Politics as Metaphor: Cardinal Newman and Professor Kuhn

My object in this paper is to compare two texts in the history of ideas which are, on the face of it at least, very different from one another. John Henry Cardinal Newman'sDevelopment of Christian Doctrineremains one of the classic expositions of an evolutionary thesis; T. S. Kuhn'sStructure of Scientific Revolutionsalready ranks as a near-classic statement of a revolutionary case. The contrast is, I think, not quite as stark as may appear at first sight: though Kuhn writes of revolutions, his concern, no less than Newman's, is nevertheless with “development”; and though his subject matter is the history of science, his concern too is, or once was, with “dogma.” What I most want to stress, however, is not this verbal correspondence, which may as it stands be intriguing rather than convincing, but a series of substantive parallels which flow from a mode of argument common to both these texts: the extensive use of political imagery in defining the structures of ideas in question and in explaining the character of their history.