Bibliographic record
Abstract
Augustin Barruel’sMemoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinismincited the famous “Illuminati scare” in the United States from 1798 through 1800. Barruel argued that a shadowy Freemason group known as the Illuminati had provoked the French Revolution. Americans in the late 1790s inferred that this group was infiltrating the United States. Scholars often imagine that this scare was an instance of mass hysteria triggered by the intensity of American politics at this moment. But in fact, Americans’ response to Barruel was measured, careful, and guided by the era’s prevailing epistemological standards. Atlantic knowledge networks repeatedly validated (or failed to persuasively rebut) the content of theMemoirs,allowing American intellectuals such as Jedidiah Morse and Timothy Dwight to spread the conspiracy theory with the conviction of “authority.” Morse was particularly significant as a mediator between these networks and American audiences. By engaging with literary reviews, the correspondence of academics, and the publications of intellectuals, Morse had good reason to accept Barruel’s account. Indeed, the evidence that Morse and his allies marshalled in favor of Barruel was arguably stronger than that which was available to their critics. In this light, the Illuminati “scare” was not an irrational panic, but rather a reasonable response to the evidence available to Americans during the late 1790s. By re-examining this story through the lens of print history, transatlantic networks, and early modern processes of knowledge production, scholars can better understand the borders and limitations of early modern epistemologies, as well as the nature of early conspiracy theories.
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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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".