The spatial sense of empire: Encountering strangers with Simmel, Tocqueville and Martineau
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay takes Georg Simmel’s conceptualization of space as a form of sociation ( Vergesellschaftung) in his 1908 masterpiece, Sociology, as a framework for critically re-reading two ninteetnth-century classics in the sociology of empire. Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835/1940) is shown to illustrate Simmel’s understanding of social-spatial boundaries by portraying the cultural and historical geography of America as an ‘optic space’ of racial (in)equality. Similarly, Harriett Martineau’s study of morals and manners in Society in America (1837) exemplifies Simmel’s ideas on social-spatial sensibilities with its attention to how everyday settings serve as a kind of ‘acoustic space’ of gendered (un)freedom. Drawing on related arguments by recent thinkers and critics, and rectifying the relative neglect of how socio-spatial dynamics are addressed in the texts of classical sociology, the essay examines a description in each work of a particular personal encounter with strangers which exemplifies how the spatial sense of empire disrupts assumptions that new-world democracy has superseded old-world colonialism. Considered as illustrations of Simmel’s thesis concerning the spatial orders of society, the ‘travelling and anecdotal theories’ of Martineau and Tocqueville provide ‘sociological allegories’ designed to instruct reading publics on how law, empire, and social mores constitute bounded fields of struggle within the contact zones of modern empire.
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 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 | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".