levelism

English

Etymology

From level +‎ -ism.

Noun

levelism (uncountable)

1. The political aim of levelling all distinctions of rank in society; egalitarianism.
   • 1814, John Taylor, An Inquiry Into The Principles And Policy Of The Government Of The United States:

     Supposing the charge exhibited against governments, under the national control, to be true; and admitting that they do tend towards levelism; it would then become necessary to compute, which species of levelism, that of dividing property between three orders according to Mr. Adams's system, or that of dividing property among all the individuals of a nation according to the supposed tendency, would product the most injustice or misery.

   • 1846, Chauncy Goodrich, “Letter from Chauncy Goodrich, February 17,1793”, in Oliver Wolcott, George Gibbs, editor, Memoirs of the Administrations of Washington and John Adams, page 88:

     Our greatest danger is from the contagion of levelism; what folly is it that has set the world agog to be all equal to French barbers .

   • 1842, Nathanael Emmons, Jacob Ide, The Works of Nathanael Emmons, page 105:

     The higher classes of men are more inclined to tyranny, and the lower classes of men are more inclined to levelism.

   • 2014, Michael C. Batinski, Jonathan Belcher: Colonial Governor, page 22:

     According to Ebenezer Pemberton, the Belchers were the victims of immorality and levelism run rampant.

2. (philosophy) The use of different levels of abstraction in order to understand something.
   • 2013, Luciano Floridi, The Philosophy of Information, page 47:

     Reality can be studied at different levels, so forms of 'levelism' have often been advocated in the past. In the 1970s, levelism nicely doevetailed with the computational turn and became a standard approach both in science and philosophy.

   • 2017, Massimo Durante, Ethics, Law and the Politics of Information, page 12:

     Epistemological levelism, based on levels of abstraction, endorses pluralism without falling into relativism or perspectivism, since "the explicit reference to the LoA makes it clear that the model of a system is a function of the available observables, and that it is reasonable to rank different LoAs and to compare and assess the corresponding models" (Floridi 2011a, 75; 2011b, 292).

   • 2017, Juliet Floyd, Alisa Bokulich, Philosophical Explorations of the Legacy of Alan Turing, page 247:

     There is the "levelism" of the rich repertoire of mathematical hierarchies, mainly the domain of the logician—in general, mathematicians like to be given a specific informational context to solve their puzzles within.

Anagrams

• mislevel