A Life of Oneâs Own: Freedom and Obligation in the Novels of Henry James
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation argues that the novels of Henry James offer a conception of personhood and of human freedom better able to explain and unify private law than the conceptions currently dominant in private law theory. I begin by laying out the two conceptual frameworks that now dominate private law theory: Kantian right and the feminist ethic of care. I argue that Kantian right‟s exclusive focus on respect for freedom of choice makes it unable to explain private law doctrines founded upon concern for human well-being, including unjust enrichment, unconscionability, and liability for negligence. However, feminism‟s ethic of care, which can be understood as a response to the Kantian abstraction from considerations of well-being and need, is also incomplete, because its understanding of the person as essentially connected to others fails to respect human separateness. I then offer readings of James‟ novels—The Portrait of a Lady, What Maisie Knew, and The Ambassadors—that show how vindicating individual worth requires both respect for abstract agency‟s separateness and freedom to choose, on the one hand, and concern for the dependent individual‟s well-being and autonomous flourishing, on the other. I argue that these two ideas are complementary parts of a complete understanding of human dignity and freedom. Finally, I argue that this understanding illuminates doctrines of private law that remain mysterious on the Kantian account while avoiding feminism‟s tendency to immerse private law in public law.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| 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".