Tending to the (National) Household: Walter Scott’s <i>The Antiquary</i> and “that happy commerce” of the Enlightenment
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay explores the question of commercialism in Walter Scott’s The Antiquary (1816), particularly as it reflects Enlightenment debates about the place of ethics in a modern commercial society. I examine the challenge—and, for Enlightenment thinkers, the urgency—of living morally in a commercialized, modern Britain, where communal ties were replaced by self-interest and monetary gain. In The Antiquary, Scott follows the thinking of Adam Smith and David Hume, who strove to define an aggregate of self-interested men as a principled community with well-developed social and ethical norms that would allow for what Smith called a “happy commerce” of socialization. Set during the French Revolution, the community anxiously anticipating a supposed French invasion cannot afford to give in to self-interested impulses that threaten to pull its members away from a unified polity. Rather than valorizing the feudal community and its social relationships, Scott historicizes the moment when sentiment as an affective communal glue is remediated from its feudal model into a force of sociability that would fit a society governed by a system of moral economy that is contingent upon the rules of contemporary, post-feudal commercial order.
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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".