<i>The Riddle of the Modern World: Of Liberty, Wealth and Equality</i>. By Alan Macfarlane. New York: Palgrave, 2000. Pp. xiii, 326. $65.00.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Alan Macfarlane is a distinguished British social anthropologist, celebrated for giving that discipline an historical turn. He is the author of important books claiming that the English had become “individualist”—in familial matters as much as in economic life—in the late Middle Ages. This view had the mixed blessing of an endorsement by Sir Keith Joseph, the intellectual powerhouse of early Thatcherism, thereby making Macfarlane a decidedly controversial figure. The present book draws on these early views, but is very much the product of sustained interaction with the thought of the late Ernest Gellner (who spent most of the last years of his life at Cambridge chairing the department in which Macfarlane teaches). What we are offered in this book then is a summary of a particular line of argument, drawing on philosophy and anthropology, which speaks to the interests of economic historians in a slightly abstract but decidedly high-powered manner. The presupposition of the whole is stated in the title, albeit that the “riddle” is in fact twofold. One riddle is the blocking of sustained development: given human ingenuity and obvious early development, why was it that most agrarian civilizations eventually hit some sort of ceiling? The second conundrum then concerns the fundamental breakthrough to capitalist and industrial modernity.
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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.024 | 0.008 |
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".