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Doctrinaire   Listen
noun
Doctrinaire  n.  One who would apply to political or other practical concerns the abstract doctrines or the theories of his own philosophical system; a propounder of a new set of opinions; a dogmatic theorist. Used also adjectively; as, doctrinaire notions. Note: In french history, the Doctrinaires were a constitutionalist party which originated after the restoration of the Bourbons, and represented the interests of liberalism and progress. After the Revolution of July, 1830, when they came into power, they assumed a conservative position in antagonism with the republicans and radicals.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Doctrinaire" Quotes from Famous Books



... great ambition. He wrote a book upon the elections, and the king created a new department for him—that of director-general of the communes and departments. He made use of his position to extend his influence. He became chief of the doctrinaire school, which included many eminent men of that time, and acquired great political power. It occupied a kind of middle ground between the ancien regime and pure liberalism. There came a reaction, and Guizot again took to his pen, leaving office and emolument. The king did ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett

... closely associated with James Harrington, the author of "Oceana," and was regarded as a "strong doctrinaire republican." He was a member of the club—the Rota—formed by Harrington for discussing and disseminating his political views, a club which continued in existence only a few months, from November, 1659, ...
— The Isle Of Pines (1668) - and, An Essay in Bibliography by W. C. Ford • Henry Neville

... America and England were ignorant of the reality of Europe: Wilson was (as Chesterton often said) a much better man than Lloyd George, but he knew as little of the world which he had come to reconstruct. He was, too, a political doctrinaire preferring "what was not there" in the shape of a League of Nations to the real nations of Poland or Italy. And with the American as with the Welshman international finance stood beside the politicians ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward

... earlier years the children all receive a good education in general and scientific knowledge, then they pass into the technical, trade, and business schools. Every kind of business and trade is thoroughly taught by teachers who are not mere doctrinaire professors, but persons who have made their mark as good, capable, and practical workers in the particular trade or business which they are ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks

... which he seized as the essence of the Revolution was, as Mirabeau was urging in private to the king, the inevitable precursor of dictatorship. He realized that freedom is born of a certain spontaneity for which the rigid lines of doctrinaire thinkers left no room. That worship of symmetrical form which underlies the constitutional experiments of the next few years he exposed in a sentence which has in it the essence of political wisdom. "The nature of man is intricate"; ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski

... a long time familiar with the ways of Parisian society, he would have appreciated better the significance of the step which M. de Villefort had taken. Standing well at court, whether the king regnant was of the older or younger branch, whether the government was doctrinaire liberal, or conservative; looked upon by all as a man of talent, since those who have never experienced a political check are generally so regarded; hated by many, but warmly supported by others, without being really liked ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... moderate, and capable of understanding the difficulty, as well as the necessity, of a great reform; indeed, their correspondence, full of facts, stated with precision and judgment, when compared with the doctrinaire rubbish of the Assembly, presents the strongest possible contrast.—But most of these lights remain under a bushel; only a few of them get into the Assembly; these burn without illuminating, and are soon extinguished ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... expect, and returned to Barbados as the lesser evil. The terms on which the proprietors granted land, liberal enough but frequently changed; restrictions laid on trade almost before there was anything to exchange; the doctrinaire Fundamental Constitutions which John Locke, fresh from the perusal of Harrington, wrote out in the quiet of his study for governing little frontier communities the like of which he had never seen,—all ...
— Beginnings of the American People • Carl Lotus Becker

... India did not generally see the wisdom of the Viceroy's appointment. There were not lacking indeed hireling organs, notoriously in the pay of a tyrannous bureaucracy, who more than hinted that His Excellency was a fool, a dreamer of dreams, a doctrinaire, and, worst of all, a trifler with the lives of men. 'The Viceroy's Excellence Gazette,' published in Calcutta, was at pains to thank 'Our beloved Viceroy for once more and again thus gloriously vindicating the potentialities of the Bengali nations for ...
— Life's Handicap • Rudyard Kipling

... me an account of the interview of the old iconoclast with a French politician, a doctrinaire Republican, who wanted to get a glimpse of this man, and found him in a noisy tavern, seated in the midst of his disciples, dry, wrinkled, laughing with an unforgettable laugh, eating and tearing ideas and beliefs with a single ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII. • Guy de Maupassant

... permit to the toiler but a bare sustenance, the bare means of a livelihood, would be a hindrance to human progress, a hindrance not to be removed by all of the maxims of the philosopher or the theories of the doctrinaire. ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission

... a doctrinaire nor a timid Conservative. He is familiar with the work of Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso, and the whole Cubist school; and if by simplification, distortion, or what men of science would call "flat absurdity," he can in any way improve his composition, he does not hesitate to simplify, distort, ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell

... advocates in America undoubtedly have underestimated these immediate effects. They have been too abstractly doctrinaire, have argued too absolutely for the merits of free trade to be applied instantly regardless of the existing distribution of investments and of occupations. They have opposed one extreme system by another, with no thought of the inexpediency and injustice of sweeping changes. There is a strong ...
— Modern Economic Problems - Economics Vol. II • Frank Albert Fetter

... the inner truth of Burke. Every statement of a principle in an orator or a pamphleteer is coloured by the occasion, the emotion, and the mood of an audience to whom it is addressed. Burke spoke amid the angers and alarms inspired first by the subversive energy, and then by the doctrinaire cruelty of the French Revolution. It was in the process of "diffusing the Terror" that most of his philosophical obiter dicta were uttered. The real nerve of the thinking of a mind so vehement, so passionate, so essentially dramatic is to be sought not in some principle which was the major premise ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford

... be regarded as the practical founder of the unified Austrian state. The new system of centralization has already been referred to. It only remains to add that, in carrying out this system, Maria Theresa was too wise to fall into the errors afterwards made by her son and successor. She was no doctrinaire, and consistently acted on the principle once laid down by Machiavelli, that while changing the substance, the prince should be careful to preserve the form of old institutions. Alongside the new bureaucracy, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various

... and worse in the world is a condition precedent of all upward evolution. Without an overstocked world, with individual variations, some progressive, some retrograde, there could be no natural selection, no survival of the fittest. That is the chief besetting danger of cut-and-dried doctrinaire views. Malthus was a very great man; but if his principle of prudential restraint were fully carried out, the prudent would cease to reproduce their like, and the world would be peopled in a few generations ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen

... whatever in his book that would be in the least offensive to this generation, but he wrote in advance of his time and consequently roused virulent attacks, notably from his fellow-clergymen, whose doctrinaire notions upon the paternal dispensation of the ...
— Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development • Francis Galton

... have saved it. He had to keep himself in the background, to use an Italian astuteness in explaining away the blunders of his followers; and when this would not do he had to use violent language, which should frighten timid doctrinaire Orleanists with prospects of popular risings in which he would take the lead. His greatest triumphs were earned when, by dint of superhuman coaxing in the lobbies, he got the Republic proclaimed as the Government of France (in 1875, on M. Wallon's ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various

... barren, superficial scepticism of the preceding age, had ever since the beginning of the century been growing in strength and breadth. It pervaded all the departments of human knowledge and activity—politics, philosophy, religion, literature, and the arts. The doctrinaire school in politics and the eclectic school in philosophy were as characteristic products of the movement as the romantic school in poetry and art. We recognise the movement in Lamennais' attack on religious indifference, and in the gospel ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks

... suspicions for some time that the child's capacity was underrated, thought she would assume the responsibility of giving him for once all the milk he could take. What he did do, so far outmeasured what the doctrinaire said he could do, that the child was happily permitted ever after to decide for himself. The faith of the trusting parents was thus visibly shaken in one theory, and I am happy to add, in due time in many others, regarding the ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... pedantic rigor. He was as far as possible from a one-sided worship of the Greeks. His reference to his 'strict form' hardly means more than is implied in simplicity of plot, fewness of characters and observance of the unities. He did not write 'The Bride of Messina' in any doctrinaire spirit,—either to reform the German drama, or to furnish a model for imitation. The play is simply an aesthetic experiment; a tentative excursion into a field confessedly 'strange'. What Schiller wished was to produce upon a modern audience, by an original ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas

... Assembly, vary more or less from the original, either in conciseness or in breadth, in cleverness or in awkwardness of expression. But so far as substantial additions are concerned they present only doctrinaire statements of a purely theoretical nature or elaborations, which belong to the realm of political metaphysics. To enter upon them here is unnecessary. Let us confine ourselves to the completed work, the Declaration as it was finally determined after long debate in ...
— The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens • Georg Jellinek

... minds to this day. Danton instantly discerned that the problem was to preserve revolutionary energy, and still to persuade the insurgent forces to retire once more within their boundaries. Robespierre discerned this too, but he was paralysed and bewildered by his own principles, as the convinced doctrinaire is so apt to be amid the perplexities of practice. The teaching of Rousseau was ever pouring like thin smoke among his ideas, and clouding his view of actual conditions. The Tenth of August produced a considerable ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley

... his schemes against the country squires. Uneasily balanced to-day between Conservative instincts and Liberal ideas they look to war to settle problems which their parliamentary representatives are painfully incapable of solving. In addition, doctrinaire manufacturers declare that the difficulties between themselves and their workmen originate in France, the home of revolutionary ideas of freedom—without France industrial ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various

... temperament was in his favour. That the country should be well governed, and that it should be governed by himself, which was the same thing to him, as it is probably to all great ministers, was the object of his life. Compared with that, special questions were of small importance. There was nothing doctrinaire in his turn of mind; the abstract righteousness of a cause did not appeal to him, and could not divert him from the pursuit of his main object. In 1787 a bill for the relief of dissenters by the repeal of the test and corporation acts of the reign of ...
— The Political History of England - Vol. X. • William Hunt

... aristocracy, or what Italians called Governo Stretto; some to democracy, or Governo Largo; some to an eclectic compound of the other forms, or Governo Misto. More consummate masterpieces of constructive ingenuity can hardly be imagined. What is omitted in all, is just what no doctrinaire, no nostrum can communicate—the breath of life, the principle of organic growth. Things had come, indeed, to a melancholy pass for Florence when her tyrant, in order to confirm his hold upon her, had to devise these springs and irons to ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds

... action of the colonists, should have thought more of the metaphysical rights than historical facts, illustrates one of the marked features of his character. He was often more of a doctrinaire than a practical statesman. He reminds us of the words which Burke applied on a certain occasion to Chatham: 'For a wise man he seemed to me at that time to be governed ...
— Thomas Jefferson • Edward S. Ellis et. al.

... system of colleges in which scientific and technical studies should be placed on an equality with studies in classical literature, one such college to be established in every State of the Union. The bill, though opposed mainly by representatives from the Southern States, where doctrinaire politics and orthodox theology were in strong alliance with negro slavery, was passed by both Houses of Congress, but vetoed by President Buchanan, in whom the doctrinaire and orthodox spirit was incarnate. But Morrill persisted and again presented his bill, ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... father's ambition; certain lectures and gibes from that strong mouth, in his early manhood. Absurd! If his father had had to do with a really spendthrift and unsatisfactory son, there might have been some sense in it. But for these trifles—these suspicions—these foolish notions of a doctrinaire—to inflict this stigma and this yoke ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... though; I'd swear that he never bought the clothes he was wearing in this country. The way the suit fitted, and the cut of it, and the shirt-collar, and the necktie. The book he was reading was Langmuir's Social History of the American People—not one of my favorites, a bit too much on the doctrinaire side, but what a bookshop clerk would give a foreigner looking ...
— Crossroads of Destiny • Henry Beam Piper

... even to that fatal phrase of my wife's: so there's an end of his faith in me, and of any chance I might have had to set him straight. That was a fortnight ago, and I have not the face to answer him. When I have any more doctrinaire anchorites to convert, I shall not call a family ...
— A Pessimist - In Theory and Practice • Robert Timsol

... certainty, moral certainty; infallibleness &c adj.; infallibility, reliability; indubitableness, inevitableness, unquestionableness^. gospel, scripture, church, pope, court of final appeal; res judicata [Lat.], ultimatum positiveness; dogmatism, dogmatist, dogmatizer; doctrinaire, bigot, opinionist^, Sir Oracle; ipse dixit [Lat.]. fact; positive fact, matter of fact; fait accompli [Fr.]. V. be certain &c adj.; stand to reason. render certain &c adj.; insure, ensure, assure; clinch, make sure; determine, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... a major critic a good part of his charm and interest for us stems from a mind that is not in the least doctrinaire. His method is inductive, his appeal is always to the human psychology as that can be known experientially, and his standards are Aristotelian (if by such a reference we mean to signify a procedure based upon the known effects of known works). While there ...
— An Essay on the Lyric Poetry of the Ancients • John Ogilvie

... my spiritual life I gravitated toward the church. There I added to my faith a theology. A theologian is a fighter—a doctrinaire. Every item of knowledge I got I sharpened into a ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine



Words linked to "Doctrinaire" :   drumbeater, informative, instructive, partisan



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