Bibliographic record
Abstract
The political philosophy unfolded in On Human Conduct certainly lacks nothing for radicalism. The core of Michael Oakeshott’s theorizing is the idea that, as the mandate of the modern state expands, the possibility of living life as the self-sufficient adventure it is meant to be contracts. On Human Conduct is above all a reflection on the nature of the state. It can hardly be an accident that Hobbes and Hegel, two of the figures within the canonical theory tradition who most deeply engaged Oakeshott intellectually, were also utterly preoccupied with the project of theorizing the state. There is no question that Oakeshott wants a severe constraining of the scope of state activity, but this view of the state would not have the philosophical character that it does if it were not tied to views about what it is to live life. An ordinary sort of human life, such as we all must lead, is inhabiting and responding to a present composed of objects and happenings ... related to ourselves as the objects of our attention and concern.... Each of us occupies such a present as his own; it is a personal present.... My Venice is not your Venice, and this grove of trees, which to me now is a shelter from the rain or a place to play hide-and-seek, to another (or to me in different circumstances) may be a defence against soil erosion. Oakeshott’s guiding conception comes out most clearly when he distinguishes between an association “of pilgrims, travelling to a common destination” and an association “of adventurers,” each wandering in a unique direction (p. 243). As individuals, we have a responsibility to respond reflectively to the worlds in which we find ourselves and to exert practical intelligence in comporting ourselves to those worlds of practical existence. An overactive state, for Oakeshott, is a clear sign that individuals are abdicating that responsibility or seeking ways to lessen the burden of exercising reflective intelligence. (More precisely, the problem is not an overactive state but a state that takes itself to be purposive at all .) When Oakeshott speaks of the “individual manqué ” (p. 275), he implies a kind of duty to be the sort of individual who is not an individual manqué , and he urges us to repudiate visions of the state that (he thinks) encourage or facilitate such moral abdication.
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 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 | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.021 | 0.005 |
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".