WOBBLY VITALISM: BERGSON, SOREL, AND THE INTERPRETATION OF REVOLUTIONARY SYNDICALISM IN THE UNITED STATES, 1905–1915
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The vogue for the philosophy of Henri Bergson, and the popularity of vitalist ideas more generally, periodically claims the attention of historians of early twentieth-century American thought and culture. There is little appreciation, however, for either the broad epistemic significance of these ideas or for their profound ethical and political implications. This essay explores the activity of Bergsonian vitalism, particularly as applied by Bergson's radical compatriot, Georges Sorel, within the fractious conversation that attended the emergence of revolutionary syndicalism as a significant force in the pre-war 1910s. Understanding the ways in which this seemingly unprecedented menace to the status quo was understood facilitates a rethinking of the relationship between ideas and experience in the rise of the Industrial Workers of the World, and illuminates the attraction of radically empiricist approaches to interpreting social phenomena in the Progressive Era. Here, as elsewhere, Bergsonism challenged dominant materialistic and mechanistic explanations in the name of “life,” a seductive alternative for those alienated by, or suffering under, the juggernaut of urban-industrial modernization.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".