Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Pertaining to, or characteristic of, the metaphysical or psychological theory of voluntarism.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective Pertaining to voluntary activity; supporting or promoting voluntarism.

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From voluntarist +‎ -ic.

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Examples

  • And while voluntaristic gestures at the individual level do no harm (and maybe, who knows, some tiny good), I actually believe that it does harm when people claim, in public, that we could solve this problem if we just each “did our part to conserve.”

    Matthew Yglesias » Human Achievement Hour 2010

  • And Joyce's novel is perhaps an argument about reconfiguring the idea of family away from blood and legal status (marriage, paternity) and towards a voluntaristic idea of affinity.

    Literary Study 2009

  • Three common themes in the work of Foucault and Derrida exemplify their antifoundationalist stance: (1) they reject a voluntaristic understanding of agency, in which individuals are responsible for their destiny; (2) they conceive of the productive nature of power; and (3) they demand reflection on the specific terms chosen (such as names, identities or nations) as the basis for political action.

    Queer Theory and Poststructuralist Theory 2009

  • In a further radical shift, the 1815 version recasts the wills as compulsive rather than voluntaristic, which forces us to confront what Slavoj Žižek calls "the Real of the drives."

    'The Abyss of the Past': Psychoanalysis in Schelling's Ages of the World (1815) 2008

  • Stalinism was not deterministic but voluntaristic; Benjamin had no critique of Stalinism, and never spoke a word against it.

    A blockage at the Elephant « Squares of Wheat 2008

  • One rationale for treating marital obligations as such promises might be thought to be the voluntaristic account of obligation.

    Marriage and Domestic Partnership Brake, Elizabeth 2009

  • Leninism was the highest voluntaristic expression of revolutionary ideology — a coherence of the separate governing a reality that resisted it.

    2009 October 2009

  • Leninism was the highest voluntaristic expression of revolutionary ideology — a coherence of the separate governing a reality that resisted it.

    The Society of the Spectacle-by Guy Debord (translated by Ken Knabb) 2009

  • What also strikes me is how this emphasis on individual and voluntaristic action is in contradiction with the drive to sell, which is so important in a commercial media and is so dramatically evident in the Inky today, led by advertising executive Brian Tierney.

    Inky Notes (Feb. 3, 2008): 2008

  • And it is not as if the view that some normative statuses are not to be explained in terms of God's will must be repugnant to a theocentric metaethics: for, after all, one might understand such statuses in theological, even if not voluntaristic, terms.

    Theological Voluntarism Murphy, Mark 2008

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