Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper argues that far from advocating fear of violence as a continuous source of civic provocation Machiavelli’s ideal ruler employs an aesthetic approach to civic violence; one that actually harms few citizens and moderates their fear with admiration through carefully considered psychological imperatives similar to those articulated two hundred years later in theories of the sublime. Such violence as there was would occur half a decade at a time in between which the citizens and the patria would enjoy stability, wealth and honor. It had a proven Medici provenance, having been developed through Cosimo de Medici’s intuitive genius for governance and was maintained by Piero and Lorenzo the Magnificent. The insight was empirically confirmed by Niccolò’s observations of similarly intuitive political savants; namely Cesare Borgia and Julius II. It was not given a technical title by Machiavelli, who unhelpfully referred to it as crudeltà bene usate (cruelty well used) but we might call it “the politics of the sublime”. Despite its most dramatic (and consequentially disproportionate) evocation in the Prince, Machiavelli’s reliance on the political sublime waned throughout his literary career, until he rejected it in a stunning critique of Cosimo’s reign in the Florentine Histories.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.033 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 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".