meliorist
- noun
- /ˈmɛliərɪst/
- Specialized
:
meliorista
- The meliorist believes that even small, incremental changes can lead to significant improvements in society.
- pragmatic meliorist
- meliorist approach
Examples
-
The various elements of Fox's pragmatic meliorist orientation, which have been extracted from his collection of scholarly works, may be summarized with the following set of propositions.
Academic text (1990) -
This meliorist outlook presents the story of Jewish life on these shores from its beginnings to the present as an inexorable march from marginality to a degree of influence and acceptance for Jews that would have surely been unimaginable to those hanging about Independence Hall in the 18th century.
Academic text (2011) -
Most important to this observer was his effective advocacy of a "pragmatic meliorist" approach to world politics.
Academic text (1990) -
The essential elements of Fox's pragmatic meliorist approach are scattered throughout his writings.
Academic text (1990) -
On the contrary, my practical philosophy is distinctly meliorist, a philosophical position that argues that things which cannot be made perfect can at least be made better.
Blog text (31) -
The first part of this essay will focus on Fox's "pragmatic meliorist" approach and how this philosophical orientation shaped his views about the policy relevance of international relations theory.
Academic text (1990) -
Darwin was a meliorist in the paternalistic tradition, not a believer in biologically fixed and ineradicable inequality.
Academic text (1991) -
The pragmatic meliorist views world politics not simply as a way of allocating scarce values but as a process which is capable of producing as well as distributing the values for the attainment of which the actors in the world system are variously contending and collaborating.
Academic text (1990) -
His pragmatic meliorist position emerged from his critiques of the excessive voluntarism of "utopian internationalists" on the one hand and the "simplistic determinism" of political realists on the other.
Academic text (1990) -
As a committed meliorist, she worked tirelessly to improve education in her community.
Synonyms
100
3.5
A person who works to make society or its institutions better
32
5.6
A person who campaigns strongly for social or political change
6
6.1
A person who wants to change political or social systems
1
3.9
A person who works to change society to make it fairer
Antonyms
How Reformist
Surface Forms
Morphology
meliorist = meliorism (opaque) = melior + ist
The Latin combining form 'melior-' is not a productive or familiar English base for most learners, so the sense 'one who believes the world can be improved' is not derivable from common English morphemes.
Etymology
The word meliorist comes from the Latin root melior meaning 'better' and the ending -ist meaning 'a person who believes'. So a meliorist is someone who believes people can make the world better through steady effort.