The City of the Humble: St. Augustine on Power, Domination, and the Status of Humilitas within Political Life
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation analyzes the writings of St. Augustine in order to investigate whether “humility” can be considered a political virtue. Both historical and contemporary writers have had mixed thoughts about the status of humility. Some writers see humility as a critical virtue, which helps to maintain good civic relations. However, other writers consider humility to be a dangerous quality which renders people weak, and leaves them vulnerable to domination. The City of the Humble draws on the writings of St. Augustine, bishop of Hippo, in order to consider the possibility that humility can be both valuable and costly. For Augustine, pride is the primeval human evil, and it is the fundamental cause of political disorder. By contrast, humility is a god-like virtue which teaches people to accept the truth of human limits, and inclines them towards self-giving love. However, at the same time, Augustine understands that in a fallen world, the practice of humility is not always easy. While the humble are capable of fusing their humility with political power under certain circumstances, there are also certain moments where humility demands self-sacrifice. Augustine concludes that such self-sacrifice is worthwhile, both because it confers spiritual goods to those who practice it, and because it serves as a means of showing the limits of political life
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| 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 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".