catastrophist Geol.
(kəˈtæstrəfɪst)
[f. as prec. + -ist.]
One who holds the theory of catastrophism; opposed to uniformitarian. Also attrib.
| 1837 Whewell Hist. Induct. Sc. (1857) III. 509 Geologists who had been bred up in the catastrophist creed. 1879 Spencer Data of Ethics iv. §17 For a generation after geologists had become uniformitarians in Geology, they remained catastrophists in Biology. 1879 Lit. World 161/1 We are still catastrophists in judging of history. |
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▸ A person who regards historical or political events as progressively disastrous; a pessimist.
| 1879 Lit. World 161/1 We are still catastrophists in judging of history. 1937 Jrnl. Amer. Statist. Assoc. 32 3 If our civilization, as catastrophists assure us, is tottering to its fall, [etc.]. 1959 Amer. Q. 11 381 The most pious of the catastrophists principally wish to show the awful doom to which the erring sinner inevitably comes. 1972 Jrnl. Southern Hist. 38 506 He is, in Orlando Patterson's terms, a survivalist rather than a catastophist. He understands the almost unbearable pressures of poverty and oppression, yet he emphasizes the resilience of the poor. 2001 Amer. Spectator 34 52 But the Telecosm will still prevail and investors who understand its dimensions will be able to spurn the catastrophists and prosper. |
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▸ A person who believes in the theory that social and political change occurs in sudden and violent upheavals.
| 1926 W. Lewis Art of being Ruled ii. ii. 47, I am not a ‘catastrophist’ either from the side of fascism or of leninism, but I do not believe that any help against the doctrine of violence is to be found in the supposed indefinite periods of time required to modify a society. 1977 Lat. Amer. Res. Rev. 12 20 The ‘catastrophists’ make a ‘mechanico-formal’ analysis, and..they sketch out their hopes of a socialism whose historical persona is not described in their analysis. 1992 Speculum 67 210 That relationship lies at the heart of the current debate that involves historians and archaeologists in trying to measure the degree of continuity that existed between political and economic systems of imperial Rome and those of early-medieval Europe. As far as Tuscia is concerned, Raspi Serra and Laganara Fabiano come down quietly..on the side of the ‘catastrophists’. |
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▸ After Polish katastrofista (compare catastrophism n.). A writer associated with the Zagary group in Poland in the 1930s; see catastrophism n.
| 1965 C. Miłosz Postwar Polish Poetry 49 Because of the Cassandra-like prophecies in their poems, Miłosz and his group were branded ‘catastrophists’. 1984 Slavic Rev. 43 740 Next we are introduced to the poetics of the Kraków Avant-garde and to other poetic solutions evidenced in the writings of Adam Ważyk and Józef Czechowicz, in ‘the Catastrophists’—the Second Vanguard ‘Zagary’ group—and finally, in thoughts from a postwar perspective. 1996 Nation 6 May 57/1 Like his contemporaries Walter Benjamin and Stefan Zweig, who joined him in suicide a few years later, Witkacy was a ‘catastrophist’, a prophet of Europe's slide into war and barbarism. |