'Mixing Larceny with the Spirit of Justice': Rousseau as the Modern Lycurgus
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay examines a heretofore neglected aspect of Rousseau’s republicanism - his discussion of ancient Sparta. While Rousseau’s admiration for ancient republican virtue is well-known, very brief if any attention is paid to his singling out of the Spartan as the model citizen, and Lycurgus as the model legislator in his chiefly political works. This move on his part is especially puzzling in light of the fact that enlightenment thinkers, like their ancient counterparts, characterized Sparta as a militaristic and extremely conservative society, and hence found very little worthy of emulation in its example. His contrarian tendencies notwithstanding, however, I argue that Rousseau’s concern with Sparta was not primarily polemical, but rather a very significant reflection of his concern with the place of natural liberty in the properly ordered community. Lycurgus’ paradoxical mixing of, in the words of Montesquieu, “larceny with the spirit of justice” reflects Rousseau’s own paradoxical goal of combining natural liberty with legitimate government in the Social Contract. Rousseau understood Lycurgus’ Sparta as a regime whose chief concern was not martial virtue, but rather the incorporation of natural liberty within the bounds of the political community. Hence, our understanding of Rousseau’s modern republicanism can be significantly deepened by an examination of the way in which he both adopted and modified the lessons of Plutarch’s Lycurgus (his chief source on the Spartan regime).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot 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.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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.
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 teacher head, 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".