Mozart was buried in a pauper’s grave. The Duke of Wellington said "the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton." Protestant Christianity nurtured the "spirit of capitalism." Hitler’s greatest support came from the lower-middle class. Totalitarianism began with the Enlightenment project of reforming criminals instead of punishing them.

Are all of the above true? Or are they "misconstructions" endlessly repeated by educated people who should know better? With this provocative question, Hamilton, a sociologist and political scientist at Ohio State University, launches his powerful assault on academic groupthink.

Drawing on an earlier work, Who Voted for Hitler? (1982), Hamilton refutes the entrenched claim that the lower-middle class is historically the most "reactionary." Combing through voting records from the Weimar Republic, he finds that support for the Nazis actually rose with voters’ social class, and that the lower-middle class nowhere exhibited a strong preference for Hitler. But while evidence of this voting behavior has long been available, too many scholars of Nazism have preferred to derive their conclusions from faulty Marxist models of German class attitudes.

Equally striking is Hamilton’s reconsideration of the influential French philosopher Michel Foucault. In Discipline and Punish: Birth of the Prison (1975), Foucault advanced the thesis that the 18thcentury shift in penology from retribution to character reform was not, as many assume, a progressive step for humankind. Instead, said Foucault, the rise of the modern prison—exemplified by Jeremy Bentham’s "panopticon," a circular structure in which observation-tower guards could see into all cells—marked a quantum leap in oppression. Foucault asserted not only that the panopticon was "the architectural programme of most prison projects," but also (in Hamilton’s paraphrase) that the modern prison "extended its principles, an all-pervasive system of surveillance and discipline, to the entire society."

There is just one problem with Foucault’s argument: the panopticon was never built. Nor was it imitated anywhere, except for three highly modified experimental prisons in the United States. This fact is no secret among historians, as Hamilton reports. Yet not a single reviewer of Discipline and Punish questioned Foucault’s grandiloquent claims.

How did Foucault get away with such pseudoscholarship? In a broader discussion of "validity and verification," Hamilton shows how a reluctance to check original sources results in lengthy, little-examined citation chains. Struggling to keep up with "knowledge overproduction" in their own highly compartmentalized fields, most academics receive scant reward for undertaking literature reviews, replication studies, or other efforts to keep abreast of what is happening in adjacent fields.

There is one question that Hamilton does not ask but probably should. Which ideologies—and ideologues—do most of the misconstructing? His case studies focus on the academic Left. It seems self-evident, however, that scholars of all political persuasions are capable of distorting their work to serve ideological interests. But then, after reading Hamilton, one might feel less secure about what seems self-evident.