Utopia without Apology: Form and Imagination in the Work of Ronald St. John Macdonald
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Summary The word “utopia” is a pun on eu topos (a good place) and ou topos (no place). While utopia in the sense of eu topos refers to an ideal society and its realization, utopia in the sense of ou topos emphasizes a mode of narrative rather than a political goal. Traditionally, the utopian form is a traveller’s account of a visit to an imaginary country where the journey is either to a far-off land or to the distant future. This article offers an appreciation of Ronald St. John Macdonald as a practitioner, presenter, and promoter of the utopian form in international law. Beyond the ability of a particular eu-topia to confront us with a complete package of ideas for international law that would otherwise remain unimagined, ou-topia generally encourages comprehensive and radical thinking about international law’s future and perhaps even jolts us into a heightened consciousness of our creativity and potential for change. The article also touches on the corresponding disadvantages of utopias and speculates that Macdonald reconciles the advantages and disadvantages partly through the fact that the power of the utopian form is available even to those who have been historically and unjustly excluded from international law.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.046 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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".