Bibliographic record
Abstract
My encounter with Maurice Cowling started in 1963 with the publication of his first two books: Mill and Liberalism and The Nature and Limits of Political Science. The book on Mill was important to me because I was starting work on a doctoral thesis on John Stuart Mill, still struggling to clarify what I wanted to say. Cowling’s The Nature and Limits of Political Science was an astute Oakeshottian critique of the modern science of politics. I had already discovered Oakeshott when studying Hobbes as an undergraduate and I used Cowling’s book as one of the readings when I first taught the philosophy of the social sciences. But it was the Mill book which was of first importance to me. Along with Gertrude Himmelfarb and Wilmoore Kendall, Cowling was a dissenter from the ranks of those who elevated Mill as the patron saint of the liberal tradition. Cowling detected in Mill a strand of moral totalitarianism, an idealistic progressivism and elitist intellectualism, which made him dangerous from Cowling’s acerbically skeptical standpoint. At the same time, the University of Toronto’s great project to publish a definitive edition of all Mill’s works was underway, in the hands of those who, by and large, defended the traditional view of Mill as the theorist of the open, individualist society. Cowling was an uncompromising controversialist. Thus I decided that in my dissertation I would adjudicate the controversy over Mill’s political theory by reviewing the arguments on both sides and testing them against careful reading of his major political texts. My conclusion was that Cowling’s view had considerable merit, if overstated (which is a compliment in his view). I owed my direction in this respect to Cowling long before I met him.
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 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 | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.024 | 0.012 |
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".