“Well-researched”

Friedrich August von Hayek’s “Well-researched” is a brief letter to the editor published in the Times Literary Supplement on September 9, 1977, and supplied here as a 2022 republication. It protests a reviewing formula that Hayek regards as both grammatically illegitimate and intellectually belittling.

The first paragraph distinguishes a research activity, its object, and the book it produces. Research may yield a book, but this does not, for Hayek, make the resulting book something that has itself been “researched”:

It is possible to describe the object one has frequently or intensively searched for in a book, but that does not make such a book a legitimate grammatical direct object of the verb ‘research’.

The second paragraph turns from grammar to scholarly dignity. Hayek speculates that the expression comes from media work, where information is assembled for editorial writers. His objection rests on a distinction between gathering material and producing scholarship or scientific discovery:

But to call the work of a scholar or scientist ‘well researched’ is offensive.

Newton’s Principia and Einstein’s general theory of relativity provide pointed tests of the formula’s inadequacy; Hayek also rejects its application to biography. He allows a jocular use to ridicule pretended scholarship, but treats sincere praise in these terms as an inadvertent insult. The letter’s relevance lies in its insistence that reviewing vocabulary carries judgments about intellectual work: an apparently complimentary phrase can, in Hayek’s view, diminish the achievement it purports to recognize.