Liberty before and after Liberalism: Milton's Shifting Politics and the Current Crisis in Liberal Theory
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The current crisis in American liberal theory marks a shift away from the critique of individualism to an exploration of the urgent challenges posed by cultural pluralism. Appeals by various ‘fundamentalist’ constituencies to the overriding authority of essential truths generated outside the consensus of the polity have the power to destroy toleration and the liberal nature of the polity. A study of Milton proves invaluable in helping to evaluate the viability of one prominent solution, for texts like A Treatise of Civil Power seem to sketch out what Paul Kahn calls a ‘liberalism of faith,’ that is, the constitution of secure domains within the polity for the contemplation and practice of truths alien to the consensus. The example of Milton suggests, however, just how fallible a solution, and how ultimately illiberal, such an extension of liberalism might be.
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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 | 0.008 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.060 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.013 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".