bipolarist

English

Etymology

bipolar +‎ -ist

Adjective

bipolarist (comparative more bipolarist, superlative most bipolarist)

1. Pertaining to bipolarism.
   • 1969, Adelphi Papers - Issues 56-73:

     In retrospect, what seems principally to have been lacking at this time was any real understanding, or perhaps rather acceptance, among the ENDC nuclear powers of the actual gait of proliferation, and of its relationship to what the still prevailing bipolarist philosophy considered to be the 'central strategic balance'.

   • 1971, Elizabeth Young, Ritchie Calder, Pacem in Maribus - Volumes 1-3, page 29:

     There are two unavoidable conclusions from this examination of the world's experience of arms control in the nuclear age: what has been achieved has been ineffective and insufficient, and it has been bipolarist in the sense that it has been devised and carried through into international treaties almost entirely by the joint and exclusive efforts of the United States and the Soviet Union.

   • 1988, Journal of Defense & Diplomacy - Volume 6, page 102:

     The bipolarist trend tends to reduce all regional conflicts to the matrix of East-West relations, while the regionalist highlights the essentially regional thrusts of conflicts that impose limits to superpower hegemonism.

   • 1992, Carlo Maria Santoro, Diffidence and ambition: the intellectual sources of U.S. foreign policy:

     The incipient bipolarist undertone of this document also owed much to Hansen's view of the economic factors.

Noun

bipolarist (plural bipolarists)

1. One who views something in terms of two exclusive categories.
   • 1955, James McKeen Cattell, Will Carson Ryan, Raymond Walters, School & Society - Volumes 81-82, page 178:

     Plato was a bipolarist in his exposition of the "unity of opposites" in such seeming bifurcations as the One and Many, Identity and Difference, Same and Other, True and False, Being and Non- Being, Rest and Motion, Permanence and Change.

   • 1962, Clarence Louis Frank Gohdes, American Literature:

     The basic critical vision is sensible and comprehensive: Melville is seen not as a formulator of rigid antinomies but as an habitual bipolarist, both attracted to and repelled by opposed ideas.

   • 1990, New Quest - Issue 80, page 94:

     The bipolarist says: A poem is a poem, and not another thing. The making and responding occur within the cultural envelope of society.