William Max Nelson. <i>The Time of Enlightenment: Constructing the Future in France, 1750 to Year One</i>.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Over the last decades, much attention has been paid to how distinct cultures, periods, and disciplines have represented their relationship to the past. Fewer works have tackled the more challenging task of reconstructing the futures projected by past societies. The Time of Enlightenment seeks to remedy this oversight. This erudite book addresses a watershed moment in Western European history when, to paraphrase Reinhart Koselleck, the authority of the past began to give way to the authority of the future. As the subtitle indicates, this study is not about the future per se but rather addresses the more circumscribed notion of the “constructible future.” “Active,” “engineered,” “experimental”: these are keywords Nelson uses to describe a new, practical attitude that reconceptualized the future as an object to be actively controlled, be it through social and political reform, economic policy, technological inventions, and, yes, even time itself. For Nelson, the culminating moment of this new attitude to the future was the decision by the French revolutionaries to create a new calendar dating from Year One of a New Time. This calendar also encapsulates the book’s key question: What changed in people’s attitudes to time over the course of the eighteenth century that made the idea of creating an entirely new future not just a utopian fantasy but a project worth undertaking?
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.018 | 0.005 |
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".