Bibliographic record
Abstract
The unapologetic re-emergence in recent years of the term “civilization” in American foreign policy circles and best-selling books merits closer scrutiny. This essay examines two different views of civilization that have attracted recent critical attention. The first is a rather militant defense of civilization. In this view, civilized nations see themselves as exempt from the very laws and principles on which they are founded, thereby enabling them, in the name of the civilizing (or pro-democracy) mission, to exert force or violence on those others who threaten civilization (also known as “barbarians,” “savages,” “terrorists,” or “enemies of democracy”) and who also happen to be, conveniently, in a state of exception from civilization and can therefore be subjected to violence. The second model of civilization reflects a certain liberal optimism. Rather than precipitating “clashes,” civilization, in this view, does not confer exceptionality on a nation or allow for the exploitation of vulnerable others; instead, a civilization should concern itself with the expansion and fusion of horizons and the need to engage in a dialogue with other cultures and societies without exception or exclusion. In describing these two views, I note the violence inherent in the model of civilization as an exception and the difficulties that confront the dialogical model. Drawing on the work of Jean-Luc Nancy and Giorgio Agamben, as well as J. M. Coetzee’s novel Waiting for the Barbarians , I conclude with some reflections on the need to revise our current views of civilization by sketching an alternative possibility of an inoperative civilization.
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 | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.075 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 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".