Confronting Liberalism’s Fatal Flaw
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Ideas matter In Oosterbeek cemetery in the Dutch town of Arnhem lie the bodies of Dutch civilians and servicemen from the UK, Poland, Canada, the Netherlands, Australia and New Zealand. A few miles to the south near Nijmegen, the bodies of American servicemen were laid to rest at the Molenhoek cemetery before being removed in 1947 to the American cemetery near Maastricht. Operation Market Garden, as the Allied attack on the Dutch bridges in September 1944 was codenamed, failed to achieve its objectives and resulted in a casualty rate of nearly 75 per cent for the British Paratroop regiment dropped into Arnhem. Military historians generally regard the operation as flawed from the start. It was poorly planned by people who had little understanding of conditions on the ground and who chose to ignore local information that was provided. Moreover, no attempt was made to adapt the plan to changing conditions on the ground (Beevor, 2018). Despite the level of incompetence of senior generals who remained far from danger, the accounts of the battle are extraordinary with five Victoria Crosses awarded, four of them posthumously (Frost, 1984). Historians today rightly caution against assumptions as to what drove individual civilians and soldiers on to acts of heroism, beyond an element of professionalism and to protect or sometimes seek revenge for the death of close friends. However, the idea that individuals were also fighting against what they thought was a terrible tyranny is not easy to dispel entirely. Every year liberal democracies remember those who died in battle defending freedom through remembrance services. One question that ought to be raised at such services is whether the legacy of the commemorated acts of heroism has actually resulted in the pursuit of freedom? Ideas matter. As Fukuyama argued in the End of History and the Last Man , there can be no democracy without democrats. It is the same for liberalism. If there is no one to make the case for the foundational ideas of freedom and equality, there is no reason to expect that a society would decide to follow such a route. There are, after all, alternatives. Neither classical nor social liberalism has succeeded in sustaining a liberal society. One common factor behind this failure is the utilitarian ethical foundation of both versions of liberalism.
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 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 | 0.016 | 0.023 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.072 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.011 | 0.022 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".