The Politics of Paradigms

Uncovers long-ignored political themes—ideology, propaganda, mind-control, and Orwellian history—at work within the pages of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

The Politics of Paradigms shows that America's most famous and influential book about scienceThe Structure of Scientific Revolutions of 1962, was inspired and shaped by Thomas Kuhn's political interests, his relationship with the influential cold warrior James Bryant Conant, and America's McCarthy-era struggle to resist and defeat totalitarian ideology. Through detailed archival research, Reisch shows how Kuhn's well-known theories of paradigms, crises, and scientific revolutions emerged from within urgent political worries—on campus and in the public sphere—about the invisible, unconscious powers of ideology, language, and history to shape the human mind and its experience of the world.

List of Illustrations
Preface
Bombs and Books: An Introduction
Timeline of Events and Documents
Cast of Additional Characters

Part I. War and Crisis

1. Progress and Revolution in the Suburbs of New York

2. War and General Education at Harvard

3. History of Science in a Divided World

Part II. “The Struggle for Men’s Minds”

4. The Cold War Conversions of Thomas S. Kuhn and James Bryant Conant

5. Sidney Hook and the Anticommunist Inquisition

6. Brainwashing, or the Structure of Philosophical Revolutions

7. The Necessary Dangers of Consensus and Unity

Part III. The Cold War Origins of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

8. The Language, Psychology, and Psychoanalysis of Scientific “Reorientations”

9. “Attention Senator McCarthy”: The Perils of Methodology in Totalitarian Times

10. Ideology and Revolution in theInternational Encyclopedia of Unified Science

11. Progress, Ideology, and “Writing History Backwards”

12. From “Ideology” and “Consensus” to Paradigmania

Part IV. The New World of Paradigms

13. “If Mr. Kuhn Is Right . . .”: Paradigms and Dogmas in Cold War Science Education

14. The Magic of Paradigms

15. Spies, Prisons, Mobs, Bandwagons, and Beasts

16. The Thomas Kuhn Experience

17. A Revolution and a New Ideology

Epilogue: Writing and Rewriting History

Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Notes
Bibliography
Index