doctorship (doktorship)

[ In one place of Cartwright's book he spake of Whitgift's "bearing out himself, by the credit of his doctor ship and deanery." Strype , Whitgift, an. 1573. doctre , n. See doctore . doctrinaire (dok-tri-nar'), n. and a. [= D. doctrinair = Dan. Sw. doktrinär , doctrinarius , pertaining to doctrine, L. doctrina , doctrine: see doctrine.] I. n. 1. One who theorizes without a sufficient regard to practical considerations; a political theorist; an ideologist; one who undertakes to explain things by one narrow theory or group of theories, leaving out of view all other forces at work. He [Melbourne] said a doctrinaire was a fool, but an Greville, Memoirs, Sept. 25, 1834. honest man. In our opinion, there is no more unsafe politician than a conscientiously rigid doctrinaire , nothing more sure to end in disaster than a theoretic scheme of policy that admits of no pliability for contingencies. Lowell , Study Windows, p. 160. 2. In French hist., during the period of the Restoration (1815-30) and later, one of a cla of politicians and political philosophers who de sired a constitution constructed on historical principles, especially after the analogy of the British constitution. They were opposed to absolutism and to revolutionary ideas, and were devoted to abstract doctrines and theories rather than to practical polities. Their chief leaders were Royer-Collard and Guizot. II. a . Characteristic of a doctrinaire or unpractical theorist; merely theoretical; insisting IMG:content-2970.png:[blocks in formation] upon the exclusive importance of a one-sided significant pa ages in the me age: "We could not view theory. The whole scheme [of civil-service organization] of 1870 and 1875 must be pronounced to have been a grave mistake: it is doctrinaire , academical, and quite unsuited to the practical requirements of the public offices. Nineteenth Century, XX. 501. In his [Justus Moser's] wayward and caustic style, he often criticizes effectively the doctrinaire narrowne of his contemporaries. Encyc. Brit ., XIX. 364.