A significant “social technology” in the modern university system. Peer review has become the ubiquitous mechanism whereby research is evaluated within academic life. In practice, peer review may take many forms, but the essential core of the enterprise involves the sending of an instance of scholarly labor (an article draft or published book, a fellowship proposal or tenure dossier, etc.) to one or, better, an array (panel, COMMITTEE, etc.) of peers (other academics understood to be actively engaged in or near the subject of the work in question) who (often, but not always, anonymously) assess the merits and demerits of the material. These evaluations tend to take the form of written comments and/or criticism, but administrative shorthands (in the form of numerical grades or letters) are sometimes used. The sum of such “peer reviews” is taken to be a reliable index of the merits of the work (though the “summation” of diverse narrative analyses often proves challenging, not to say arbitrary), and publication decisions, together with significant allocations of institutional resources (e.g., salary, honors), are now wholly contingent on the outcome of peer review processes. While mutual evaluation—explicit and implicit, direct and indirect, anonymous and personal—has been a feature of social life across most cultures and most historical periods, the fetishization of peer review as a distinctive instrument of KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION within universities is not easy to understand. The (pseudo-?) formalization of such procedures would seem to participate in the general movement of modern societies toward more elaborately bureaucratic social forms. In addition, the distribution of such decision-making and its systematic embedment within communities of inquiry can be understood to reflect a specifically administrative or regulatory activation of an older notion of a “republic of letters.” To reprise an analytic quip often applied to democracy, peer review may be the worst system conceivable for doing the work it must do—except for all the others. Though it should be said that a number of significant non-university domains do not use peer review, and seem to function nevertheless. Neither governments nor commercial enterprises have engaged the method in any important way. Closer, perhaps, to university life, trade publishers of books and journalism also forego the form, though their basic activities—receiving and evaluating texts for publication—are substantially conformal with the work of university presses and scholarly journals. Works of merit (and works of little merit) surface in peer-review and non-peer-review venues alike. However, works of disciplinary merit appear almost exclusively in the former, since non-peer-review work largely fails to clear a primary test of disciplinary knowledge formation: explicit engagement with (or is it thralldom to?) the disciplinary “conversation.” It is worth noting that the sum total of all peer reviews written in a given field is perhaps a more faithful representation of that disciplinary conversation than the published material that eventuates from this matrix of mutual commentary and evaluation. Be that as it may, it is important to observe the extremely recent emergence of the explicit language of “peer review.” A keyword search raises almost no relevant instances of the phrase before 1970. Moreover, the historical nexus out of which modern peer review arises is worthy of note: the earliest usages are closely connected to regulatory interventions into human experimentation in the Cold War social sciences. The first formal “peer review” panels are effectively the institutional forerunners of modern Institutional Review Boards (IRBs). One may well wonder whether peer review in its currently pervasive form retains any vestige of its origins in anxious efforts by colleges and universities to police sadistic psychologists and thereby limit institutional liability for their practices.