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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 science, The 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.
"The book is … full of new information, new insights and thought-provoking connections. It should be required reading for everyone interested in Kuhn's Structure, its sources and its political and cultural background." — Metascience
"Impressive archival research into the entirety of Kuhn's publications, manuscript drafts, and letters exposes how his understanding of scientific revolutions was assembled … Highly recommended." — CHOICE
"This book raises and explores important questions about the ideological background of some of the most important work in the philosophy of science in the twentieth century. It challenges conventional wisdom about the ideological neutrality of that work." — Peter S. Fosl, editor of The Big Lebowski and Philosophy: Keeping Your Mind Limber with Abiding Wisdom
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 the International 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