The Social Misconstruction of Reality: Validity and Verification in the Scholarly Community Richard F. Hamilton. New Haven: Yale University Press, i996, 289 pp. $32.50.We generally take the contributions of the scholarly community to be true, valid, and reliable, unless there is some overwhelming reason to doubt the conclusions o∂ered. When a respected scholar insists that extraterrestrials pose a threat, when individuals or groups seem to be forwarding an outlandish position based on a specific agenda, e.g., that the Holocaust is a fabrication, or when data seems to be purposely skewed, fudged, fabricated, or fraudulent, we do question. But this occurs so infrequently that Richard F. Hamilton's query, How much of scholarly work is misconstruction? is more than justified.Very few investigators followed through in this inquiry. There are, to be sure, some journal articles and monographic studies on specific cases, but The Social Misconstruction of Reality appears to be the first general analysis of widely-accepted though misleading truths, often propounded by highly respected scholars including Max and Michel Foucault. Hamilton's work is not revisionist in the sense that feminist studies may be; rather he is simply revisiting the evidence, often the very material cited by the original scholars, in order to trace the history of the propounded ideas back to their original sources. What he finds is that sometimes the evidence does not warrant the conclusions.Hamilton begins with some general comments on a number of inter-related ideas: the extent to which what we know is mediated by social constructs; conformity; and the reliability of long citation chains. He then turns his attention to two types of errors. The first consists of ideas that are ubiquitously accepted (despite the fact that are known to be false, e.g., that Mozart was impoverished when he died and was buried in a pauper's grave) but whose correction would have no major consequences for intellectual life. The second type of error is much more important, since a change in perspective alters the way in which broad historical truths are understood and interpreted.Three major beliefs are discussed often in microscopic detail, the first being Max Weber's contention that success and the birth of capitalism derive from a specific religious orientation. But despite the many sources lists in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, he does not actually document that initial claim. Weber's citations are often deficient, misleading, or non-existent. Here is Gordon Marshall's assessment of the spirit of capitalism: Weber documents his argument with an unconvincing mixture of fictitious illustrations, composite instances drawn from diverse times and places, and anecdotal empirical examples. Despite the flawed thinking, his conclusions continue to influence scholars.A second misconstruction concerns the belief that the desperate lower middle-class was responsible for Hitler's election; Hamilton contends that this is untrue:The lower middle-class argument has had a long history. …