The Fetishism of Formal Law and the Fate of Constitutional Patriotism in Communities of Comfort: A Canadian Perspective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper suggests that, as appealing as they may be from a normative viewpoint, philosophies such as constitutional patriotism, when a-contextually understood or ideologically overloaded, may problematically induce some, be they citizens, scholars or politicians, to assume the inevitable emergence of genuine reciprocal commitments in complex polities. In such polities, neither the sharing of a political space nor the experience of democratic participation within a single, and potentially culturally-embedded, legal framework guarantee the emergence of any form of patriotism, be it constitutional or otherwise. On the contrary, they may obscure the existence of a form of democratic parallelism that bears witness to the presence of deep political fractures. On a more positive note, they may also render political life with these fractures easier by relegating them to the realm of the non-dit or by neutering them. But while such an outcome enhances social peace, there is no evidence that it is also conducive to patriotism, constitutional or otherwise. The paper further examines how, in complex polities, the implementation of aspirational philosophies may prove delusive. Indeed, the idealism underlying such philosophies is susceptible of preventing normatively committed observers from acknowledging the gap that may exist between their normative conceptions of a polity and the possibilities of implementing these conceptions in the actual circumstances of that polity. In other words, such philosophies may provoke the creation of “ideal realities”, at the risk of obscuring thicker sociological ones. Moreover, such ideal realities are more likely to be believed if they find support, symbolic or otherwise, in the structuring norms of these complex polities. Indeed, as these norms may become “obscure objects of desire” for citizens, scholars or politicians, they risk becoming at the same time objects of fetishism, a fetishism that will only render more difficult the acknowledgment and evaluation of possible gaps between ideals and realities.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.042 | 0.056 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 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".