Academic authors, imagine a roomful of expert readers, prepared to spend days going through your draft opus, point by point. It’s a writer’s dream—at least for a writer willing to take constructive criticism from equals.
For the past decade or so, the Mercatus Center at George Mason University has been making that dream a reality in a series of manuscript-review workshops. Designed for well-established scholars in the later stages of big-think projects, the workshops bring together interdisciplinary groups of 15 or so experts, who sit with the author around a table for two days and have an intensive, moderated conversation about the ways and means of the project.
Call it tough love for manuscripts. “People try to push on all the weak spots,” says Peter J. Boettke, a professor of economics at George Mason and one of the guiding lights at the free-market-oriented center, where he directs the F.A. Hayek program for advanced study in philosophy, politics, and economics. “It’s not a hostile environment, but it’s an aggressive environment.”
In the past few years, more universities have been offering workshops for faculty authors. Duke University, for instance, does so at its John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute. But most academics will never get the kind of intensive review the Mercatus conferences offer. The center works with only two or three authors a year. Scholars who have taken part, though, say it results in a better-published book.
The eminent economic historian Deirdre N. McCloskey has found the process so useful that she’s gone through it more than once, bringing installments of her multivolume “The Bourgeois Era” series to the center. Ms. McCloskey is a professor of economics, history, English, and communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago. On a recent, overcast Friday, after a morning spent “workshopping” a draft of the third and perhaps final volume, Ms. McCloskey talked about the experience.
She summed up the book as an essay about “the change in the rhetoric that surrounds the marketplace.” It’s “a response to my friends on the left and some on the right,” she said, “who have become so suspicious about market-tested solutions.”
Partway through the workshop, she’d already been reminded not to indulge in what she calls “snarky editorializing,” and she’d gotten suggestions for “a very significant structural change” in the existing draft. “There are three books in this screaming to get out,” she said. The manuscript workshop, Ms. McCloskey concluded, is “better than peer review because it’s a real conversation.” (Ms. McCloskey has a contract to publish the book with the University of Chicago Press, where it will still go through a full formal review when she submits it.)
A Gathering of Equals
Authors work with the center to come up with a list of experts whose knowledge seems especially relevant to the subject at hand. When the workshop convenes, participants are expected to have given the manuscript a close read and be prepared to talk about it in depth. They get expenses and an honorarium.
The 14 people who took part in Ms. McCloskey’s latest workshop included economic historians, political scientists, philosophers, and journalists. That disciplinary range reflects the broad scope of the Bourgeois Era project. If such a group doesn’t understand parts of her argument, Ms. McCloskey assumes “it’s because I’ve written it badly.”
It’s key not to be defensive. The readers are “coming at it from a point of love and respect,” she said. She takes notes, but mostly “I’m to shut up and listen.”
“It’s exhausting,” Ms. McCloskey said. “But it’s so much fun. This is what I got into intellectual life for.”
For the author to get the most out of the experience, senior-scholar self-importance has to be kept in line. “When you put 16 academics in a room talking about ideas, you’re lucky if you don’t have all the electricity in the building go out,” Mr. Boettke said. At the sessions on Ms. McCloskey’s book, “everybody checked their ego at the door.”
Each conference features a moderator to make sure egos stay checked, and the process includes strict rules about how questions and discussion points are handled.
“The job is to keep a team of wild horses moving forward at a steady pace without dashing off,” said Jack A. Goldstone, a senior fellow at the Mercatus Center who has run many workshops, including Ms. McCloskey’s. “The authors know they have to listen, they have to be patient, they have to hold their tongue,” he said. “It is better to be vigorously criticized in private when you can still change things.”
Participants are reminded not to focus on their own arguments but on the author’s. “Part of what we discuss here is how to tailor the books to reach their audience,” Mr. Goldstone said.
If the Mercatus Center and the workshop authors have their way, that audience will be broader than the small circle of specialists for whom many academic books are written.
The scholars associated with the center “generally work in the area of social change,” Mr. Goldstone said, and emphasize economic history with a market-oriented focus. (Critics have called it antiregulatory, and pointed out that the center gets money from right-wing sources like the Koch family.)
The center looks for books with “a big intellectual message that will change the way people think” about popular rights, economic development, constitutional liberty, the origins of the Industrial Revolution, and modern economic growth, Mr. Goldstone said. Authors sometimes approach the center to ask that their current projects be considered for manuscript conferences. Often the center draws on its intellectual networks to identify thinkers whose work speaks to its mission.
Timur Kuran’s book The Long Divergence: How Islamic Law Held Back the Middle East (Princeton University Press, 2011) fits the big-intellectual-message model. Mr. Kuran, a professor of economics, political science, and Islamic studies at Duke University, took a late-stage draft of the book through a Mercatus manuscript conference in 2008.
Covering 1,300 years of history, the book investigates Islamic law’s role in the Middle East’s successes in the Middle Ages and the region’s later “slide into underdevelopment,” Mr. Kuran said. He knew it would be controversial and felt on firmer ground for having experts in several disciplines react to it before publication.
The workshop didn’t change any of his fundamental arguments, but it led him to remove elements that readers found confusing, and to build in defenses against criticisms he was likely to hear after publication. The finished product, he said, is “a much more subtle book.”
Mr. Kuran has participated in several workshops, not just as an author. In his experience, the quality reflects how well-thought-out the manuscript is. Readers, even very smart ones, can’t turn a bad idea into a good one.
