Bibliographic record
Abstract
William H. Sewell’s latest book Capitalism and the Emergence of Civic Equality in Eighteenth-Century France opens with the question of what could have led aristocrats and clergy to abruptly abandon centuries of entrenched privilege on the night of August 4, 1789, during the early weeks of the French Revolution. The answer, he tells us, lies in the social and cultural impact of decades of economic transformation. Sewell’s aim here is to make a major intervention in debates over the origins of the French Revolution, still the holy grail of many dix-huitièmistes. Beyond addressing this everlasting question, Sewell’s further goal is to revive a Marxist interpretation of the Revolution, not in the familiar form of bourgeois class struggle as expounded by Georges Lefebvre and Albert Soboul—which Sewell agrees is irredeemably discredited—but in the form of the commodity fetish and the abstraction and anonymity of market relations engendered by capitalism. Sewell thus argues that the rise of commercial capitalism in eighteenth-century France, itself inspired by competition with the rising trade empires of England and the Netherlands, fatally undercut the rigidly hierarchical and corporate structure of Old Regime society. Instead of interacting as groups defined by privilege, people trading in the thriving markets created by increased production, trade, and commerce increasingly interacted as atomized individuals who freely bought and sold desired commodities. As a result, they began to conceive of themselves and their fellow French subjects as essentially the same, a development that Sewell argues was the fundamental precursor to the sudden adoption of civic equality in the revolutionary fervor of 1789.
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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 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.003 |
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".