popularist

English

Etymology

From popular +‎ -ist.

Adjective

popularist (comparative more popularist, superlative most popularist)

1. Reflecting popular taste and opinion.
   • 1974, The Tablet - Volume 228, page 595:

     There have been others, of course, antagonistic to established authority, whose philosophy has been anything but popularist, but it is not the popularist basis of Benn's antiauthoritarianism that is peculiar.

   • 2011, Christina Jones-Pauly, Abir Dajani Tuqan, Women Under Islam: Gender Justice and the Politics of Islamic Law:

     They based their honour killings on a hadith which used the Arabic word for honour in a word play which gave the reader a choice – to favour the more popularist and customary notion of male control over women or to follow the more pro-woman emancipatory approach which gave women control over their own honour and sexual lives, answerable only to God.

   • 2013, Tihomir Lukovic, Nautical Tourism, page 95:

     The 'Love Boat' was popularist, light entertainment but the impact was significant (Schwichtenberg, 1984).

   • 2017, Annie Gray, The Greedy Queen: Eating with Victoria, →ISBN, page 157:

     She threw herself into making their childhood different from hers and Albert's, taking them on excursion which were sometimes highbrow — the theatre and opera, plus numerous recitals and plays performed at Windsor — but were equally likely to be popularist.

   • 2018, Xiufeng Liu, Wen Ma, Confucianism Reconsidered:

     The rise of the popularist approach reshaped the shared assumptions and agreed procedure of learning during the 17th century.

Translations

of popular taste or opinion

• Maori: arotini

Noun

popularist (plural popularists)

1. An artist or composer whose work appeals to popular tastes.
   • 1954, Dennison Nash, The American Composer: A Study in Social-psychology:

     Three composers in the study are undoubted popularists.

   • 2012, Howard Pollack, Marc Blitzstein: His Life, His Work, His World, page 120:

     Blitzstein discerns a pervasive debt to impressionism among these folkloric primitivists, and he refers at times to Bloch explicitly as a “post-impressionist” (whereas he sometimes places Copland among the popularists)

2. One who adapts and popularizes a subject.
   • 2011, James D. Faubion, An Anthropology of Ethics, page 227:

     Here, she has no greater debt than to Sylvester Graham, originally a New Jersey minister who found a more successful calling as the popularist of what his magnum opus summarily entitled The New Science of Human Life.

   • 2012, Inken Prohl, John K. Nelson, Handbook of Contemporary Japanese Religions, page 529:

     Did Alan Watts (1915–1973), one of the first Western popularists of Zen, have it right when he described Zen Art as the “art of artlessness, the art of controlled accident” (Watts 1994)?

3. On who advocates populism.
   • 1986, I͡U︡riĭ I͡U︡rʹevich Kondufor, A Short History of the Ukraine, page 126:

     The so-called 'popularists' attempted to exploit the urge of the masses of the Western Ukrainian lands for enlightenment and cultural education in their native tongue in order to strengthen the dominant position of the Ukrainian bourgeoisie.

   • 1987, Michael Salamon, Industrial Relations: Theory and Practice, page 168:

     In their view the 'nascent leader' is a transient type which will develop into either a 'leader' or 'popularist'.

   • 1995, Peter R. Baehr, Human Rights in Developing Countries Yearbook, page 22:

     By and large, the popularists were courted by, and often allied themselves, with the guerrillas.

   • 2015, John P. Powelson, The Institutions of Economic Growth:

     The popularist believes that, by and large, those persons with power and influence over social decisions, such as government officials, business executives, and labor leaders, act on behalf of their respective constituencies.

4. One who explains social phenomena in terms of popular responses and habits.
   • 2012, Adrian Furnham, The Psychology of Behaviour at Work: The Individual in the Organization:

     Despite the paucity of early psychological research on the consequences of job transfers, popularists have been quick to point to the negative consequences of transfer: heart attacks in men, depression in women, maladjustment in children.

   • 2012, Kathryn Hurlock, Britain, Ireland and the Crusades, C.1000-1300, page 91:

     Traditionalists see only campaigns launched to recover Jerusalem as true crusades; generalists argue that any Christian war fought for God was a crusade; popularists claim that crusading came out of popular, peasant movements; while pluralists argue that any war in which the participants took a vow and gained spiritual rewards could be seen a crusade.