Bibliographic record
Abstract
Social contract theory imagines political societies as resting on a fundamental agreement, adopted at a discrete moment in hypothetical time, that both bound individual persons together into a single polity and set fundamental rules regarding that polity's structure and powers. Written constitutions, adopted at real moments in historical time, dictating governmental structures, bounding governmental powers, and entrenching individual rights, look temptingly like social contracts reified. I argue in this article, however, that something essential is lost in the casual slippage between social contract theory and the practice of constitutionalism. Enacted constitutions do not come into being against the background of a state of nature of isolated individuals; and by this I do not mean to invoke the too-familiar critique of the supposedly decontextualized liberal person, but rather to critique the aspiration to decontextualize the legal and political order. Constitutions are enacted in ongoing societies (whether newly politically sovereign or otherwise) with pre-existing laws and legal systems, political organizations, cultural and linguistic and religious divisions, and norms and mores. Moreover, the practice of constitutionalism is usually, at least in part, a practice of reconciling those legacies to a new political order, of making use of those legacies to build loyalties to or counterbalances against the state (or both). Most constitutions cannot be well-understood by retrospectively characterizing them as the kind of complete and radical break with the past envisioned by social contract theory. Contractarian blinders lead us to look for greater individualism, greater social unity, and greater coherence of principles than can actually be expected of constitutions or constitutionalism. Real constitutional orders appropriate, incorporate, and channel the histories and divisions of the societies they govern. Treating them as if they are social contracts will flatten and distort them, making those engagements with the past or with social plurality appear anomalous and encouraging their minimization. I aim to redirect some of our attention to non-contractarian constitutionalism, or non-contractarian strands within constitutionalism, both as intellectual inheritance and as lived practice. Non-contractarian elements persisted in constitutional theory across the apparent break of the late 1700s, even though these have to some degree been lost sight of more recently; and they have persisted and should persist in constitutional practice.
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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 | 0.008 | 0.025 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.026 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.016 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.002 |
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".