popularist

Etymology

Definitions

1. 1

   Reflecting popular taste and opinion.

   • 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.
   • The 'Love Boat' was popularist, light entertainment but the impact was significant (Schwichtenberg, 1984).
2. 2

   An artist or composer whose work appeals to popular tastes.

   • Three composers in the study are undoubted popularists.
   • 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)
3. 3

   One who adapts and popularizes a subject.

   • 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.
   • 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)?
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   1. 4

      On who advocates populism.

      • In their view the 'nascent leader' is a transient type which will develop into either a 'leader' or 'popularist'.
      • By and large, the popularists were courted by, and often allied themselves, with the guerrillas.
   2. 5

      One who explains social phenomena in terms of popular responses and habits.

      • 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.

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