(De)Radicalism: Rootlessness and the Subversive Power of Money in Godwin’s Caleb Williams and St. Leon
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It is unsurprising that William Godwin, a thinker whose major project was considered by critics to be an upheaval of all inherited tradition, would focus on questions of rootlessness in his first two novels.Both Caleb Williams and St. Leon present heroes who are plagued by the inability to maintain connections with other individuals as a result of past actions and suffer for having negative or unknown reputations.Although the heroes are uprooted from their past through calumny and poor judgment, they attempt to define themselves by present action and good intentions, rather than by the prejudices of the societies that have cast them out.Williams and St. Leon each develop a pattern of thought in which they see themselves both as outsider and member; they at once reject the opinion of society, instead favoring pure reason and an obstinate sense of righteousness, and maintain the importance of living in and supporting that society.Their constant changes of disguise, wandering, concealment, imprisonment, and miscalculated attempts at benevolence all reveal the impossibility of escaping the past.This characterizes a significant problem in Godwin's attitude toward reform: the necessity of uprooting the past in order to create a rational future contrasts with the impossibility, even undesirability, of being free from history.Although the prejudices of society are the bugbear of Godwinian thought, Godwin's novels nevertheless lament the individual's alienation from society as a result of rejecting its constraints.The tension between rational commitment to change
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 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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".