation in which people who all called themselves liberal could still disagree sharply. Some stayed close to the classical, negative‑liberty view: protect individuals from both state and mob. Others embraced a more positive‑liberty view: use public power to remove social obstacles that prevent people from flourishing. Both camps claimed the liberal inheritance. So in some contexts, the word liberal meant market‑friendly and anti‑statist, opposed to authority, interference, and power of the state (government) in society; while in other contexts, liberal meant pro‑welfare‑state and egalitarian.

By the late 20th century, liberalism had come to represent different social and economic concepts depending on location — significantly diverging between, for example, the United States and the United Kingdom.

The American twist: “liberal” = left of centre

In the United States liberal has become the everyday label for politics left of centre, especially on social issues and economic redistribution. A liberal American today is expected to favour:

• Robust social programs and progressive taxation

• Strong civil‑rights protections

• Environmental regulation and climate policy

• Progressive positions on issues like abortion, LGBTQ+ rights, and gun control

Meanwhile, those who still champion classical “free market” liberalism tend to use other labels — libertarian, classical liberal, or fiscal conservative. On U.S. talk radio, liberal becomes a partisan insult roughly equivalent to “left‑wing activist,” and is sometimes conflated with progressive or socialist.

Today, in the United States, the word liberal has gone from naming a philosophical tradition to naming a tribe. Whatever that tribe believes at a given moment becomes “liberal.”

The European twist: “liberal” = free‑market centre or right

In much of Europe, liberal primarily signals economic liberalism: support for free trade, deregulation, and constrained government, sometimes combined with social progressivism.

Liberal often signals economically pro‑market positions: free trade, competition, and limited state intervention, sometimes combined with civil‑liberty language. Liberal parties tend to sit at the centre or centre‑right: more market‑friendly than social democrats, but not always as culturally conservative as traditional right‑wing parties.

So an American might hear “liberal party” in Europe and expect centre‑left social democracy, but encounter a party that is closer to what North Americans would call “pro‑business,” even centre‑right.

Same word, different political geography.

Liberal in Canada, Australia, and the Commonwealth

In Canada, Australia, and elsewhere in the Commonwealth, Liberal is also a party label, but the parties are not clones of one another. In Canada, the federal Liberal Party combines social‑liberal policies with generally market‑friendly economics, while in Australia, the Liberal Party is usually described as centre‑right and conservative on many issues.

Global political discourse

In the global media environment, international outlets talk about “liberal democracy,” “liberal international order,” or “neo‑liberal globalization,” however, we are not all hearing the same meaning. For a businessperson in Singapore, an activist in Nairobi, or a student in São Paulo reading in English, liberal may point to American culture wars, European economic doctrines, or an abstract ideal of constitutional democracy — sometimes all at once.

Globalization and migration

For newcomers arriving from countries where liberal might mean “secular Western” or where party labels map completely differently, this is bewildering. Even for long‑time citizens, tracking whether the speaker means “Liberal Party,” “classical liberal,” “US‑style social liberal,” or “nebulous ‘woke’ liberal elite” requires a great deal of background knowledge.

Why this is more than a semantic quirk

Given that English is used as the shared language in many international contexts and the word liberal has multiple meanings, it is understandable that an audience scattered across the Anglosphere — and beyond — might not be hearing the same thing when someone says “liberal”.

Polysemy is normal; language has always worked this way. But when a word is pivotal in conversation about civics in a global lingua franca, its ambiguity has real consequences. Confusion and miscommunication in the realm of politics and public life is not benign. It directly affects who feels able to participate in civic life.

The “Problem of Polysemy” around liberal is not confined to one country’s talk shows or civic discourse. It shapes how citizens around the world, reading and listening in English, understand — and misunderstand — core debates about rights, markets, culture, and democracy.

Political actors can exploit the confusion by sliding between meanings — praising “liberal values” when they want to invoke human rights, attacking “liberals” when they want to rally their base against a partisan opponent, and never admitting that they are trading on ambiguity.

When a colossal polysemic word is used without clarification, it becomes high‑context code for insiders and a maze for everyone else — especially newcomers to English or to a given political culture. To understand which of these meanings is being used in a given moment, you often need both Western intellectual history and a feel for local political context — knowledge that many reasonable, engaged citizens do not have.

Public debates become high‑context, insider conversations. That is especially exclusionary in immigrant‑rich societies where many citizens are acquiring both English and local political history at the same time. The lack of clarity about the meaning of the word liberal acts as a barrier to grappling with its meanings.

Cultural distance, internal diversity, and contested liberal freedoms

Some newcomers arrive in Western liberal democracies from moral, religious, and civilizational worlds shaped by different assumptions about personhood, family, authority, obligation, knowledge, and the good life. The distance is not only political. It can also be cultural, epistemological, and ontological: people may differ not just in what they value, but in how they understand reality, truth, selfhood, community, and moral order.

For that reason, “liberal values” may not appear as self-evidently good or universal. To some, they may look partial, culturally specific, overly individualistic, morally destabilizing, or insufficiently attentive to family, tradition, duty, or sacred authority. At the same time, many people who are wary of liberalism in some respects may still value aspects of liberal societies, such as personal safety, legal protections, educational opportunity, economic mobility, and freedom from arbitrary state power.

It is also important not to flatten newcomer communities into a single stance or think of them as a monolith. Such communities are internally heterogeneous. They contain generational differences, class differences, theological differences, political differences, and differences between those who wish to conserve inherited norms, those who want selective adaptation, and those who are actively negotiating hybrid identities across more than one moral world. Some experience liberal society as corrosive; others experience it as protective; many experience it as both at once.

Power is also uneven within communities. Appeals to tradition, culture, or faith may express deeply meaningful forms of belonging and continuity, but they may also mask internal hierarchies or silence dissenting voices. That matters when we ask who gets to define the community, whose interpretation of tradition prevails, and whose interests are protected when “our values” are invoked.

This raises difficult but necessary questions, especially for women in newcomer communities who may want fuller participation in public, civic, and economic life, and who may find in some liberal arguments a language for naming equality, consent, education, mobility, and legal protection. How should we understand the position of women who draw on liberal ideas from within communities whose dominant norms are not themselves liberal? When such women appeal to equality, autonomy, or rights, are they simply assimilating to the dominant culture, or are they engaging in their own forms of moral and political reasoning? And who gets to decide when a woman’s embrace of liberal claims is authentic, strategic, coerced, resisted, or hybrid?

These questions are not easy, and they should be approached with caution. But an inclusive civic conversation cannot avoid them.

Clarity is inclusion

When conversation quietly assumes university‑level familiarity with the Western canon and with current culture‑war scripts, that is not a neutral stylistic choice; it is a hidden entrance requirement that people with practical knowledge, newcomers, many immigrants, and people educated in other traditions or disciplines cannot reasonably be expected to meet.

A discourse that builds on the assumption that everyone knows the many meanings of the word liberal cannot honestly call itself inclusive.

It isn’t difficult to add a brief explanation of your usage of the word:

• “In this paragraph, ‘liberals’ refers to self‑identified supporters of the Canadian federal Liberal Party, not to liberalism as a general political philosophy.”

• “In this context, ‘a liberal attitude’ simply means being broad‑minded and willing to tolerate a wide range of views and lifestyles, not any particular political program.”

• “In this passage, ‘liberal’ is referring to trade rather than democracy: it means low barriers to international commerce, not any stance on domestic social policy.”

• “When I say ‘liberal’ in the context of US party politics, I’m using it as shorthand for the contemporary centre‑left: roughly the positions associated with the Democratic Party on social issues and economic redistribution.”

If we are serious about inclusive democracy in an English‑speaking and English‑mediated world, we cannot keep building our political conversations on unspoken, specialized knowledge. When we use polyssemic colossi words like liberal, we need to state which meaning we intend, so that understanding is an invitation into the civic conversation, not a barrier.

Endnotes

1. The Latin liberalis (courteous, well-bred, gentlemanly, generous, honorable, befitting a free person) and its relation to liber (free from control, independent, unimpeded, or outspoken) are discussed in historical lexicography and etymological sources.https://latin-dictionary.net/definition/25593/liberalis-liberalis-liberal, https://www.latin-dictionary.net/search/latin/liber

2. For the emergence of classical liberalism as a political philosophy grounded in individual rights, consent, private property, a good starting place is John Locke, the ‘father of liberalism’, especially A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), Two Treatises of Government (1689/90), and An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689/90), In The Social Contract (1762), Jean Jacques Rousseau explored popular sovereignty and the “general will” as foundations for a free society. Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776) laid the groundwork for economic liberalism, arguing that markets, when left relatively free, can coordinate economic activity more effectively than heavy-handed state control. In On Liberty (1859), John Stuart Mill offered a powerful defence of individual freedom and autonomy in social and political life, famous for the “harm principle”: power should only be used against someone’s will to prevent harm to others.

3. The shift from classical to social liberalism in response to industrialization, poverty, and social inequality led to the development of social or “positive” liberalism and the idea that the state may need to act to enable individuals to realize their potential. Idealists like T.H. Green in Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation (1895) introduced the common good and positive liberty, wherein the state might need to act not only to protect freedom, but to enable it by removing social barriers to self‑realization, enabling individuals to realize their potential—and that is true liberty. For a complementary overview, see discussions of “two traditions of liberalism” in contemporary political theory.

4. In the early 20^th century, economists like John Maynard Keynes in The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936) supplied a powerful economic rationale for government intervention to stabilize economies and protect people from the worst swings of capitalism made the case for active government intervention to stabilize economies and reduce the human cost of recessions.

5. Merriam‑Webster’s exploration of “What exactly is a ‘liberal’?” offers a popular‑level overview of the different contemporary senses of liberal (political, economic, temperamental) in English. https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/liberal-meaning-origin-history

6. The BBC article “Liberal? Are we talking about the same thing?” uses journalistic examples to illustrate how liberal can point to very different positions in the US, Europe, and elsewhere, reinforcing the idea that it is a polysemic political term. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-10658070

7. On “liberal democracy,” “liberal international order,” and the contested meaning of liberal in global politics, see concise treatments of these terms in contemporary policy analysis and political theory.

8. For the role of news style guides and prescriptive/descriptive struggles over language, see the Associated Press Stylebook’s evolution and its impact on journalistic word choice, including around politically charged vocabulary.

   https://www.apstylebook.com , https://www.prsa.org/article/from-oxford-commas-to-ai--inside-the-evolving-ap-stylebook, https://awordsmith.com/the-history-of-a-grammar-nerds-bible-evolution-of-ap-style/

9. John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money (1936), which supports government intervention to stabilize economies and promote social welfare. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal policies in the 1930s exemplify this turn toward a welfare state liberalism that combines economic intervention with social programs.

10. On the distinction between negative and positive liberty within the liberal tradition, see Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty” (1958), which provides a foundational philosophical framework for understanding different kinds of freedom.

11. For the reassertion of a more market-centred liberalism and debates over the proper scope of the state in the mid 20th century, see Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (1962), which advocates minimal government intervention and free market policies. The late 20th century sees the meaning of liberalism diverge further, with the term coming to represent different social and economic concepts depending on location, particularly between the United States and the United Kingdom.

12. This divergence is not just an academic curiosity; it is an active problem for people who still think liberalism is worth defending. In his recent book Centrists of the World, Unite! The Lost Genius of Liberalism (2026)Adrian Wooldridge makes the case for liberal centrism in an age of populism and polarization. He traces the intellectual, cultural, and political histories of liberalism and argues that we now live in an “age of extremes,” with populists and autocrats on the march and a “bewildered” liberal establishment short on confidence and ideas. He urges liberals to rediscover the “lost genius” of their creed—its commitment to constitutionalism, open markets, social mobility, and individual rights—while being more critical of big business that manipulates choices and spreads misinformation, and more realistic about immigration, social disorder, and substance abuse. Wooldridge’s project is, in part, an exercise in lexical rescue: he wants to remind readers what liberalism has meant at its inception and development, and to separate that tradition from the caricatures that dominate contemporary debate, warning against fragmenting into sub‑groups that cannot see the common good they still share.

13. On the idea that both sides of the political spectrum broaden and shift the meanings of politically salient concepts over time (conceptual “creep”), see C. A. Harper, H. Purser, & T. Baguley, “Do Concepts Creep to the Left and the Right? Evidence for Ideologically Salient Concept Breadth Judgments Across the Political Spectrum,” Social Psychological and Personality Science, 14(3), 319–332 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1177/19485506221104643

“Critical” is a small word with an outsized role in contemporary discourse. It can mean essential, as in “critical infrastructure”; disapproving, as in being “critical of the government”; analytic, as in “critical thinking”; urgent, as in “in critical condition”; or related to a particular body of theory, as in “critical race theory.”

Etymologically, “critical” comes from the Greek kritikos, meaning able to judge or discern. In Aristotle, it is linked to the assessment of drama and literature; in Hippocratic medicine, “critical days” were decisive turning points in the course of illness. From early on, then, the word carried both evaluative and threshold meanings, and those two lines of meaning continued to develop over time.

In the early modern and modern periods, “critical” took on increasingly systematic intellectual uses. Montaigne’s Essays modeled reflective critique, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason established “critical philosophy” as an inquiry into the limits and conditions of knowledge, and Marx’s critique of political economy gave the term a structural cast: not mere complaint, but analysis aimed at exposing underlying mechanisms and contradictions. In the twentieth century, the Frankfurt School developed “critical theory” in contrast to “traditional theory,” arguing that theory should not only explain the world but also help reveal and transform structures of domination. Later thinkers such as Derrida and Foucault extended critical analysis to language, discourse, identity, and power, and by the late twentieth century “critical” had become attached to a wide range of interdisciplinary projects, from critical legal studies to critical race theory and critical pedagogy.

This history matters because it helps explain why “critical” now functions as a kind of password or badge. Within universities, it can signal membership in conversations that aim not only to describe the world but also to transform it, often by centring marginalized perspectives and interrogating power. Outside those institutions, however, the word can be bewildering. “Critical race theory,” for example, is not simply criticism of racism; it is a specific legal and scholarly framework concerned with how racism may be embedded in laws and institutions.

When these specialized meanings move into the public square, the result is polysemy with high stakes. The same word “critical” can be heard as neutral analysis, harsh condemnation, essential importance, urgent danger, or a symbol of political allegiance. Some listeners hear “critical” not as a call for analysis at all, but as a form of ethical admonition—a signal that one is expected to recognize wrongdoing, align with a moral stance, and correct one’s language or assumptions accordingly. For those who have not spent years in academic settings, the proliferation of “critical” terms can make important conversations about race, gender, education, and inequality feel like closed shops. Newcomers to English face the additional hurdle of distinguishing everyday usages such as “critical condition” from highly specialized ones such as “critical theory” by relying on context clues that are often opaque.

For multilingual speakers, this is not simply a vocabulary problem but a heuristic one. Heuristic mapping is the ordinary habit of interpreting an unfamiliar use of a word by attaching it to the closest familiar meaning in one’s own linguistic and cultural repertoire. When multilingual speakers encounter “critical” in English, they quite reasonably map it onto the nearest term they already know. A French speaker may hear either urgent (time-sensitive) or critique (evaluation); a Hindi speaker may toggle between atyāvaśyak (absolutely necessary) and samīkṣā or pratyālocanā (analytical review); a Japanese speaker may distinguish hihanteki (questioning, analytical) from hinan (condemnation); a Swahili speaker may learn “critical thinking” as kufikiri kwa makini—careful, attentive thinking. In those linguistic worlds, urgency, disapproval, analysis, and moral correction are often distributed across different words or collocations. No single everyday adjective is expected to mean “in intensive care,” “finding fault,” “able to judge evidence,” and “aligned with a particular theoretical tradition” all at once.

This is where the history of the word becomes important. “Critical” has moved from meaning “able to judge” to naming deep structural examination, and then further still into a wide range of academic and public uses. Borrowing Nick Haslam’s language of horizontal and vertical concept creep, we can say that the term has expanded in two directions at once. Horizontally, it has spread into more and more domains: from literary judgment and medical turning points to infrastructure, pedagogy, law, race, identity, and public policy. Vertically, its threshold has dropped: what once marked either a rare emergency or a demanding philosophical stance now appears in routine phrases such as “critical reflection,” “critical literacy,” or “critical conversation.” The word has spread further and sunk lower at the same time.

That double expansion helps explain why “critical” has become a polysemous colossus. Academic usage has progressively stacked different functions onto one familiar adjective: urgent, disapproving, analytical, morally corrective, and linked to particular traditions of theory. When this concept-crept word leaves academic discourse and enters public life, multilingual speakers and non-specialists are not failing to understand. They are using sensible shortcuts formed in linguistic worlds where those functions are usually kept separate. The problem is that those ordinary shortcuts are now outmatched by a word whose meanings have multiplied faster than public explanation has kept up.

This has exclusionary effects long before anyone consciously decides to gatekeep. A newcomer to English who hears “critical race theory” may reasonably hear “race in a state of emergency,” “extremely negative talk about race,” or “a moral indictment,” rather than a particular scholarly and legal framework. Someone who encounters “critical pedagogy” may be unsure whether teachers are being asked to help students think carefully, to condemn existing institutions, or to adopt a specific political project. Even people with university educations may be unfamiliar with theoretical language if they were trained in other disciplines. For them too, “critical” can function as insider code: a familiar word that has been repurposed without explanation.

In public conversation, that matters. When one small word quietly accumulates multiple specialized meanings, it stops being a bridge and starts functioning as a filter. Important debates about race, gender, education, justice, and democracy begin to rely on a vocabulary that silently assumes specialized background knowledge. Those who lack that background—newcomers to the language, citizens educated in other fields, or anyone outside particular theoretical circles—are left to guess at the intended meaning and risk embarrassment or censure if they ask for clarification.

This dynamic raises the cost of entry into civic life. If citizens must decode what “critical” is doing in each sentence before they can even form an opinion, they are less likely to join the discussion in good faith. When misunderstanding is likely and being wrong feels risky, self-censorship becomes rational. Political actors can also exploit the ambiguity, using “critical” to signal allegiance to an emancipatory project or to portray opponents as hostile and destabilizing, without ever clarifying which meaning is intended. The result is not only semantic confusion but a narrowing of the practical public: debates that should invite broad participation instead begin to feel legible only to insiders.

This is not an argument against critical theories or critical thinking. Democracies need more rigorous analysis, not less. But if we want broader public engagement, we need to stop using “critical” as a stand-alone signal and start explicitly naming what we mean: analytic, urgent, evaluative, or linked to a particular theoretical tradition/ research paradigm with the goal of social change. When we say “critical race theory,” for example, we can add a brief explanation of its focus and limits rather than assuming everyone knows the backstory. Otherwise, “critical” risks functioning as a shibboleth: a marker of tribe that keeps those without specialized background knowledge on the outside, even when the goal is social justice.

Endnotes

1. Standard dictionaries record several distinct meanings of “critical,” including “expressing adverse or disapproving comments,” “exercising or involving careful judgment,” “of decisive importance,” and “relating to or being at a turning point or specially severe stage.” The point here is not that any one of these meanings is illegitimate, but that contemporary public discourse often carries several of them at once without enough contextual clarification.

2. The word “critical” derives from the Greek kritikos, meaning able to judge or discern. In Aristotle’s Poetics, it is associated with analysis and assessment in literature and drama; in Hippocratic medicine, “critical days” referred to decisive turning points in the progress of disease. From early on, the word therefore carried both evaluative and threshold meanings.

3. In the Renaissance and early modern period, “critical” came to include literary and artistic critique, emphasizing judgment and evaluation. Montaigne’s Essays (1580) represent an early form of reflective critique, while Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781) established “critical philosophy” as an inquiry into the limits and conditions of human understanding.

4. Marx’s Das Kapital (1867) gave “critique” a more structural sense: not mere disapproval, but analysis aimed at exposing hidden mechanisms and contradictions. Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy (1869), by contrast, used criticism in a more literary and cultural register, showing that even in the nineteenth century the family of meanings around “critical” was already broadening in different directions.

5. In the twentieth century, Horkheimer’s “Traditional and Critical Theory” (1937) distinguished theory that merely explains from theory that seeks social transformation. Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940) extended critique into history and culture, while later thinkers such as Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault pushed critical analysis toward myth, language, discourse, identity, and institutional power. By the late twentieth century, “critical” had become a marker for whole interdisciplinary traditions rather than simply a style of judgment.

6. This later expansion continued into critical race theory, critical pedagogy, gender theory, and related interdisciplinary projects in works by figures such as Marcuse, Habermas, Crenshaw, and Freire. In this phase, “critical” often signaled not only analysis but the intention to reveal and challenge structures of domination, giving the word an academic lineage that is often invisible to readers encountering it in ordinary public language.

7. Borrowing psychologist Nick Haslam’s language of “concept creep,” this post argues that “critical” has expanded both horizontally and vertically. Haslam used those terms to describe concepts that spread outward into new domains and downward to include less extreme cases; although he developed the framework in relation to harm-related concepts, it is useful here as a way of describing the semantic expansion of “critical.”

8. The broader argument is that semantic expansion often begins when scholars adapt existing words to carry adjacent or newly theorized meanings rather than inventing new vocabulary. Once those expanded meanings move from academic discourse into the public square, the shared social understanding of the word weakens, and word choice can become a marker of in-group belonging rather than a vehicle of clear explanation. In that sense, concept creep is not just a lexical phenomenon but a civic one.

9. Heuristic mapping: By this I mean the ordinary interpretive shortcut by which listeners attach an unfamiliar or contextually unclear use of a word to the nearest familiar meaning in their own linguistic and cultural repertoire. In the case of “critical,” multilingual speakers are likely to map the English word onto the closest equivalent they already know—urgent, disapproving, analytical, or morally corrective—especially when their own languages distribute those functions across separate terms. The point is not that they are misunderstanding out of carelessness, but that they are using a normal and usually efficient strategy of comprehension. What makes “critical” difficult is that public English now asks one familiar adjective to carry several meanings that many speakers would ordinarily expect to remain distinct. In that sense, heuristic mapping helps explain why polysemous public language can become exclusionary: it places the burden of disambiguation on newcomers and non-specialists rather than on the speaker or writer.

10. The multilingual examples in this post are illustrative. They are meant to show that many languages distribute functions now bundled into English “critical” across separate words or collocations: French urgent / critique; Hindi atyāvaśyak and analytical terms for critique; Japanese hihanteki / hinan; and Swahili kufikiri kwa makini for “critical thinking.” The point is not that these languages are semantically simple, but that English often asks one familiar adjective to do work that other linguistic repertoires spread across several terms.

11. In some African educational contexts, what Anglophone institutions call “critical thinking” is more readily rendered through descriptive phrases than through a single adjective. This is relevant here because it shows that rational, evidence-sensitive thought can be named without also importing the connotations of urgency, negativity, or theoretical allegiance that now often cling to “critical” in English.

12. Some listeners hear “critical” not as an invitation to analysis but as ethical admonition: a cue that one is expected to recognize wrongdoing, align with a moral stance, and correct one’s language or assumptions accordingly. That hearing is especially relevant in intercultural communication, where words are filtered through prior moral and relational frameworks as well as dictionary definitions.

13. Orwell observed in “Politics and the English Language” (1946) that many political words acquire multiple incompatible meanings and are then used in ways that allow speakers to smuggle in private definitions while listeners infer something else. The larger argument here extends that insight by treating such words as “colossi” in public life: conceptual landmarks citizens need in order to orient themselves politically, but which become exclusionary when their meanings multiply without being made explicit.

14. The democratic concern, then, is not merely semantic untidiness. When politically consequential words become polysemous and high-context, participation becomes harder for newcomers to English, for citizens educated outside the relevant theoretical traditions, and for anyone expected to infer specialized meanings without explanation. In that setting, misunderstanding is not a personal failure but a predictable consequence of public language that no longer does the work of public inclusion.

Justice is another towering colossus in political life. We invoke it constantly in law, activism, and everyday speech, often as if its meaning were self‑evident when, in fact, it is anything but. At first glance, it seems straightforward: justice is about fairness, getting what one is “due,” and rectifying wrongs. Yet as soon as we look closely, we find multiple, overlapping meanings.

In ancient Western philosophy, Plato described justice as harmony—each part of the soul and each class in the city fulfilling its proper role. Aristotle framed justice as giving each their due and distinguished distributive justice (how benefits and burdens are shared) from corrective justice (how wrongs are righted). Later, Thomas Aquinas integrated these ideas with Christian theology, casting justice as a cardinal virtue ordered toward divine and natural law.

Modern political thinkers reframed justice in terms of social contracts and rights. For Hobbes, justice arises when individuals agree to submit to a sovereign power to escape the chaos of the state of nature. Locke tied justice to the protection of life, liberty, and property. Rousseau linked it to the general will and the common good. In the twentieth century, John Rawls famously presented “justice as fairness,” arguing that just institutions are those we would choose behind a veil of ignorance about our own social position.

Even within this Western stream, we already have a cluster of meanings: justice as inner and civic harmony, as giving each their due, as a virtue, as contract‑keeping, as rights protection, as fairness in basic institutions. Once we widen the lens, the picture becomes even more layered.

Confucian traditions, for example, link justice closely to social harmony, role‑based obligations, and cultivated character. Confucius and his successors emphasize benevolence, moral fairness, and ritual propriety; justice arises from forming just persons whose empathy, shame, and sense of order keep relationships in balance, rather than from enforcing impersonal rules alone. Confucian theories emphasize the formation of just individuals and harmonious relationships more than the design of just institutions.

In Islamic thought, Qur’anic language distinguishes terms such as ʿadl and qisṭ when speaking of justice. ʿAdl points to establishing balance, right order, and fairness, while qisṭ stresses actively uprooting injustice and refusing practices that produce oppression. Justice here is not only a legal or political standard but a theological mandate, tied to accountability before God and to steadfastness in bearing witness to what is right.

In many South Asian Dharmic traditions (Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Sikh), ideas of justice often intersect with dharma—a term that can mean cosmic order, moral law, individual duty, and righteous conduct all at once, though each tradition understands it differently. Rather than starting from individual rights, dharma emphasizes obligations and roles: people secure one another’s claims by fulfilling their responsibilities. Questions about what counts as just behaviour are therefore framed in terms of duties appropriate to one’s stage of life and position, within a larger cosmic and social order.

African philosophies of ubuntu and hunhu add yet another register. Ubuntu’s core claim—“I am because we are”—grounds justice in interdependence, empathy, and the restoration of relationships. In post‑apartheid South Africa, ubuntu informed restorative approaches that prioritized reparation, reintegration, and rebuilding the common good over purely punitive responses. Here, justice is inseparable from healing: a community‑centred practice of mending bonds rather than only measuring deserts.

Indigenous legal traditions in places like Canada contribute still more senses. Practices such as sentencing circles treat crime as a breach of relationships among offender, victim, and community, and aim to heal those breaches through collective dialogue and consensus rather than through adversarial punishment alone. On this view, justice is less a matter of the state imposing a sentence and more a shared process of accountability, repair, and restoring the conditions for ongoing life together.

The concept of justice, across these settings, serves as a foundational pillar in discussions about rights, morality, and the social contract. Its meanings span from the legal domain, where it refers to the application of laws, to philosophical discussions about moral rightness and social equity. In many ancient legal codes—from Mesopotamian law collections to early Chinese dynastic law—justice appears as a mix of retaliation, fairness, and maintenance of social order, already combining several of these strands.

Legal justice focuses on procedural fairness and the application of laws, ensuring rights are protected and wrongdoings are appropriately addressed. This form of justice is tangible, embedded in institutions and legal codes, and often treated as the backbone of democratic societies. We see it in guarantees like due process, fair trials, and proportionate sentencing—ideals that appear, in different guises, from ancient law codes to contemporary constitutions.

Social justice extends the concept to the equitable distribution of resources, opportunities, and rights, highlighting the need to address systemic injustices that impede full participation by all members of society. It encompasses ideals of fairness beyond the courtroom, touching on economic, social, and political arrangements, and is often associated with movements seeking to transform structures rather than simply apply existing rules more consistently.

Distributive, retributive, and restorative justice further nuance the discussion, offering different lenses through which to view fairness and the rectification of wrongs—from how goods and burdens are allocated, to the mechanisms of punishment, to the practices of reconciliation and repair. Contemporary work adds transformative justice to this list, focusing on changing the conditions that generate harm in the first place.

Cross‑cultural studies suggest that different societies weigh these lenses differently: some prioritise punishment and deterrence, others restoration and harmony, others equality or equity in distributions. They also suggest that concepts of justice are remarkably fluid in adapting to changing social needs.

The polysemic nature of justice enriches public debate, allowing for multifaceted discussions about society’s core values and objectives. It lets us talk, under one heading, about criminal law, welfare policy, climate responsibility, racial inequality, and the moral formation of citizens. Yet it also demands careful attention to context and definition if we want dialogue to lead to mutual understanding rather than confusion.

Each of these meanings is intelligible in its own setting, but when we use the word justice without saying which dimension we have in mind, we invite misunderstanding. One person may hear a call for justice reform and think of sentencing guidelines, while the speaker has in view healthcare access or climate policy. Others may assume that justice is always about courts and police, missing wider arguments about housing, education, economic structures, character formation, spiritual obligation, or the healing of relationships.

For newcomers learning English and adjusting to a new political and legal system, this complexity poses a double challenge. First, they must navigate unfamiliar institutions and processes. Second, they must decode a word whose meaning slides from courtroom procedure to philosophical ideal to redistributive policy to religious duty, often within the same conversation.

Recent cross‑cultural research suggests that people in very different times and places share some basic intuitions about justice and fairness, but fill them out with different priorities and practices shaped by local histories, religions, and social structures. Culture also impacts which aspect of the word justice is foregrounded and weighted, even if its multiple meanings are well known.

When no one pauses to say which sense they intend, justice risks becoming a feel‑good word that papers over disagreement rather than clarifying it. In Weber’s terms, we end up in a “polytheism of values”: different visions of justice compete under the same name, and clashes of value get mislabeled as mere disagreement over facts.

If all citizens are to participate meaningfully in conversations about our society’s core values and goals, we owe one another more precision and more hospitality in our language. When we invoke justice in public debate, we can take a moment to say whether we mean legal procedures, social arrangements, outcomes, opportunities, duties, repair of relationships, or some combination of these.

That small act of clarification can make the difference between a debate that welcomes diverse voices—including immigrants and multilingual speakers whose own languages carve up justice differently—and one that only insiders can follow.

References

Classical and early modern justice

Plato. (2007). Republic (B. Jowett, Trans.). Dover. (Original work published ca. 375 BCE)

Aristotle. (2009). Nicomachean Ethics (W. D. Ross, Trans.). Oxford University Press. (Original work published ca. 4th c. BCE)

Aristotle. (1998). Politics (C. D. C. Reeve, Trans.). Hackett. (Original work published ca. 4th c. BCE)

Aquinas, T. (1947). Summa Theologica (Fathers of the English Dominican Province, Trans.). Benziger. (Original work published 1265–1274)

Hobbes, T. (1996). Leviathan (R. Tuck, Ed.). Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1651)

Locke, J. (1988). Two Treatises of Government (P. Laslett, Ed.). Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1689)

Rousseau, J.-J. (1997). The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings (V. Gourevitch, Ed. & Trans.). Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1762)

Rawls, J. (1971). A Theory of Justice. Harvard University Press.

Capabilities, justice, and equality

Sen, A. (1999). Freedom. Development, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Sen, A. (2008). The idea of Justice. Journal of Human Development, 9(3), 331-342.

Nussbaum, M. C. (2013). Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach. Harvard University Press.

Kymlicka, W. (2001). Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press.

Confucian, Islamic, Dharmic, Ubuntu, and Indigenous justice

Angle, S. C. (2012). Contemporary Confucian political philosophy. Polity.

Funes, M. G. (2025, July 30). The Ubuntu Approach to Building Restorative Justice. Science Publishing Group.https://www.sciencepublishinggroup.com/article/10.11648/j.ijsts.20251304.12

Hadley, M. L. (Ed.). (2001). The spiritual roots of restorative justice. State University of New York Press.

Hinduism and human rights: Understanding dharma . The Law Institute. (2025, October 26). Retrieved April 6, 2026 from https://thelaw.institute/human-rights-in-india/hinduism-human-rights-dharma-understanding/

Lilles, H. (2002, August 9). Circle Sentencing: Part of the Restorative Justice Continuum. IIRP. https://www.iirp.edu/news/circle-sentencing-part-of-the-restorative-justice-continuum

Mangena, F. (n.d.). Hunhu/Ubuntu in the Traditional Thought of Southern Africa. Internet encyclopedia of philosophy. Retrieved on April 6, 2026 from https://iep.utm.edu/hunhu-ubuntu-southern-african-thought/

Schoeman, M. (2016). The African Concept of Ubuntu and Restorative Justice. In Reconstructing restorative justice philosophy (pp. 291-310). Routledge.

Sheposh, R. (2022). Dharma (religious concept): Religion and philosophy: Research starters: Ebsco research. EBSCO. Retrieved April 6, 2026, from https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/religion-and-philosophy/dharma-religious-concept

Siddiqui, A. R. (2015, June 9). ‘Adl (Justice) Source: Qur’anic Keywords A Reference Guide. Alukah in English. https://en.alukah.net/shariah/4/5932/

Zaidi, F. J., & Dhanji, N. (2025, December 16). The Quran’s concept of social justice. Thaqlain. https://thaqlain.org/guide/qurans-concept-of-social-justice/

Cross‑cultural and comparative justice

Harrison, E. J. (2025). Cross-Culture Perceptions of Justice: A Comparative Study of Ethical Principles. Cultura. International Journal of Philosophy of Culture and Axiology, 22(3), 183–199.

Suneki, S., & Pratama, T. G. W. (2026). Theory of Justice: A Cross-Cultural Philosophical Perspective. Journal of Advances in Education and Philosophy, 10(02), 18–24. https://doi.org/10.36348/jaep.2026.v10i02.002

Sznycer, D., & Patrick, C. (2022, October 21). Intuitions About Justice Are a Consistent Part of Human Nature Across Cultures and Millennia. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/intuitions-about-justice-are-a-consistent-part-of-human-nature-across-cultures-and-millennia-190523

The word violence is one of the most emotionally powerful colossi in our political vocabulary. For most people, the primary association is clear: the exertion of physical force or power that injures, damages, or kills. This everyday meaning appears in news reports about assaults, wars, riots, and domestic abuse. In legal contexts, violence refers to specific acts defined in statutes and case law, where precise definitions matter for evidence, charges, and sentencing.

Over time, however, the concept of violence has expanded. In early European political philosophy between the 16th and 18th centuries, thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke used violence to describe both the chaotic “state of nature” and the coercive power of tyrannical rulers. In the 19th century, Karl Marx and others treated violence as a tool of class struggle and revolution, while Nietzsche linked it to the “will to power.” In the 20th century, Max Weber famously defined the state as holding a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force, and Frantz Fanon wrote about the dehumanizing violence of colonialism and the cathartic violence of anti‑colonial resistance.

Later in the 20th century, scholars deepened the concept further. Michel Foucault analyzed how institutions exercise control and discipline over bodies and populations, highlighting subtler forms of coercion that blur the line between force and control. Pierre Bourdieu introduced “symbolic violence” to describe how cultural dominance and social norms can harm people without overt physical force. More recent thinkers such as Judith Butler and Achille Mbembe have written about economic, environmental, and necropolitical violence—forms of harm embedded in global inequalities, precarious lives, and decisions about whose lives are protected and whose are expendable.

These expansions were intellectually motivated: scholars and activists needed ways to name harms that are not captured by bruises and broken bones. But when this expanded vocabulary moves from academic work into public conversation without clarification, we end up with one word, violence, trying to do very different jobs. In everyday use, a headline about violence usually suggests physical danger. In activist or scholarly discourse, violence may refer to policies, omissions, or cultural narratives that systematically marginalize or damage people’s life chances.

Violence across languages and cultures

The layering of meanings is not unique to English. Every language and culture has its own ways of naming and ranking harmful acts. Anthropologists and historians have shown that what “counts” as violence, and how it is morally evaluated, varies widely across societies and periods.

In some small‑scale societies, for example, ritualized fighting can be understood as a controlled, even necessary, outlet—structured by rules, overseen by elders, and not always classified as “real violence” by participants. In others, practices many outsiders would see as obviously violent—such as corporal punishment, certain initiation rites, or what many would see as harmful cultural practices—may be framed locally as discipline, tradition, or duty. Conversely, some communities place strong cultural emphasis on peace and non‑violence, developing elaborate norms and institutions to prevent escalation and repair conflict.

Across contexts, what we consider violence depends on cultural perspective, social position, and lived experience. Transgression is central—someone or something has crossed a line—but where the lines are drawn and how they are named are culturally specific. This means that when people immigrate, they bring with them not only memories of violence or peace, but also conceptual maps: which acts are “normal,” which are unthinkable, and which words signal danger.

In a globalized, Anglophone media environment, these different maps collide. English‑language discourse about “structural violence,” “cultural violence,” and “gender‑based violence” builds on particular academic traditions, including work that argues violence can be embedded in institutions, economic systems, and everyday social practices. These insights are important—but when the terms enter public debate without explanation, their specialized meanings are often invisible to those outside those traditions.

Is “violence” a colossus elsewhere?

Anthropologists argue that “violence” is not a simple universal concept; it’s a family of ideas that different cultures carve up and label in different ways. In many languages, there isn’t a single everyday term that simultaneously covers interpersonal assault, war, state coercion, and structural harm the way the the English word violence does. Instead, you often see:

• Separate terms for interpersonal aggression versus warfare

• Distinctions between legitimate versus illegitimate force

• Culturally specific labels for sanctioned practices (corporal punishment, initiation rituals, blood feuds) that insiders may not name as “violence” at all

So in other literate civilizations, you often get clusters of politically loaded words that together cover the terrain we put under violence, and those clusters function as colossi in their own traditions.

For example, in classical Chinese contexts, terms around force and harm are stratified: words for warfare and punitive force are distinguished from terms for chaos, disorder, or cruelty, and are embedded in broader ideas about harmony, hierarchy, and legitimate rule. In South Asian traditions, there is both a strong ideal of non‑violence (ahimsa in Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain thought) and a long history of epic and political narratives in which force is valorized under specific conditions; the conceptual field is structured as much by debates over justified versus unjustified harm as by a single word for “violence.” In Islamic legal and ethical thought, distinctions between just and unjust force are tied to concepts like zulm (wrongdoing/oppression) and jihad in its various interpretations, and to rules governing who may be harmed, when, and how; the moral weight doesn’t sit in a single “violence” term but in a network of legal‑moral categories.

What matters for this series is not the fine‑grained philology, but the point that other civilizations also have politically charged conceptual clusters around force, harm, and order that have accumulated centuries of theological, legal, and philosophical debate. Those are their colossi. People who immigrate to Canada (or anywhere else) bring their conceptual maps with them.

Non‑literate and small‑scale societies

In non‑literate or historically oral societies, the concepts are no less complex; they just aren’t written down in treatises. Ethnographers of these societies have documented that:

• Some communities normalize certain forms of fighting or raiding as expected, even ritualized, parts of male life, surrounded by rules and meanings that don’t match outsiders’ categories.

• Other communities emphasize peace and have strong norms and practices for avoiding escalation, even if occasional lethal conflict still occurs.

• Practices like human sacrifice, harsh initiation rites, or corporal punishment can and have been integrated into a moral and cosmological order rather than named as “violence” in the way a Western observer might.

Researchers note that how violence is defined and named in these contexts depends heavily on local cosmology, gender roles, and social organization. At the heart of this series is the recognition that there is no neutral, view‑from‑nowhere about ‘violence’. People bring culturally shaped expectations about what counts, what is normal, and what is outrageous.

Literate civilizations also carry their own colossi around the use of force and of harm. Classical Chinese, South Asian, and Islamic intellectual traditions, for instance, distinguish carefully between legitimate and illegitimate force, between just and unjust killing, and between order‑preserving punishment and chaotic brutality—using conceptual clusters that do not map one‑to‑one onto the English word violence. These traditions have generated centuries of debate about when, how, and against whom force may be used. People who immigrate to Canada bring those conceptual maps with them, then encounter an English‑language public sphere in which a single word, violence, tries to carry many of these distinctions at once. When they encounter English public discourse where one small word is asked to carry all of this at once, they are not starting from a blank slate. They are trying to translate between colossi.

Interpretive burden and inclusion

Context can help us infer which meaning is intended—phrases like “structural violence,” “symbolic violence,” or “gender‑based violence” are important qualifiers—but they still require background knowledge. To decode the intended meaning, a listener may need familiarity with sociology, anthropology, postcolonial theory, or feminist scholarship. That is a lot to ask of people who are still learning the language, let alone the specialized history of concepts.

For immigrants and refugees from places where political violence is common, this can have serious consequences. When they read or hear about “violence” in Canadian public debate, they may reasonably assume widespread physical danger, only to discover that the word is being used to describe emotional harm, systemic barriers, or offensive speech. This mismatch can heighten anxiety about public life, reinforce a sense that politics is unsafe, and discourage participation in civic spaces.

Cross‑culturally, there is also the risk of misjudging others. Someone from a setting where only extreme physical harm is labelled “violence” may be puzzled or even sceptical when hearing that certain policies or careless comments are “violent,” especially if they have experienced the trauma of war, torture, or severe interpersonal abuse. Conversely, someone whose conceptual map strongly emphasizes structural or cultural violence may interpret hesitancy about that language as indifference to harm, rather than as a difference in definitions. In both directions, the lack of explicit meaning turns conceptual differences into moral accusations.

None of this means we should ban broader uses of the term. Structural, symbolic, and cultural violence are real and important concepts that help us see harms that might otherwise remain invisible. But inclusive political communication demands that when we speak for a general audience, we specify what we mean. Are we talking about physical assault, institutional practices, degrading speech, or something else? Are we using the word violence metaphorically or literally, and do our listeners know the difference?

A democratic responsibility

In a democracy, citizens need a shared grasp of what is being claimed when the word violence is invoked. Otherwise, we amplify fear, confusion, and mistrust—especially among those with the least margin for misunderstanding. Because violence is both an embodied experience and a heavily theorized concept, the interpretive burden falls hardest on people who are already navigating multiple vulnerabilities: newcomers, multilingual speakers, and those without experience of the academic and policy conversations that have stretched the term.

If we care about inclusion and democratic participation, we can adopt some simple habits in our own speech and writing:

• Say which kind of violence we’re talking about (for example, physical violence, structural violence, symbolic violence).

• Flag when we are using the term in a specialized sense (for example, “I’m using ‘violence’ here in a broader, sociological sense that includes institutional harm.”).

• Be curious rather than punitive when others use the term differently, and make definitions part of the conversation rather than a test of belonging.

These are small practices, but they matter. They lower the interpretive burden, make room for different conceptual maps, and help ensure that when we talk about violence in our public life, we are not accidentally manufacturing more of it in the form of exclusion, fear, and silence.

In a country that depends on people who arrive with many different histories of harm and safety, learning to say what we mean by ‘violence’ is not a luxury—it is part of the work of building a democracy that truly belongs to all of us.

____End of article except …

Endnotes

If you’re inclined to see how far down the rabbit hole “violence” you can go—philosophically, politically, and cross‑culturally—here are some entry points into the leviathan:

1. Political philosophy and the modern state

• Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651): Violence in the “state of nature” and the argument for a powerful sovereign to stop a life that is “nasty, brutish, and short.”

• ​John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (1689): Tyrannical violence as a breach of natural rights, and the right to resist.

• Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848): Violence as both a tool of class domination and a means of revolutionary rupture.

• ​Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra and related works: The “will to power,” struggle, and the ambivalent place of force in human flourishing.

• ​Max Weber, “Politics as a Vocation” (1919): The state’s “monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force” as its defining feature.

• ​Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961): Colonial violence, internalized dehumanization, and the cathartic—but dangerous—promise of revolutionary counter‑violence.

2. Structural, symbolic, and necropolitical violence

• Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (1975): How prisons, schools, and other institutions exert power through surveillance, discipline, and normalization rather than overt force.

• ​Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction (1979) and essays on symbolic violence: How classed tastes and cultural norms “gently” impose dominance and inferiority.

• ​Judith Butler, Precarious Life (2004): Whose lives count as grievable, and how normative frames can make some deaths socially invisible.

• ​Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics”: How modern power decides who may live and who must die, extending beyond classical notions of sovereignty.

​3. Anthropology and the many meanings of violence

• David Riches (Ed.), The Anthropology of Violence: A classic collection on how different societies define, justify, or condemn harmful acts.

• ​Nancy Scheper‑Hughes & Philippe Bourgois (Eds.), Violence in War and Peace: Ethnographic case studies of everyday, structural, and symbolic violence.

• ​Bruce Knauft, “Reconsidering Violence in Simple Human Societies”: A detailed look at homicide and social meaning among the Gebusi of New Guinea.

• ​Work on “peaceful societies” by Douglas Fry and others: Ethnographies showing that some communities invest heavily in norms and institutions that minimize serious violence.

These anthropological debates underline one key point: what “counts” as violence, and how shocking or normal it feels, depends on cultural cosmologies, gender expectations, and social structure.

4. Harmful cultural practices and human‑rights debates

Reports on what many people consider to be harmful cultural practices (for example, child marriage, FGM/C, certain forms of corporal punishment) from UN agencies and research networks: how practices framed locally as tradition or duty are reframed internationally as forms of violence.

​These sources show how naming a practice “violence” is not just descriptive; it’s a political and ethical act with real consequences.

You do not need to read any of this to join public conversations about violence—that is exactly the inclusion problem this series points to. But seeing how much work the concept is doing in different traditions helps explain why one short word can be so overburdened, and why being explicit about which layer (vertical dimension) we mean is a democratic courtesy in service of civic inclusion rather than an academic quibble.

References

Bonta, B. D. (1996). Conflict resolution among peaceful societies: The culture of peacefulness. Journal of Peace Research, 33(4), 403–420.

​Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste (R. Nice, Trans.). Harvard University Press. (Original work published 1979)

​Butler, J. (2004). Precarious life: The powers of mourning and violence. Verso.

​Fanon, F. (1963). The wretched of the earth (C. Farrington, Trans.). Grove Press. (Original work published 1961)

​Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). Vintage Books. (Original work published 1975)

​Fry, D. P. (2006). The human potential for peace: An anthropological challenge to assumptions about war and violence. Oxford University Press.

​Government of Canada. (n.d.). Criminal Code (R.S.C., 1985, c. C‑46). Justice Laws Website. Retrieved March 21, 2026, from https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca

​Hobbes, T. (1996). Leviathan (R. Tuck, Ed.). Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1651)

​Knauft, B. M. (1987). Reconsidering violence in simple human societies: Homicide among the Gebusi of New Guinea. Current Anthropology, 28(4), 457–500.

​Locke, J. (1988). Two treatises of government (P. Laslett, Ed.). Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1689)

​Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1998). The Communist manifesto (D. Fernbach, Trans.). Verso. (Original work published 1848)

​Mbembe, A. (2003). Necropolitics (L. Meintjes, Trans.). Public Culture, 15(1), 11–40.

​Nietzsche, F. (2006). Thus spoke Zarathustra (A. del Caro, Trans.). Cambridge University Press. (Original work published 1883–1885)

​Riches, D. (1986). The phenomenon of violence. In D. Riches (Ed.), The anthropology of violence (pp. 1–27). Basil Blackwell.

​Scheper‑Hughes, N., & Bourgois, P. (Eds.). (2004). Violence in war and peace: An anthology. Blackwell.

​UNESCO. (2019). The origins of violence. The UNESCO Courier. https://courier.unesco.org/en/articles/origins-violence

United Nations Population Fund. (2020). State of world population 2020: Against my will—Defying the practices that harm women and girls and undermine equality. UNFPA.

​Weber, M. (2004). Politics as a vocation. In D. Owen & T. B. Strong (Eds.), The vocation lectures (R. Livingstone, Trans., pp. 32–94). Hackett. (Original lecture delivered 1919)

​

In my previous post, I suggested that some of the most important words in our political conversations are quietly excluding people from full participation. These are the words that anchor how we think about fairness, safety, belonging, and power—and yet they carry multiple, often incompatible, meanings.

In this post, I want to stay with those words themselves and look at what they are doing. What are these colossi? How did they become so heavy with history and emotion? And why do they function so differently from everyday words that happen to have more than one meaning?

Navigating by conceptual landmarks

In ancient cities, colossal statues and monuments weren’t just impressive art; they were how people found their way. If you could see the harbor statue, you knew you were close to the sea. If you were standing under the city gate, you knew you were at the edge of town.

In our political lives, we navigate by colossal words. Terms like violence, justice, equality, equity, racism, and liberal function as conceptual landmarks. We use them to orient ourselves in moral space:

• If this is “violence,” I must oppose it.

• If that is “justice,” I should support it.

• If this policy is “liberal,” I might feel at home—or feel under threat.

This is very different from the almost playful polysemy of a word like bank. You rarely risk social shaming or job loss because you misinterpreted bank as “riverbank” instead of “financial institution.” The stakes are low and the context is usually clear.

But when the word on the table is violence or racism, the stakes are much higher. These concepts are morally loaded. They carry accusations, absolutions, and identity claims. Misunderstanding is no longer just embarrassing; it can feel like being misjudged, mislabelled, or pushed out of the conversation.

How words become colossi

Part of the problem is history. Colossal words have been doing heavy intellectual work for centuries. Along the way, they’ve picked up new meanings and layers that don’t replace the old ones: they sit on top of them.

Take violence. For most people, it still evokes physical harm—being hit, threatened, or injured. Yet over time, thinkers and activists have used violence to describe state coercion, revolutionary upheaval, structural harm, symbolic domination, economic dispossession, environmental devastation, and more. A single word now has to do the work of describing everything from a punch to a policy.

Or take justice. At various points in our history, justice has meant harmony in the soul and in the city, giving each person their due, protecting natural rights, enforcing fair procedures, distributing resources more evenly, repairing relationships after harm, or expanding people’s real-world capabilities. Legal scholars, philosophers, theologians, and social reformers have each added their own layers. None of these additions are “wrong,” but together they create a concept that is heavy, complex, and far from self-evident.

For people who have spent years in universities or deep in public policy, this complexity can feel enriching. One word opens into an entire intellectual library. For newcomers to the language or to the country, or for anyone who hasn’t had the benefit of a university-level liberal arts education, it’s something else entirely: an invisible library you are expected to have read before you’re allowed to speak.

Why this is an intercultural communication problem

From an intercultural communication perspective, this isn’t a minor nuance. Every language and culture has its own political colossi, its own emotionally charged words. People who immigrate to Canada bring those conceptual maps with them.

A person whose experience of ‘liberal’ politics comes from Eastern Europe, South Asia, Latin America—or even from countries like the UK or the US, where liberal maps onto different party histories and ideologies—will not automatically hear liberal the way Canadians do. Today’s media environment also means that many of us consume news and commentary from across the Anglosphere: Canadian audiences follow American and British outlets, British viewers watch U.S. political talk shows, and so on. Unlike in earlier eras, political language now circulates transnationally in real time. That makes the civilizational history tied to the English language—including its cultural and intellectual debates—highly relevant to understanding what these words are doing in public life, yet this history is rarely acknowledged and seldom explained for context.

Liberal is, in many ways, an abstract political label that depends on specific party histories and ideological debates. Violence, by contrast, is ostensibly a universal, embodied human experience—something we encounter long before we ever learn a theory about it. Someone whose life has been shaped by literal, physical violence may hear broader uses of the word—say, calling a policy, silence, or a careless comment ‘violent’—as a signal that the streets are unsafe, rather than as a way of naming more indirect harms.

Someone raised in a different legal tradition may map justice primarily onto courts and policing, while their neighbours are using it to talk about housing or climate policy.

Now add the academic expansions of words like violence or racism, and we end up with several layers of meaning stacked on top of each other. Unless someone slows down and says, “Here’s what I mean when I use this word,” newcomers—and many long-time citizens—are stuck trying to reverse engineer the map while everyone else is already arguing about where to go.

For immigrants, multilingual citizens, and anyone without specialized education, this is not just an inconvenience. It is an exclusion barrier hiding in plain sight.

From shared meanings to tribal badges

There’s another twist. Polysemous colossi are not just confusing; they are useful.

Ambiguity enables skilled speakers maximize support and minimize accountability. If I say I am “for justice” or “against violence” but never clarify what those words mean in practice, different audiences can project their preferred meanings onto my message. Each group can walk away feeling seen, even if they are imagining very different policies and priorities.

Over time, definitions themselves become tribal markers. Using one version of equity or racism signals which side you’re on. Word choice starts to function less as a tool for shared understanding and more as a badge of belonging.

For people who are still learning the language—or who don’t know the latest intra-disciplinary academic debates—that is like walking into a room where everyone is wearing colour-coded jerseys you can’t see. You know there are teams, and you sense that the game matters, but no one has explained the rules.

At this point, our colossi stop helping us navigate together and start serving as flags we wave at one another. Politics becomes harder to learn and easier to game.

Where we’re going next

In the rest of this series, I’ll slow down and look at several of these colossi one by one: violence, justice, critical, equality and equity, racism, and liberalism. For each, I’ll sketch how its meaning has expanded, why that matters for inclusion, and what we can do—as writers, speakers, and listeners—to make our political conversations more inclusive instead of more exclusive.

My goal isn’t to settle once and for all what these words should mean. Languages and concepts naturally evolve, and that in itself is not a problem. The ethical issue arises when we let that evolution remain implicit and unexplained in the public square, so that only people with certain backgrounds or educations can follow the conversation. Assuming that democracies depend on a healthy public sphere—a space where citizens can understand and challenge the ideas that govern them, polysemous colossi that only insiders can decode quietly undermine that ideal. If we care about an inclusive public sphere—and about a democracy in which diverse citizens can actually understand and contest the ideas that govern them—then being explicit about what we mean is part of our responsibility to one another.

By making the complexity of polysemic colossi visible, I mean the explicit assertion of which meaning we’re using for a word, signalling when that meaning comes from a specialized tradition, and leaving room to compare definitions instead of pretending there is only one. When we see the colossi for what they are, more of us can participate in shaping our shared political vocabulary instead of being silently shaped by it.

References

Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste (R. Nice, Trans.). Harvard University Press. (Original work published 1979)

Butler, J. (2004). Precarious life: The powers of mourning and violence. Verso.

Fanon, F. (2004). The Wretched of the Earth (R. Philcox, Trans.). Grove Press. Original work published 1961

Foucault, M. (1995). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). Vintage Books. (Original work published 1975)

Habermas, J. (1991). The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society (T. Burger & F. Lawrence, Trans.). MIT Press. (Original work published 1962)

Mbembe, A. (2003). Necropolitics (L. Meintjes, Trans.). Public Culture, 15(1), 11–40.

Orwell, G. (1946). Politics and the English Language. Horizon, 13(76), 252–265.

Rawls, J. (1971). A theory of justice. Harvard University Press.

Sen, A. (2009). The idea of justice. Belknap Press.

Stand on any street corner in Canada, the US, or the UK, and it does not take long to notice that mass immigration has transformed our demographics. As of 2021, new Canadians constitute roughly 23% of Canada’s population, and immigration drives most population and labour‑force growth. In a country that depends on newcomers, it is worth asking not only what immigration policies we have, but how welcoming our political conversations really are.​

Most of us know what it feels like to be new: a new school, a new workplace, a community where everyone else seems to know the backstory. We watch, listen, and slowly learn who is who and what is what. Now imagine that instead of a comprehensible and welcoming environment, you have walked into a conflict zone where people shout past each other, using words that do not mean the same thing to everyone present. How could anyone settle in and learn the ropes in such a place?

Political expression is risky in today’s environment of polarization and cancel culture. People fear being shamed, losing status, or damaging relationships, so many engage in self‑censorship. Research suggests that polarization makes political participation especially stressful for new immigrants, who embody immigration as a polarizing issue and often navigate additional anxieties related to immigration status, family vulnerability, and public hostility. For those who come from countries where politicians and political processes are deeply mistrusted, or where political violence is normal, the barrier to participating in “ordinary” democratic life can be even higher.

Even without political trauma, learning a new political culture takes time. There is a centuries‑long backstory to absorb and a cast of public figures to learn. In highly polarized climates, political “tribes” vilify the opposing camps, turning what could be a slow, incremental learning curve into a high‑stakes choice of which tribe to call home. Citizens are pushed toward broad identity categories that flatten the diversity of opinion within immigrant and minority communities. All of this is harder when you are using English as a second, third, or fourth language.

This is where a deceptively technical concept—polysemy—becomes a democracy problem. Polysemy, from the Greek “poly” (many) and “semy” (signs), refers to the capacity of a single word to carry multiple meanings. Some polysemy is harmless or even charming: the word “bank” can mean a financial institution, the side of a river, or an action in aviation. Newcomers can find this confusing, but there are usually contextual clues and relatively low stakes.

By contrast, certain political words function as what I call colossi in our shared mental landscape. George Orwell, in his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” warned that words like “democracy,” “socialism,” “freedom,” “patriotic,” “realistic,” and “justice” each have “several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another,” and that attempts to define them clearly are actively resisted. These are words whose meanings anchor how we think about society, rights, morality, and belonging. They are conceptual landmarks.

In ancient cities, people navigated by colossal statues and monuments. In our political life, we navigate by colossal words: violence, justice, equality, equity, racism, liberal. These words carry heavy historical, emotional, and ideological freight. In the hands of skilled communicators—politicians, activists, journalists—they can inform, persuade, unite, or divide. But for newcomers to English or those without specialized education, the multiple meanings of these colossi can be disorienting and exclusionary.

Polysemous colossi can also be weaponized. Ambiguity allows speakers to appeal to broad audiences while quietly advancing specific agendas. A single word can evoke solidarity in one group and fear in another, even as each side is convinced they are talking about the same thing. Strategic ambiguity becomes a tool for “gaming” public opinion. The battle over word meanings becomes one more front in the battle for hearts and minds. Discourse grows emotional and fraught. When the words that anchor our political thinking have multiple, shifting meanings, politics becomes hard to learn and easy to game. For immigrants, multilingual citizens, and anyone without specialized education, that’s an exclusion barrier hiding in plain sight. It may feel like passionate engagement. In fact, it’s puppetry.

If we want all Canadians—and all residents of diverse democracies—to participate as full citizens and co‑creators of our cultures, we must treat the clarity of key word meanings as a collective responsibility. This is not a call to freeze language or deny conceptual innovation. It is a call to recognize that the way we use certain words can unintentionally exclude those without access to specialized education or to the particular historical and academic conversations that shaped those words.

In this series on polysemy, I will explore several colossi—violence, justice, critical, equality and equity, racism, and liberal—and show how their shifting meanings can turn politics into a language game that only insiders can play. I write as an intercultural communication scholar concerned with inclusion and democratic participation, not to assign blame, but to name a communication problem with serious social justice implications.

When we lean on abstract colossi without unpacking them, we make civic conversation easier for insiders and harder for those who are newer to our political culture—especially newcomers and people using English as a second or third language. By pausing to say, in concrete terms, what we mean by words like ‘violence’ or ‘justice,’ and offering brief examples or distinctions instead of assuming shared background, we lower the linguistic barrier to participation and invite more people into the democratic conversation.

In a digital era of inexpensive long‑form publishing and podcasts, we no longer have the excuse of strict word‑count limits. We can afford the extra sentence it takes to say what we mean—and in a democracy that depends on the participation of all its citizens, that sentence is not a luxury. It is part of our civic duty.

References

Burnett, A., Knighton, D., & Wilson, C. (2022). The self-censoring majority: How political identity and ideology impacts willingness to self-censor and fear of isolation in the United States. Social Media + Society, 8(3). https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051221123031

Chen, W., Hall, B. J., Ling, L., & Renzaho, A. M. (2017). Pre-migration and post-migration factors associated with mental health in humanitarian migrants in Australia and the moderation effect of post-migration stressors: Findings from the first wave data of the BNLA Cohort Study. The Lancet Psychiatry, 4(3), 218–229. https://doi.org/10.1016/s2215-0366(17)30032-9

Coyne, A. (2024, June 28). In a Country Where Immigrants are the Majority, Anti‑Immigration Politics are Obsolete. The Globe and Mail.

Gagnon, A., & Larios, L. (2021). The politicization of immigration and integration at the subnational level: Electoral campaigns in Ontario and Quebec. Canadian Journal of Political Science, 54(3), 696–716. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0008423921000469

Gibson, J. L., & Sutherland, J. L. (2023). Keeping your mouth shut: Spiraling Self-censorship in the United States. Political Science Quarterly, 138(3), 361–376. https://doi.org/10.1093/psquar/qqad037

Idemudia, E., & Boehnke, K. (2024). Acculturation and mental health among African migrants in Europe: A pre, during and post-migration discourse. EDULEARN Proceedings, 1, 8539–8539. https://doi.org/10.21125/edulearn.2024.2038

Manalo-Pedro, E., Enriquez, L. E., Nájera, J. R., & Ro, A. (2024). Anxious activists? examining immigration policy threat, political engagement, and anxiety among college students with different self/parental immigration statuses. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 65(3), 381–399. https://doi.org/10.1177/00221465241247541

Merriam-Webster. (n.d.). bank. In Merriam-Webster.com dictionary. Retrieved March 18, 2026, from https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bank

Mohamadian, M., Javdani, M., & Heroux-Legault, M. (2024, April 2). Public attitudes toward immigration in Canada: Decreased support and increased political polarization. The Center for Growth and Opportunity. https://www.thecgo.org/research/public-attitudes-toward-immigration-in-canada/

Orwell, G. (2013). Politics and the English language. Penguin Classics.

Pedersen, D. (2015). Rethinking trauma as a Global Challenge. Trauma and Migration: Cultural Factors in the Diagnosis and Treatment of Traumatised Immigrants , 9–31. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17335-1_2

Sarfraz, A. (2023, March 13). Newcomers Struggle to Separate Truth from Fiction in Canadian Politics. National Observer. Retrieved March 16, 2026, from https://www.nationalobserver.com/2023/03/13/news/newcomers-struggle-separate-truth-fiction-canadian-politics.

Viswanathan , G. (2024, November 19). Understanding Canada’s political system as a newcomer. Canadian Immigrant. https://canadianimmigrant.ca/immigrate/citizenship/understanding-canadas-political-system-as-a-newcomer