Montesquieu's Teaching on the Dangers of Extreme Corrections: Japan, the Catholic Inquisition, and Moderation in<i>The Spirit of the Laws</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Explicitly and implicitly inThe Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu binds together the Japanese who persecute Christians and the Inquisitors of Catholicism who persecute heretics. In seeking purity, both sets of vehement reformers impose atrocious punishments. In so binding the abuses of the East and West together, the work is an expression neither of Orientalism nor of Eurocentrism as conventionally understood. Although Montesquieu thus offers a critical approach to Europe's vulnerability to reformers who go to extremes, whether pious zealots who seek to perpetuate Christianity or zealous Enlightenment philosophes who would seek to eradicate it, many commentators have focused on the work's apparent neutrality with regard to the various cultural phenomena it examines. The key to understanding Montesquieu's reserved tone lies in his commitment to moderation. Given the West's continuing vulnerability to extremism of various types, Montesquieu's moderate teaching on the need for moderation in corrections remains pressingly relevant.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 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".