NIMROD AMZALAK. Fascists and Honourable Men: Contingency and Choice in French Politics, 1918-45.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Its intriguing title and opening chapter suggest that this book represents another intervention in the longstanding debate on the significance of fascism in interwar France. But after tracing the emergence in the 1990s of a new consensus on how to interpret generic fascism, Nimrod Amzalak expresses skepticism about the utility of that concept. Commenting on the particularly fraught debate over French fascism, he questions the recent scholarly focus upon nationalist movements such as the Croix de Feu, despite its mass support (perhaps five hundred thousand members by 1936). Amzalak suggests an alternate approach, contending that the spread of anti-democratic ideas in French society at this time might be more fruitfully examined by assessing the intersection of professional interests and technocratic ideologies. Although this reviewer found aspects of the introduction rather puzzling, the results of the subsequent analysis are distinctive and valuable. The intersection of interests that Amzalak explores was the result of “elective affinities”—a concept he adopts from Max Weber—between technocratic professionals, notably engineers, and the “nonconformists,” a diverse group of intellectuals and politicians seeking national renewal through the ostensibly apolitical management of public affairs. During the interwar years a discourse of engineers as leaders and social mediators, promoted by figures such as Georges Lamirand, future secretary of state for youth under Vichy, was taking shape. As for the nonconformists, figures such as the dissident socialist Marcel Déat and the “Young Turk” radical Bertrand de Jouvenel were growing disillusioned with their respective organizations. They began to advocate a reorganization of the French state along technocratic lines, with engineers playing a leading role. The agendas of the two thus converged: the professionals provided the nonconformists with a social base for the articulation of their program, while the nonconformists furnished a broader vision and in some cases access to government.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.033 | 0.008 |
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".