‘The new Messiah of my life’: Anthony Crosland's reading of Lucien Laurat's<i>Marxism and Democracy</i>(1940)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores Anthony Crosland's rejection of Marxism in the early 1940s through his reading of Lucien Laurat's Marxism and Democracy (1940). In correspondence with his friend Philip Williams, Crosland commented in unusual depth on Laurat's book. Using this correspondence alongside other contemporary writing, this article argues that Laurat's ideas helped Crosland untangle his own early thoughts on the relationship between Marxism and democratic socialism and establish the limitations of Marxist analysis for contemporary conditions. These themes contributed to an interpretation of modern capitalism that became central to Crosland's post-war writing and the emergence of ‘revisionist’ socialism in Britain. Furthermore, the Left Book Club's translation of Laurat's book and continued parallels between Crosland's and Laurat's analyses in the 1950s open the possibility of greater connections between continental European and ‘revisionist’ British socialism.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| 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".