De Iure Homini et Homunculi: Rights, Tristram Shandy, and the Language of Isolation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Laurence Sterne’s 1759 comic novel, Tristram Shandy, we encounter a startling invocation of protected individual rights, the individual in this case being the hapless proto-human Homunculus destined to become the titular character. Decades before the revolutionary declarations of rights, Sterne, Thomas Jefferson’s favourite author in matters of moral philosophy, blatantly ridicules the idea of the self-evidence of rights. Sterne’s satirical “rights-talk” captures two important facets: the atomistic, alienating aspect of perceiving human relations through the lens of rights, as famously criticized by Marx and so many others ever since; and the way in which drawing on genuinely legal concepts has contributed to the development of this often criticized language of isolation. In this paper, I trace, in particular, the ideas of Natural law scholars like Grotius and Pufendorf (who is explicitly referred to by Sterne) who conceptualized rights as non-relational, as domains, modelled on the Roman law concepts of dominium, ownership, and patria, the power of a pater familias over his household, both concepts that are characterized by domination over objects or human beings. Yet a theory of rights that insists on the integrity of exclusive spheres of power cannot easily accommodate non-transgressive intersubjective action – most importantly, contract. Nonetheless, the rhetoric of the protected sphere of the subjective right never left the language of law.
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.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
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.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".