“Le système de John Law” and the Spectre of Modern Despotism in the Political Thought of Montesquieu
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the early eighteenth century, Europe was rattled by a series of financial shocks, stemming from the impropriety of government and economic actors who grew increasingly interdependent as governments relied on private lenders for imperial expansion. New institutional arrangements redefined the relationship between class and power and led to original notions of political justice, inconceivable in the premodern economic era. Political thinkers increasingly placed emphasis on how existing notions of freedom could be squared with bringing unwieldy and chaotic economic situations under political control. Some concerned themselves with how commerce stifled the civic character, while others held a more optimistic view, suggesting commerce was a source of political stability that engendered certain forms of virtue commensurate with eighteenth-century political exigencies. Among these thinkers, Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de la Brde et de Montesquieu astutely observed France's transition from an orderly but stultifying feudal order towards a progressive but often unstable commercial society, and he sought to reconcile these two positions throughout his political works.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".