POLITY • E-FREE TRANSLATION.COM • Definition of Polity

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/pˈɑləti/ Listen

noun

Polity n. (pl. polities)

The form or constitution of the civil government of a nation or state; the framework or organization by which the various departments of government are combined into a systematic whole.

Hence: The form or constitution by which any institution is organized; the recognized principles which lie at the foundation of any human institution. "Nor is possible that any form of polity, much less polity ecclesiastical, should be good, unless God himself be author of it."

Policy; art; management. (Obs.)

Synonyms: Policy. Polity, Policy. These two words were originally the same. Polity is now confined to the structure of a government; as, civil or ecclesiastical polity; while policy is applied to the scheme of management of public affairs with reference to some aim or result; as, foreign or domestic policy. Policy has the further sense of skillful or cunning management.

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Etymology of 'Polity'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Polity" Quotes from Famous Books

... operate with bullets and bayonets, when it had been fondly hoped that the ballot would ever be a sufficiently formidable weapon in the hand of the American citizen, and that he never would have to become the citizen-soldier in a civil contest. Had Hamilton been allowed to shape our national polity, it would have worked as successfully for ages as that financial system which he formed has ever worked, and which has never been departed from without the result being most injurious to the country. At this day, when events ...

— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various

... reactionary commonwealth, this fanatical representative of early Germanic use and wont, is possessed of a clearness of self-consciousness, a hard and positive clearness of understanding, such as is to be found nowhere else in the Middle Ages and very rarely at all in any polity. ...

— Epic and Romance - Essays on Medieval Literature • W. P. Ker

... envoy, smiling and bowing to Tito, "to think that her affections must overrule the good of the State, and that nobody is to be beheaded who is anybody's cousin; but such a view is not to be encouraged in the male population. It seems to me your Florentine polity is much ...

— Romola • George Eliot

... example, and an unjust one for women, of taxation without representation, which our fathers declared to be tyranny; and which is contrary to the genius of our republican institutions, and to the general polity of this commonwealth. Women are also governed, while they have no direct voice in the government, and made subject to laws affecting their property, their personal rights and liberty, in whose ...

— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various

... impossible to draw together in common activity and worship the different sects of the same German race and language; the effort to unite in one organization peoples of different language, but of substantially the same doctrine and polity, was equally futile. It seemed as if minute sectarian division and subdivision was to be forced upon American Christianity as a law of its ...

— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon

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