The terms "good" and "bad" when applied to reviews have two very different meanings. Meaning One refers to the judgment of the review, whether it is favorable or unfavorable to the object reviewed. Meaning Two refers to the quality of the review, that is, whether the review is reasoned, accurate, informed with respect to the object reviewed, or whether it is simpleminded, superficial, irrelevant, or inaccurate. A good, that is, favorable, review may be a bad review in terms of quality, and a bad, that is, unfavorable, review may be a good review in terms of quality.
In the last issue of The National Interest, Pierre Hassner wrote a doubly bad review of my book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. In terms of Meaning One, it is highly unfavorable, which is his right to be. It is also outrageously bad in the Meaning Two sense because it is a mixture of disingenuousness, inaccuracy, misrepresentation, and calumny.
The review raises serious issues concerning Hassner's professional standards. In December 1995 Hassner presented a paper, "Conflit des civilisations ou dialectique de la modernite?", to a conference in Paris. This paper was then published in the April 1996 issue of the French journal Defense Nationale. Hassner's review of my book in the Winter 1996/97 issue of The National Interest is an extension of that 1995 paper. Paragraphs, sentences, and even references (for example, to Weber's "disenchantment of the world", Freud's "narcissism of small differences") in the paper reappear verbatim in the review. Most importantly, the review also reproduces all the major arguments of the paper and Hassner himself has privately called it an "elaboration" of what he had written previously. This duplication raises two problems.
