Review of Herbert Butterfield, <i>Liberty in the Modern World: Being the Third Lectures on the Chancellor Dunning Trust</i>, delivered at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, 1952 (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1952)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Wight wrote that Butterfield held that “it is the historian’s business not to pass moral judgments but to attain a compassionate understanding. . . . At the centre of Mr. Butterfield’s argument is a golden picture of the eighteenth-century balance of power: an age of limited warfare, no single dominant Power, and secure and tranquil small States. . . … This is so extravagant a description of the State-system exemplified by Frederick the Great and Catherine the Great that it discredits the particle of truth it may contain. Of that system Sorel said that two episodes were typical — its respect for international obligation was shown by Frederick’s seizure of Silesia, its respect for weak States by the Partition of Poland. . . . Just as Professor Butterfield’s historical philosophy requires us not to make a moral condemnation of Hitler or Stalin but to analyse our collective guilt for their emergence into power, so his political philosophy enjoins us, in whatever measures we take to restrain them, to avoid self-righteous attitudes towards them. The value of this doctrine is unquestionable, and yet it fails to encompass the whole problem. For the Christian category of political discussion has traditionally been, not charity or humility, but justice. The history of attitudes of appeasement. . . . has shown how easy it is, in seeking to avoid self-righteousness about the tyrant and the aggressor, to forget the considerations due to his victims and to the international community as a whole.”
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 distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
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 teacher head, 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".