All That Glitters: Devaluing the Gold Standard in the Utopias of Thomas More, Francis Bacon, and Margaret Cavendish
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Francis Bacon’s and Margaret Cavendish’s ideal societies unexpectedly follow Thomas More’s Utopia in eliminating the exchange value of gold and replacing it with a knowledge economy. Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627) and Cavendish’s Blazing World (1666) similarly pursue new “light” and shun selfish profit, private trade, capital accumulation, and conspicuous consumption. Unlike More, they allow gold to retain its traditional decorative and symbolic functions, but its “use value” completely trumps its exchange value. Cavendish uses gold to construct and glorify her Blazing World and to forge astonishing defensive weapons, but it cannot be bought, sold, or even earned since it remains exclusively imperial. Bacon restricts gold to buying new “light” or knowledge and honouring thriving families with symbolic golden grape clusters, but like the Fathers of Salomon’s House, all three societies value only beneficial knowledge and the collaborative virtues taught by their new or improved religions to further universal peace and brotherhood. Les sociétés idéales imaginées par Francis Bacon et Margaret Cavendish emboîtent étonnamment le pas à l’Utopie de Thomas More lorsqu’elles éliminent la valeur monétaire de l’or pour la remplacer par une économie du savoir. La New Atlantis de Bacon (1627) et le Blazing World de Cavendish (1666) proposent de façon comparable la quête d’une nouvelle lumière et le refus du profit égoïste, du commerce privé, de l’accumulation du capital et de la consommation ostentatoire. Toutefois, à la différence de More, ils permettent que soit maintenue la valeur esthétique et symbolique de l’or, qui éclipse ainsi complètement sa valeur de monnaie d’échange. Cavendish utilise l’or pour construire et glorifier son univers flamboyant et pour créer d’étonnantes armes défensives, mais il ne peut être ni acheté, ni vendu, ni même gagné, puisqu’il est exclusivement impérial. Bacon limite l’usage de l’or à l’achat d’une nouvelle lumière, c’est-à-dire de la connaissance, et à l’hommage des familles florissantes en leur offrant de symboliques grappes de raisins en or, mais tout comme les Pères de la Maison de Salomon, cettes trois sociétés valorisent uniquement la connaissance bénéfique et les vertus de collaboration qu’enseignent leur religion nouvelle et améliorée afin de favoriser la paix universelle et la fraternité.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.056 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".