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.

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