Libel and Academic Book Reviews

And they say the English libel law is bad!

I’m just in the process of nudging a few folks who write for the Guardian book blog.

Just to echo everyone else — That’s it? That’s an actionable review?

For purposes of contrast (and cheap entertainment), here is the opening paragraph of Art Stinchcombe’s review of Immanuel Wallerstein’s The World System II: Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World Economy, 1600-1750:

I do not think this book is very good. But it does not explain what it is trying to do, and so does not generate standards internally according to which I can judge it to have fallen short. I will therefore consider it successively as a sociological monograph urging a theoretical argument, as a history of the 17th and early 18th century, and as a source book and guide to the literature on economic history. I will argue that it is not very good by the standards generated by any of these three visions of what the book is, though of the three it comes closes to the last; it is a pretty good annotated bibliography in 17th century economic history.

There are many other entertaining examples in this genre.

Someone should send over a copy of Scott McLemee’s review of Cornel West’s last book in IHE. Such sublime and funky criticism cannot be kept for US audiences alone!

Sorry, link here, with the double inconvenient of being written in French and being gated.

My favorite bad review is Eugene Genovese’s famous attack on his departmental colleague Herb Gutman in the TLS. I don’t know if it’s online, but this is the third sentence:

Mr Gutman’s The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925 provides the strongest empirical support so far for this cumulative and collective effort by many fine schoalrs, whose work, I regret to say, he slights, ignores, and distorts, rather than credits.

Slightly later:

Particularly shameful is Mr Gutman’s pillorying of Blassingame for assorted sins, while failing even to mention the considerable contribution to be found in his discussion of the folk culture at the heart of Mr Gutman’s own subject. IT has been a long time since an American scholar of some reputation chose to puff up his claims to an originality attainable only in heaven and in the blurbs of publishers by so denigrating the labour of his predecessors and colleagues. If only Mr Gutman’s cheek were at stake, no comment would be called for, and his performance might be dismissed as merely sad. . . . Yet Mr Gutman, whose analysis would seem to lend support to a nationalist interpretation, refuses to meet his elementary responsibility to offer an evaluation of the significance of his own work; he slips into silence, as he does on the political implications of every other part of his argument.

You could be right – I read a piece in the Times Higher that annoyingly did not cite the review at all, but led me to expect something much, much worse than this. The reviewer is actually quite polite, and seems to me to pull some punches – I’d assume from his review that he really thinks this is a largely redundant descriptive exercise by someone with no real analytical understanding of the procedures she’s writing about – but heck, he doesn’t actually say that, does he? If she can sue successfully based on what he does say (which I presume she can’t), we’re all going to find it much harder writing reviews in future.

This is just awful.

On the subject of negative reviews, I’ve always been a fan of Barry on Nozick. The whole thing is just golden, but here’s a nice sample:

“Finally the intellectual texture is of a sort of cuteness that would be wearing in a graduate student and seems to me quite indecent in someone who, from the lofty heights of a professorial chair, is proposing to starve or humiliate ten percent or so of his fellow citizens (if he recognizes the word) by eliminating all transfer payments through the state, leaving the sick, the old, the disabled, the mothers with young children and no breadwinner, and so on, to the tender mercies of private charity, given at the whim and pleasure of the donors and on any terms that they choose to impose. This is, no doubt, an emotional response, but there are, I believe, occasions when an emotional response is the only intellectually honest one. The concept of a “free fire zone,” for example, could appropriately be the subject of black comedy or bitter invective but not dispassionate analysis. Similarly, a book whose argument would entail the repeal of even the Elizabethan Poor Law must either be regarded as a huge joke or as a case of trahison des clercs, giving spurious intellectual respectability to the reactionary backlash that is already visible in other ways in the United States. My own personal inclination would be to treat the book as a joke, but since it is only too clear that others are prepared to take it seriously, I shall do so as well…..”

Is it really true that anyone can simply press a pedal and the entire clanking machinery of the French criminal justice system will begin to belch and lurch and grind up ordinary people in its path? According to the link, this proceeding has been going on for a year and half now, and not a single official – prosecutor, judge, magistrate – has had the ability or the obligation to determine whether there is any reason for it to forward. And now an actual trial will be held, so that the defendant has to work up a full defense, with witnesses, evidence, and the threat of criminal liability – and no way to put a stop to it?

Can that really be so? If it is, what a ridiculous, inefficient, oppressive, capricious system the French have.

Book reviews are a serious issue – interesting case in Germany (though concerning ficition) is the feud between Martin Walser (one of the best known living German authors) and Marcel Reich-Ranicki, the Doyen of German literary criticism.
In 1974, Reich-Ranicki had written a highly polemical review of one of Walser’s books. The first sentence read: “Ein belangloser, ein schlechter, ein miserabler Roman.”
– an irrelevant, bad, awful novel.
28 years later, Walser published a novel “Death of a Critic” – said critic is, of course, an only thinly disguised stand-in for Reich-Ranicki. The novel caused a pretty serious literary scandal…

As for the “affair” at hand – it is hard to understand what she was thinking.

Somewhat related, there’s a new and rather controversial biography out of Ryszard Kapuscinski, the Polish star foreign correspondent and essayist. The author is, Artur Domoslawski, a prominent left wing foreign correspondent for Gazeta Wyborcza who specializes in Latin America. Kapuscinski’s widow is suing him for defaming his memory. She’s also gotten her lawyers to intimidate various foreign publishers into withdrawing their plans to publish the book in France, Italy, and Spain. Domoslawski apparently provides plenty of evidence that Kapuscinski was for much of his life a strong supporter of Communism and the People’s Republic, and that he wrote numerous political analyses for the Polish foreign intelligence services. The reception of the book offers an interesting in window into contemporary Polish politics. On the one you’ve got the liberals (in the European sense of the word) who are upset that he is airing the dirty laundry of one of their intellectual idols, and on the other there are the conservatives who are attacking Domoslawski for the fact that he presents Kapuscinski’s support for Communism with a great deal of sympathy.

I think that if the author had just made a really good French food dish for the critic, none of this would have happened.

@lgm: how’s all of the above relevant to the absurd step of taking legal action against the reviewer?
This is horrible, and there should be significant academic reaction. I am sending in my letter today.

Ben Tripp, you may be in the US, but you ain’t safe. The book editor being sued is actually an NYU prof!

LGM, you must be defending your pal. The absolute authoritarian whiney absurdity of that woman suing the book editor AT THE VERY LEAST requires an airing of her incompetent and incoherent letter. Being kicked out of academia is probably a better and more proportionate response.

There’s one sentence in the review that I can even begin to imagine might qualify as libel under English law (no idea what the French standard is), and that one’s a real stretch. It’s just a statement of fact which could conceivably lower the subject’s reputation – though not likely – and might or might not be true. The rest is obviously fair comment. I’m 99% certain that even that sentence wouldn’t pass muster in England, so I find it bizarre that the case has been going on so long.