Receiving Ideas in Political Analysis: The Case of Community Power Studies, 1950–1970

M .ORE THAN a decade has passed since Thomas Kuhn wrote The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962).1 During that time, many members of our discipline have acquainted themselves with his basic view and agree that the theory of scientific revolutions offers helpful insights into the way in which any community of scholars, including political scientists, goes about its work. Despite a high regard for Kuhn's book, however, not all political scientists hold that every element of its argument is equally valid. In particular, differences of opinion have arisen concerning Kuhn's explanation of how controlling ideas enter the corpus of received truth in any science. There does not seem to be much doubt that, as Kuhn supposed, the basic and more fruitful ideas in any science can flow from non-rational and unpredictable wellsprings of human creativity. Some political scientists have claimed, however, that such ideas are validated and subsequently accepted by the scholarly community on the basis of public, rigorous, and objective tests; and so they tend to distinguish between contexts of discovery and contexts of verification, or theoretical creation and theoretical tests, or the logic of discovery and the logic of justification, or generation and evaluation.2 Kuhn himself concluded otherwise, to the effect that the fundamental outline of scientific understanding in any generation is a complex of notions accepted even before they can be supported experimentally, in bursts of shared enthusiasm that, sociologically speaking, somewhat resemble religious conversions.3