Simpson, James. Permanent Revolution: The Reformation and the Illiberal Roots of Liberalism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
James Simpson, well known for his brilliant contribution to the scholarship of the late Middles Ages, has contributed a distinct and suggestive study of the English Reformation, showing once more how deep scholarship and reading can yield something unexpected and significant not just to scholars but to members of the wider community.So what is surprising?The English Reformation began with "illiberalism, " intolerance, literalism, predestination, and the like, and gave the underpinnings, even if transmogrified, of liberalism, freedom of conscience, free will, religious freedom, political constitutional frameworks, and more.Simpson finds the illiberal roots of liberalism in this permanent revolution and so makes more intricate our understanding of the Reformation and what followed to our day.Protestants transformed their own tradition to go from the illiberal to the liberal.But ever the nuanced scholar and stylist, Simpson shows that the Reformation had illiberal and liberal aspects.One of the best elements of this book is the way it crafts an argument, lucidly but never simplistically, to give a fuller picture than we had before of the oxymoronic aspect of the subtitle.So I began this review with the apparently paradoxical shift from the illiberal to the liberal but will follow Simpson into a much more complex and fascinating account of the waning of the Middle Ages to the Glorious Revolution.Simpson came to this book in a Milton seminar in which the question of freedom with a precondition arose (ix).This comment on Milton, who for Simpson is a mixture of liberal and illiberal, prompts this study, whose answers are "that Protestantism is a powerfully and necessarily self-conflicted tradition, precisely because its anti-formalism repudiates tradition" (xi).Simpson continues: "In flight from nothing so energetically as from prior forms of itself, Protestantism is best described as an anti-tradition tradition of permanent revolution, forever targeting earlier and/or competing versions of itself (rather than Catholicism) precisely as the source of most lethal threat" (xi).Simpson sees a kinesis within Protestantism, which explains how 1688 was so different from 1517, and argues that evangelism forged the liberalism of 1688 and of today, and he maintains that this early modern evangelism also made illiberal,
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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) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".