One of the many curiosities of academic publishing is the process of peer review. Theoretically, it provides a kind of quality control, in which the piece you have written is vetted by two, sometimes three, experts in the field. As peer-reviewers retain an anonymity that is not generally extended to the authors of the work they evaluate, things are almost comically open to abuse—backscratching, nepotism, grudge-bearing, territorialism, partisanship, and so on, all presented in the most high-minded terms. On the whole, though, peer review can be ranked in the class of things that includes representative democracy: indefensible until you pause to consider the alternatives, and surprisingly effective at preventing the worst from coming to pass.
The only place where peer review regularly comes unstuck is in confronting work that is genuinely new and transformative. Human nature being what it is, not all experts can be counted on to welcome, or even to comprehend, the offerings of those who would upset the applecart of their expertise—especially if those doing the upsetting look to them like undercredentialed upstarts, or if they are from a rival discipline or sub-discipline or school of thought.
I don’t suppose anyone would deny that a strong and possibly unanswerable case can be made that Noel Malcolm is the greatest living scholar-historian. He is the author of breathtakingly learned books on subjects including Bosnia, Kosovo, George Enescu, English nonsense verse, Thomas Hobbes, Albania, John Pell, Marco Antonio de Dominis, 16th-century collisions between the Ottoman east and Christian west, and the influence of Islamic thought on the western political tradition; he is also the editor nonpareil of Hobbes’s correspondence and Leviathan. He has for the past 20 or so years been a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.
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