Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Fable of the Bees was the Enlightenment's epitome of immoralism. Throughout the eighteenth century, Mandeville was seen as the most formidable modern critic of Christian moral psychology, the exemplary nihilist who applauded illimitable human desire, and the compelling satirist of contemporary codes of propriety. His work, more than any other, called into question fundamental standards of social behavior. To both his few admitted admirers and The Fable 's legion of opponents, Mandeville's critique of inherited ideals of conduct was thought never fully to have been answered, not only in his own lifetime, but during the two generations after his death in 1732. Adam Smith, for example, was still revising his attack on The Fable in 1790, the last year of his life. Mandeville himself insisted that his distinctive amalgam of philosophy and satire had both a critical and constructive intention: to “pull off the disguises of artful men,” as he wrote in response to Bishop Berkeley, and to expose “the hidden springs” of human action to analytic inspection. His project of “anatomizing the invisible part of man” (1, 136) was designed to demonstrate that the vocabularies of formal systems of ethics served the essentially political and socializing purpose of deflecting critical attention from the irreducibly passionate and utterly self-regarding sources of actual human wishes.
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 | 0.012 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.016 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.037 | 0.012 |
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".