Plagiarism charges leveled against Jacob Heilbrunn, author of a history of neoconservatism
A little over a year ago, Doubleday published a study of the rise of neoconservatism called They Knew They Were Right. The book has the trappings of a serious work of original research, such as extensive endnotes about primary sources, suggesting that its author, Jacob Heilbrunn, had toiled in archives and periodical reading rooms. In a review that appeared in this magazine ("Out of Place," June 23, 2008), Corey Robin argued that in its materials and its method They Knew They Were Right is marred by blemishes large and small. Besides recycling lots of well-known history, Heilbrunn reuses without attribution the language, argument and research of several writers. Robin's suspicions were aroused when he noticed that Heilbrunn had pilfered material from an article Robin had published in the London Review of Books. After he recovered from the mugging, Robin opened Heilbrunn's book to a random page, arbitrarily chose a fact-laden passage and set about vetting it. This passage, too, was tarnished by shoddy sourcing. Robin then undertook a more systematic investigation, and after finding several dozen instances of ambiguous sourcing, he concluded that "on at least two occasions, [Heilbrunn] expropriates the research of others without attribution. And on at least one occasion, he passes off the prose of another writer as if it were his own."
When I learned in September that Anchor Books would be publishing a paperback edition of They Knew They Were Right, I sent Robin's review to Anchor's editorial department. In an accompanying note I explained that Heilbrunn and Doubleday hadn't replied to Robin's review. That is, the author and his publisher hadn't challenged the claim that the book contains passages of stolen material, and that the similarities between the passages point to a larger pattern of unacknowledged sourcing and plagiarism that can't be attributed to chance or dismissed as innocent mistakes. This I found peculiar. Did the author of They Knew They Were Right really think he had done nothing wrong?
A reply from Anchor never arrived, but a change in the paperback edition of They Knew They Were Right, which appeared in January, reveals that Heilbrunn (or his editor) read Robin's review. The passage with material lifted from Robin's London Review of Books article has been retrofitted with a modifying clause: "As Professor Corey Robin has noted..." Heilbrunn doesn't identify the LRB article as his source--a typical lapse that makes the correction cosmetic. Why name-check Robin but not cite his article? And which is ultimately worse: the original error or the botched, if not disingenuous, correction? Stranger still is the fact that Heilbrunn corrected the least egregious offense flagged by Robin, leaving unmodified other instances of unattributed expropriation, including language harvested verbatim from a 1981 article by Patricia Derian about President Reagan's human rights policies (see box below). By choosing only to right the wrong done to Robin, the author of a critical review of his book, Heilbrunn seems to have mistaken an intellectual offense for a personal one. Either he doesn't understand the evidence of plagiarism presented by Robin or he just doesn't care....
Read entire article at John Palattella in The Nation
When I learned in September that Anchor Books would be publishing a paperback edition of They Knew They Were Right, I sent Robin's review to Anchor's editorial department. In an accompanying note I explained that Heilbrunn and Doubleday hadn't replied to Robin's review. That is, the author and his publisher hadn't challenged the claim that the book contains passages of stolen material, and that the similarities between the passages point to a larger pattern of unacknowledged sourcing and plagiarism that can't be attributed to chance or dismissed as innocent mistakes. This I found peculiar. Did the author of They Knew They Were Right really think he had done nothing wrong?
A reply from Anchor never arrived, but a change in the paperback edition of They Knew They Were Right, which appeared in January, reveals that Heilbrunn (or his editor) read Robin's review. The passage with material lifted from Robin's London Review of Books article has been retrofitted with a modifying clause: "As Professor Corey Robin has noted..." Heilbrunn doesn't identify the LRB article as his source--a typical lapse that makes the correction cosmetic. Why name-check Robin but not cite his article? And which is ultimately worse: the original error or the botched, if not disingenuous, correction? Stranger still is the fact that Heilbrunn corrected the least egregious offense flagged by Robin, leaving unmodified other instances of unattributed expropriation, including language harvested verbatim from a 1981 article by Patricia Derian about President Reagan's human rights policies (see box below). By choosing only to right the wrong done to Robin, the author of a critical review of his book, Heilbrunn seems to have mistaken an intellectual offense for a personal one. Either he doesn't understand the evidence of plagiarism presented by Robin or he just doesn't care....