Ieva Plūme

The middle of the 19^th century was the turning point in the development of cultural life in Latvia. The New Latvians movement with such authors as K. Valdemārs, K. Barons, J. Alunāns, A. Kronvalds called upon Latvians to create an intellectual life without German and Russian influence and develop ideas of national culture. They started the process of historical and cultural self-identification and they paid attention to the use of the Latvian language as a tool for intellectual communication. Since the 60^s of the 19^th New Latvians use the concept “society”. The goal of the paper is to provide an insight into the understanding of society. The method of the analyses based on separation of the community and society.

The research of discourse of the New Latvians reveals the dominant concept, for example, nation, state, tribe, language, fatherland, history. Usually there are economical, political, historical and judicial contexts of using these notions. But the concept of the society is used as the tool of the social and ethnic differentiation.  If we compare the characterizations of the society and the community we bring out the activity of the New Latvians take place in the conditions of the community and nation and society is identified with history (the diachronic aspect), not as the model that functions synchronous. The social reality is marked out with distinction and the article draws attention to the contradictions within the framework in the one theme.