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Record W1134262665

George Woodcock's Transatlantic Anarchism

2015· article· en· W1134262665 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

aboutThe title or abstract carries a Canadian signal from the geographic lexicon.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueAnarchist studies · 2015
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicAnarchism and Radical Politics
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsWoodcockGeorge (robot)PoliticsClassicsHistorySurprisePARRYLawSociologyMedia studiesArt historyPolitical science
DOInot available

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Literary scholar Peter Hughes' comment (in 1974) that George Woodcock 'has written more than many literate people have read' might come as something of a surprise to readers of Anarchist Studies.1 While famous for his historical study Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements, first published by Penguin in 1962 and subsequently reprinted in numerous editions, the prominence of this book has tended to overshadow the full range of his activities before and after his relocation from Britain to Canada in 1949. As a journalist observed in a 1975 profile published in the Ottawa Citizen, Woodcock combined the roles of 'poet, journalist, critic, travel writer, playwright, historian, editor, political commentator [and] biographer'. 2 His output was so prolific that by the time of his death in 1995 he was a well-known public intellectual in English-speaking Canada, though, sadly, fame proved fleeting: one is hard-pressed to encounter any mention of him nowadays.Woodcock was born to British immigrant parents in Winnipeg in May 1912, and moved to England before his first birthday (his mother was unenthused with prairie winters). An 'academic career' was proffered when he turned 17, but Woodcock's unwillingness to accept a stipend from his grandfather - offered on the condition that he study for the Anglican orders at Cambridge - foreclosed that possibility. Tempting as it is to see this youthful intransigence foreshadowing his politics - an echo of Kropotkin's decision to reject the position of secretary to the Russian Geographical Society on the basis that a life of privilege came at the expense of the many - Woodcock's reasoning was more pedestrian. 'I refused...partly because my faith was beginning to waver', he noted in his first autobiography Letter to the Past (1982), 'but even more because I was... so inordinately shy that the idea of standing in a pulpit and preaching to a congregation paralysed me with terror'.3The route out of the small town where his family had settled was temporarily blocked and for the next eleven years, starting in 1929 at age seventeen, he commuted from his home in Marlow, Buckinghamshire to London's Paddington Station, where he occupied a variety of roles as a 'glorified office boy' for the Great Western Railway. Despite the petty frustrations of catching the 7:58 am commuter train for over a decade, and the 'barrenness, frustration, boredom, darkness' of his mundane labour, the city was a 'paradise for the poor aspirant scholar and aesthete'.4 Encountering periodicals like Alfred Orage's New English Weekly did much to broaden Woodcock's horizons, as did London's cultural riches. He regularly visited the Victoria and Albert Museum, and paced the corridors of the Tate Gallery (now Tate Britain) armed with a knowledge of modern art gleaned from articles by Clive Bell and Herbert Read. In addition, the daily commuter train became an unlikely surrogate 'college': one of his fellow passengers, 'Brooks', introduced Woodcock to socialism via anecdote-peppered discussions of William Morris, H.M. Hyndman, Annie Besant, George Bernard Shaw and, most importantly, Peter Kropotkin.5Surprisingly, given that Woodcock would later be a remarkably prolific writer, his initial literary experiments were faltering, and only modestly successful. First finding an audience in Orage's New English Weekly in 1932 with the publication of two poems, he then endured a barren period for the next five years. This was no doubt frustrating for a writer making his living as a railway clerk, but befriending the German anarchist and publisher Charles Lahr opened new avenues. Having brought out early work by D.H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley, Lahr was an important connection and encouraged Woodcock's efforts. A number of his poems soon appeared under Lahr's imprint, and he gained more success as a poet, publishing in Geoffrey Grigson's New Verse and Julian Symons' Twentieth Century Verse.6His political thinking was also developing. …

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesScience and technology studies
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.787
Threshold uncertainty score0.999

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.003
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.296
GPT teacher head0.469
Teacher spread0.173 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it