Bibliographic record
Abstract
Tocqueville employed the notion of the virus to describe the strange process that led the utopian ambitions of the French revolution to collapse into bloody terror. I use this idea to trace the history of the relationship between utopia, dystopia and the virus of fear. Following discussion of Tocqueville’s notion and its connection to the modern event par excellence, I examine the origin of ancient modernity in Herotodus’s Histories. I show that anxiety, fear and paranoia were embedded in the normal symbolic order of capitalism from the beginning and suggest that the modern version of Platonic communism expressed by Rousseau, Marx and Engels, and realized by Robespierre, Lenin and Stalin, was fated to produce nightmarish totalitarianisms because of the ways it reacted to the radical collapse of European totalitarianisms and the rise of American liberalism in the post-Second World War neoliberal utopia of fear, which suggests that radical anxiety is a condition to be embraced. New fundamentalisms reflect the emergence of new conservative utopias: psycho-social reaction-formations meant to resolve the anxiety of global insecurity. Throughout the paper I hold onto Tocqueville’s metaphor of the virus to suggest that the fear of otherness has always been at the heart of efforts to control radical anxiety.
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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.039 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 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".