George A. Reisch 
The Politics of Paradigms 
Thomas S. Kuhn, James B. Conant, and the Cold War “Struggle for Men’s Minds”

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 Mc Carthy-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.

Inhoudsopgave

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 Mc Carthy”: 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

Over de auteur

George A. Reisch is managing editor of
The Monist and series editor for Open Court Publishing Company’s series Popular Culture and Philosophy.