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Record W4411483614 · doi:10.1215/07393148-11830592

C. B. Macpherson and Democracy Today

2025· article· en· W4411483614 on OpenAlexfundno aff
Phillip Hansen

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.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.003
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.006
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
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 score0.017
Threshold uncertainty score0.068

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0030.006
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0020.001
Science and technology studies0.0060.017
Scholarly communication0.0060.005
Open science0.0000.002
Research integrity0.0040.005
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0080.001

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.

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

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

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".

Quick stats

Citations1
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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