XX. The Term. “Communal”
The period following the French Revolution was deeply interested in “the people” as a mass conception, in all that belonged to them and all that they created. It was in this period that theorists on the origin of law, customs, religion, language, literature—particularly the folk-song and the folktale—liked to advocate the doctrine of spontaneous, unconscious growth “from the heart of the people,” as the phrase went. Such conceptions of origin had their critics from the first; but they remained more or less orthodox throughout the nineteenth century, and they still have foothold in both England and America. They have, however, receded in the wake of more reserved second-thoughts about human nature, along with the recession of the “romantic” vehemence, and of the Hegelian philosophy of the “over-soul,” and of our own demagogic admiration of the undifferentiated demos.