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Record W3007154734 · doi:10.33137/rr.v41i3.31560

More, Huxley, Eggers, and the Utopian/Dystopian Tradition

2018· article· en· W3007154734 on OpenAlexvenueno aff
Peter C. Herman

Bibliographic record

VenueRenaissance and Reformation · 2018
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicReligious Studies and Spiritual Practices
Canadian institutionsnot available
Fundersnot available
KeywordsDystopiaUtopiaContradictionIdeologyPhilosophyHumanitiesLawPoliticsPolitical scienceEpistemology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

From its inception in Plato’s Republic and revival in Thomas More’s Utopia, the concept of a perfect (or as More originally put it in a qualification often lost, “best”) form of a republic has been dogged by the spectres of hypocrisy, contradiction, and authoritarianism. However, the matter is more complicated than a simple declaration that utopias provide a vehicle for totalitarian fantasy, that totalitarian governments inevitably portray themselves as creating a utopia. While today’s readers, at a comfortable distance from the early sixteenth century, may bridle at the lack of privacy, or at the ideological coerciveness in More’s Utopia, that does not eradicate how, in Walter Kendrick’s words, “what for us are problems are for them solutions.” It can be argued that the negative elements are a response to social ills. The same goes for Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Dave Eggers’s The Circle. While the negatives in all three fictions undermine or put into question the positives, our realization that the authors also intended the negatives as genuine attempts at resolving genuine problems that cause untold misery invites us to complicate our judgments. The undermining is itself undermined. L’idée d’un gouvernement parfait (ou « meilleur » pour reprendre l’expression même de More), de son apparition dans la République de Platon jusqu’à son renouveau dans l’Utopie de Thomas More, a été traquée et mise à profit par les partisans de l’hypocrisie, de la contradiction et de l’autoritarisme. Toutefois, la question est plus complexe que la simple affirmation qui voudrait que les utopies favorisent les phantasmes totalitaires, ou que les gouvernements totalitaires se présentent inévitablement comme la réalisation d’une utopie. Ces éléments négatifs répondent en fait souvent à de véritables problèmes sociaux, et, bien que le lecteur d’aujourd’hui, dans la confortable distance qui le sépare du début du XVIe siècle, puisse s’indigner du manque de vie privée et de l’intransigeance idéologique de l’Utopie de More, cela ne change pas le fait que, pour emprunter la formule de Walter Kendrick, « ce qui pour nous sont des problèmes, sont pour eux des solutions ». Il en va de même pour le Brave New World de Aldous Huxley et The Circle de Daver Egger. Alors que les aspects négatifs dans ces trois fictions compromettent leurs aspects positifs, le fait de reconnaître que ces auteurs, par ces moyens discutables, ont sincèrement tenté de régler de vrais problèmes entraînant des misères infinies, amène le lecteur d’aujourd’hui à nuancer ses jugements. Et ainsi, les aspects compromettants de ces oeuvres sont eux-mêmes remis en question.

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.003
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.015
Threshold uncertainty score0.032

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.003
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0060.027
Scholarly communication0.0060.006
Open science0.0010.002
Research integrity0.0030.005
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0060.001

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.

Opus teacher head0.023
GPT teacher head0.241
Teacher spread0.219 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations25
Published2018
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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