The historian in prosecutor’s garb, or, The idea of legal and/or moral responsibility in historiography: The Example of Communism.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Law and historiography share several fundamental paradigms: the search for truth based on facts from the past; investigation; the presentation of “exhibits;” testimony and the evaluation of witnesses (according to the kind of jurisprudence that forms source criticism); the use of “pieces of evidence,” etc. If it is true that “legal principles cannot be transferred as-is into historical research,” that the demands in terms of evidence are not of the same nature, and that—and this is a decisive difference, but one that is not always observed, far from it, and it’s precisely this difference that will be the theme of my reflections today—the historian is not supposed to, having reconstructed the facts, regardless of how incriminating they are, pass judgement on, nor present a prosecutor’s charge against (nor plea for the acquittal of) figures from the past.With a belated but exceptionally violent spurt, the 1997 publication of The Black Book of Communism in France rekindled the long-lasting debate on the role and record of communism, mobilizing the press as a whole and every essayist in sight, with no signs that controversy is about to die down. Un pavé dans l’histoire, by Pierre Rigoulot and Ilios Yannakakis, recounts the first months of the polemic surrounding the “memory of communism” in France, positioning itself from the accusatory point of view of the book’s contributors. Several years later, the collective text Du passé faisons table rase! introduced French readers to the contrasting receptions The Black Book’s translations met in all of Europe’s countries and languages: very favourable in the East, reticent in the West—with intellectual France, as always, a clear exception, diverging from the countries who had known “real socialism,” despite the reluctance of a rearguard of prudently recycled apparatchiki who had preferred not to “stir up the mud” of the past.
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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 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.033 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".