Birth, death and survival: sources of political renewal in the work of Hannah Arendt and Virgil’s<i>Aeneid</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Does death provide a generative force in politics? The great theorist of political founding, Hannah Arendt, insisted that birth, not death, equipped us for the task of beginning, and pointed to Virgil’s Aeneid as a work that best understood this process. But the Aeneid is a work primarily concerned with sacrifice, suffering and death, and it highlights the losses that must be endured, the disorientation to be overcome, before renewal arrives. Reconsidering Arendt’s emphasis on action in the light of the themes of loss and despair in the Aeneid suggests that death cannot be definitively excluded from an Arendtian approach. Indeed, this element may lie close to the heart of her thinking. Virgil’s emphasis on the management of despair through prophecy suggests one reason Arendt might forego an emphasis on death, since accounts of founding, be they myth or theory, must first and foremost serve the needs of survival.
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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 | 0.008 | 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 | 0.015 | 0.067 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| 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".