Does Rousseau's discussion of sovereignity and government suggest a preference for elite domination?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The aim of this essay is to defend the thesis that Rousseau favoured popular sovereignty. Rousseau defines popular sovereignty as the “exercise of the general will” of the people, where the general will is those interests shared by the whole citizenry (Rousseau 2011, 170) . Before reaching this conclusion, I initially draw a distinction between the two ways in which Rousseau describes the function of government. On the one hand, it is described as the executive agent of the citizenry (which I call description A). On the other hand, he describes government as an independent body that may choose to prioritise its own interests (description B). Through the essay I argue that these two descriptions are incompatible, and that Rousseau’s conflation of these two descriptions has engendered confusion as to whether he did in fact support popular sovereignty. The purpose of this essay is to defend the view that Rousseau did favour popular sovereignty, despite the extensive power that he describes the government as having.
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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".