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, the author 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 1 War and crisis : Progress and revolution in the suburbs of New York -- War and general education at Harvard -- History of science in a divided world. Part 2 "The struggle for men's minds" : The Cold War conversions of Thomas S. Kuhn and James Bryant Conant -- Sidney Hook and the anticommunist inquisition -- Brainwashing, or the structure of philosophical revolutions -- The necessary dangers of consensus and unity. Part 3 The Cold War origins of "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" : The language, psychology, and psychoanalysis of scientific "reorientations" -- "Attention Senator McCarthy": the perils of methodology in totalitarian times -- Ideology and revolution in the "International Encyclopedia of Unified Science" -- Progress, ideology, and "writing history backward" -- From "Ideology" and "Consensus" to paradigmania. Part 4 The new world of paradigms : "If Mr. Kuhn is right...": paradigms and dogmas in Cold War science education -- The magic of paradigms -- Spies, prisons, mobs, bandwagons, and beasts -- The Thomas Kuhn experience -- A revolution and a new ideology -- Epilogue: writing and rewriting history -- Acknowledgments -- Abbreviations -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index.