statist

plural statists

1. A supporter of statism.First known use 20th c.
2. datedA statistician.First known use 19th c.
3. archaicA skilled politician or one with political power, knowledge or influence.First known use 16th c.

   Statists and Politicians, unto whom Ragione di Stato is the first Considerable, as though it were their business to deceive the people, as a Maxim, do hold, that truth is to be concealed from them […].

   1650, Thomas Browne, chapter I, in Pseudodoxia Epidemica: […], 2nd edition, London: […] A[braham] Miller, for Edw[ard] Dod and Nath[aniel] Ekins, […], →OCLC, 1st book, page 3

   1 more example

   [O]ur Tympanouſe ſtatiſts / (In their affected grauitie of voice, / Sovverneſſe of countenance, maners crueltie, / Authoritie, vvealth, and all the ſpavvne of Fortune) / Thinke they beare all the kingdomes vvorth before them; […]

   1603–1604 (date written), [George Chapman], Bussy D’Ambois: A Tragedie: […], London: […] [Eliot’s Court Press] for William Aspley, published 1607, →OCLC, Act I, page 1

comparative more statist · superlative most statist

1. Pertaining to statism.

   This is why the Conservative programme for government is founded on such a radical revolt against the statist approach of the Big Government that always knows best.

   2010 April 17, David Cameron, “This is a radical revolt against the statist approach of Big Government”, in The Guardian

   3 more examples

   It was as if the Samizdat spirit, extended and intensified by the proliferation of do-it-yourself media, had rendered the centralised, statist tyrannies of the Soviet Union untenable.

   2006 January, David Garcia, “Learning the Right Lessons”, in Mute, →ISSN

   By the early 1950s, however, the rising expectations for economic growth in the developing world were being dashed by the failure of foreign investment to materialize and by the declining terms of trade in these same raw materials, increasing the appeal of statist solutions.

   2008, Bradley Simpson, Economists with Guns, page 26

   Instead, he [Barack Obama] and [Gordon] Brown stand together, supposedly the representatives of Anglo-American turbocapitalism, struggling to push the statist French and Germans—and this is the bit that was in nobody's script—leftward.

   2009 March 31, Jonathan Freedland, “Jonathan Freedland: Where is the new JFK we expected? He's stuck in a rut with Gordon Brown”, in The Guardian