The Duck of Minerva

Dan-Nexon-Gets-Taken-to-the-Woodshed Alert

by Dan Nexon

7 July 2011, 2104 EDT

In honor of Brad DeLong’s “smackdown” posts, I hereby inaugurate an occasional chronicle of public embarrassment by pointing to Andreas Osiander‘s (correct) indictment of errors of typography, historical sequence, and fact in The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe. I find this particularly cringeworthy because:

  • I discovered a number of the typographical and, for lack of a better term, proper-name-construction errors right after the book came out (but not during the copyediting process) and already went through a round of self-flagellation about them;
  • A not insignificant number of the other issues take the form of “I wrote what?!?!”; and
  • The rest reflect my poor grounding in German imperial history–a problem I’d been aware of for years and yet never took the necessary steps to correct after the dissertation grew to include central European cases. 


I’m therefore incredibly lucky to have gotten a reviewer who also points out that these errors don’t implicate the fundamental argument, and that the majority of reviews in historical journals have agreed with this assessment.

Still… d’oh.

Daniel H. Nexon is a Professor at Georgetown University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service. His academic work focuses on international-relations theory, power politics, empires and hegemony, and international order. He has also written on the relationship between popular culture and world politics.

He has held fellowships at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Ohio State University's Mershon Center for International Studies. During 2009-2010 he worked in the U.S. Department of Defense as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. He was the lead editor of International Studies Quarterly from 2014-2018.

He is the author of The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009), which won the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) Best Book Award for 2010, and co-author of Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020). His articles have appeared in a lot of places. He is the founder of the The Duck of Minerva, and also blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money.

Daniel H. Nexon is a Professor at Georgetown University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service. His academic work focuses on international-relations theory, power politics, empires and hegemony, and international order. He has also written on the relationship between popular culture and world politics.

He has held fellowships at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Ohio State University's Mershon Center for International Studies. During 2009-2010 he worked in the U.S. Department of Defense as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. He was the lead editor of International Studies Quarterly from 2014-2018.

He is the author of The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009), which won the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) Best Book Award for 2010, and co-author of Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020). His articles have appeared in a lot of places. He is the founder of the The Duck of Minerva, and also blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money.

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