• Bellicist

    Origin

    From Latin bellicus ("of or pertaining to war; warlike") and the suffix -ist; possibly adapted from the French neologism belliciste ("") (about Bismarck, 1871; in Émile Faguet, 1908).

    Full definition of bellicist

    Noun

    bellicist

    (plural bellicists)
    1. Adherent of bellicism, advocate of war, one who is war-centered or war-oriented.
      • The bellicist was sure to advocate an end to the policy of appeasement.
      • 1912: Norman Angell, Peace Theories and the Balkan War, p. 19Or, if you deem that that word connotes non-resistance, though to the immense bulk of Pacifists it does not, you would be an anti-Bellicist, to use a dreadful word coined by M. Emile Faguet in the discussion of this matter. to the book: Émile Faguet, Le Pacifisme (French), 1908.
      • 1919: in The Living Age, vol. 303, Oct-Dec 1919, p. 173As for what are called ‘war books,’ whether written from the pacifist or bellicist point of view, more or less brilliant reporting with emphatic or cynical anecdotes, surely there has been enough of them in the United States as well as in France and in England.
      • 1942: in Contemporary Japan: A Review of Far Eastern Affairs, vol. 11, No. 1, Jan 1942, p. 220-221It may be that this standard definition errs, in representing every state structure as essentially based on conflict: it involves, as the writer pointed out in an address delivered long ago in 1915, a “bellicist theory of state structure.” ... It may be well, therefore, to discard the “bellicist” idea of a state essentially based on conflict and involving a superior body which forcibly imposes its will on the mass. to the paper: Dr. Thomas Baty, "The Bellicist Theory of State Structure", 1915.
      • 2008: David P. Barash & Charles P. Webel, Peace and Conflict Studies, p. 31British historian Michael Howard introduced the term bellicist'' to refer to cultures “almost universal in the past, far from extinct in our own day, in which the setting of contentious issues by armed conflict is regarded as natural, inevitable and right.”

    Adjective

    bellicist

    1. Of or relating to bellicism, a bellicist, bellicists, advocating war, who is war-centered or war-oriented.

    Related terms

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