English edit

Noun edit

maximism (uncountable)

  1. A tendency toward excess and extravagance.
    • 2005, Kanika Gahlaut, India Today - Volume 30, page 66:
      After the minimalism of the past, fashion is witnessing a peaking of maximism.
    • 2021, Christopher Hodapp, Alice Von Kannon, RVs & Campers For Dummies, page 16:
      If boondockers want minimalism, glampers want maximism.
  2. The tendency to maximize the application of a particular approach or to strive for maximum acquisition of a particular resource; extremism.
    • 1906, William Shakespeare, John Macmillan Brown, The Merchant of Venice: A Study, page 54:
      It goes with fondness for moralising over life– an ethical maximism that belongs to the age .
    • 1945, Simon Isaevich Liberman, Building Lenin's Russia, page 26:
      Larin's radicalism in particular, and the era's maximism in general , demanded that the old bourgeois be removed from industry entirely .
    • 1970, The Critic - Volume 29, page 67:
      There is much reason to believe that, evwen in the dogmas of immaculate conception and assumption, the Holy See has acted chiefly as a restraint on the "mariologial maximism " of the body of the faithful .
    • 2013, Thomas G. Mitchell, Israel/Palestine and the Politics of a Two-State Solution, page 29:
      Jabotinsky's Revisionist ideology had three main ideas: hadar (dignity and pride), monism', and territorial maximism.
    • 2021, Routledge Library Editions: Special Educational Needs, page 166:
      Amongst the implications we identify the following: management and leadership; arbitration and advocacy; entitlement and surveillance; bureaucratic maximism and minimalism.
  3. (theology) A belief that religious observances should be applied as widely as possible.
    • 1872, Henry Thomas Braithwaite, Esse and posse, page 56:
      As to minimism and maximism — microscopic and telescopic tendencies — the cosmical laws are themselves of such vast range that we should naturally expect the greatest embodiments to have occurred first, as in the case of a thousand Suns and Jupiters they manifestly did.
    • 1912, The Nineteenth Century and After, volume 72, page 70:
      [] theologians were puzzled by Newman's apparent combination of liberalism and ultramontanism, of maximism and minimism.
    • 1918, Edmund Bishop, Liturgica Historica, page 229:
      [] maximism of the Cluniacs on the one hand and the minimism of puritanic Cistercianism on the other.
    • 1966, Cistercian Studies - Volume 24, page 179:
      The monks' practice of "eschatological maximism ” did not make them a group apart from the rest of the Church .

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