All 6 Uses

idealism
in
What They Fought For - 1861-1865
(Auto-generated)

How could men sustain a high level of idealistic commitment through the grim experiences of disease, death, exhaustion, and frustration as the war ground on year after year?
p. 42.1 *

idealistic = the belief that behavior should be guided by high ideals or standards
These were the idealists.
p. 62.6

idealists = people who believe behavior should be guided by high ideals or standards -- often implying that they are unrealistic
But for others their initial idealism, even if intensified by more visceral emotions, persisted to the end.†
p. 24.8
Another historian of the Union army, influenced by Linderman, maintains that "whatever idealism that the soldiers brought with them into the army faded" by the latter years of the war."†
p. 42.1
Whose idealism could survive all that?†
p. 42.4
Not only patriotism but also the idealism of 1861 persisted among many veterans, including a Pennsylvania private who wrote to his wife from a hospital after a couple of hundred miles of marching up and down the Shenandoah Valley in 1864, the last twenty-five of them in bare feet.†
p. 45.3

Definitions:

(1) (idealism as in: youthful idealism)
the belief that behavior should be guided by high ideals or standards and often that good things will result -- sometimes used to imply that such beliefs are unrealistic
(2) (meaning too rare to warrant focus)
Idealism can also reference the philosophical theory that there is no reality outside of ideas.