From a Hundred Schools to One Doctrine: Institutional Consolidation, Peer Review, and the Political Sociology of Epistemic Arrest

This volume opens the Academic Politics research program by formalizing a single historical mechanism, the Consolidation Trap, and tracing its instantiation across two widely separated cases: the transition from the Hundred Schools of Thought (諸子百家) of Warring States China to the state-sponsored Confucian orthodoxy established under Emperor Wu of Han on Dong Zhongshu's counsel, and the transition from pre-institutional scientific publishing to the mid-twentieth-century formalization of anonymous peer review. The Consolidation Trap names the structural pattern by which the same mechanism introduced to solve a genuine coordination problem in a period of open, cross-domain competition — filtering noise, allocating scarce publication or patronage capacity, establishing minimum quality thresholds — becomes, once institutionalized, a mechanism that filters signal indistinguishably from noise whenever that signal does not conform to prevailing paradigm assumptions. The volume does not evaluate peer review in moral language; it analyzes it in mechanism language, formalizing four component dynamics: paradigm enforcement (Kuhn 1962), consensus bias, the anonymous-review accountability deficit (extending Gieryn's 1983 boundary-work concept from public science communication to reviewer behavior), and citation-cartel dynamics (Merton's 1968 Matthew Effect, and its adversarial limit case documented in the Ike Antkare fabricated-author experiment, Labbé 2010). Empirical grounding is drawn from the 1936 Einstein–Physical Review incident, establishing peer review as a contingent twentieth-century innovation rather than a timeless requirement; from the NeurIPS peer-review consistency experiments, documenting near-random accept/reject agreement between independent review committees evaluating identical submissions; and from the disciplinary-silo literature documenting the institutional persistence of boundary maintenance independent of its stated justification. The volume closes by treating its own conditions of production — authored without institutional affiliation, evaluated on argumentative merit rather than credentialed standing — as a live empirical instance of the argument rather than a disclaimer external to it.