Panglossn.adj.

1794 S. T. Coleridge Coll. Lett. (1956) I. 114 Your remark of the Physical Evil in the long Infancy of men would indeed puzzle a Pangloss.

1798 F. G. Waldron Epil. in T. Holcroft Inquisitor New Panglosses should still, with quotations pat, come here.

1844 B. Disraeli Coningsby I. ii. i. 153 The political Panglosses who..were continually proving that this was the best of all possible governments.

1863 Times 22 Oct. 8/1 Had the Emperor named any other persons the Panglosses of the press would have said the same.

1928 J. F. Dashiell Fund. Objective Psychol. xii. 340 Here is one key to the Javerts and the Panglosses, to the Abolitionists and the teetotalers, to slaying prophets and cock-sure Babbitts.

1973 Listener 5 Apr. 438/1 The [Egyptian] regime's official Dr. Pangloss, Culture Minister Dr Abdel Khader Hatem.

1993 Harper's Mag. Sept. 48/1 As factories moved out of the United States in the 1970s and 1980s, the Panglosses of the day called it progress.

1881 Catholic World July 506 We have many Protestant divines with a Pangloss string of D.D.s and LL.D.s after their names.

1909 W. C. Brownell Amer. Prose Masters 172 The ascription of optimism to him in the Pangloss sense would be absurd. A view of the actual as the best possible world can hardly be ascribed to a revolutionary and reformatory spirit, always..a critic of the established order.

1965 A. F. Davies & S. Encel Austral. Society vi. 97 The Pangloss role of the official was compounded until recently by academic neglect of the bureaucratic organizations whose influence permeates large areas of social life.

1926 J. S. Huxley Ess. Pop. Sci. xii. 147 This conclusion, from its inception with some of the Stoics to its Panglossic latter end in certain evolutionists, he dismisses.

1976 Contemp. Sociol. 5 690/1 This first part is grounded in careful scholarship, and relatively free of the Panglossic view—pervading the rest of the book—that the American university is the best of all possible worlds in which to increase scientific knowledge.