MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W4411483614 · doi:10.1215/07393148-11830592

C. B. Macpherson and Democracy Today

2025· article· en· W4411483614 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

fundA Canadian funder is recorded on the work.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueNew Political Science · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldSocial Sciences
TopicCritical Theory and Philosophy
Canadian institutionsnot available
FundersYork University
KeywordsDemocracyIndividualismLiberalismAuthoritarianismSociologyLiberal democracyPoliticsDemocratic theoryClassical liberalismPolitical philosophySiegeValue (mathematics)ParallelsCritical theoryRelevance (law)LawEpistemologyPolitical economyPolitical sciencePhilosophyEconomicsHistory

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract This article examines the political thought of C. B. Macpherson and highlights its value in the current era in which democracy is under siege. It focuses on Macpherson’s signal concept of possessive individualism, and explores the trajectory of his treatment of liberal democracy over time to show his continuing relevance for democratic theory and practice. Both dimensions are linked to the historical vicissitudes and contradictions of liberalism. Macpherson’s accounts of democracy indicate parallels to the critical theory of the Frankfurt School by providing underappreciated insights into the relation of liberalism to authoritarianism and thereby suggest how his ideas contribute to the tasks of a critical political science and its appraisal of democracy’s prospects.

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.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.002
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesScience and technology studies
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.962
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.002
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.001
Science and technology studies0.0010.003
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.024
GPT teacher head0.380
Teacher spread0.356 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it