Bibliographic record
Abstract
All political societies have peculiarities, and nothing special is to be concluded from the Anglophone focus of the present article. The theme here is that there was a schism between the fi rst and second British empires, not in itself an original thought, as the paper makes clear. The fi rst empire, as conceived by many historians, was an Atlantic empire governed by the British monarch and the Westminster legislature in the United Kingdom, and by the British monarch through his local representative, the colonial governor and the colonial assemblies. It appeared as a kind of confederation to many contemporaries, including Franklin and Washington, until as late as the mid-1770s. In each of the communities, the common law governed according to the customs of the people, subject to amendment by the appropriate legislature. The latter might be at London, Massachusetts or Philadelphia. For reasons outlined in the article, this system broke down when Westminster asserted ultimate sovereignty and the validity to override colonial assemblies and tax the colonies without their consent. The colonies objected and broke with Britain.In Britain itself and in the remaining colonies, Westminster’sassertion represented a new, stronger view of sovereignty, one in whichlaw no longer even notionally refl ected the slowly changing customs, habitsand expectations of the governed. Instead, sovereignty represented thewill of the sovereign. The legitimacy or validity of laws no longer referredto their content, or their conformity with a “balanced” constitution.Instead, the legitimacy rested in the pedigree of a law. To its practicalquestion, ‘is this a valid law?’ the British imperial world was ready forthe Benthamite answer. The latter was to remain culturally dominantfor many decades, and still dominates the dry fi elds of legal positivismand conservative social science. Bentham asked ‘is a law the sign of thevolition of the sovereign?’ Elsewhere, Bentham asserted that the contentof the law bore no relation to its validity. This article examines thischange from the earlier Whig thought which informed the AmericanRevolution and what became of it.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 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".