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Politics as Metaphor: Cardinal Newman and Professor Kuhn

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Richard Vernon
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Extract

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's Development of Christian Doctrine remains one of the classic expositions of an evolutionary thesis; T. S. Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions already 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.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 41 , Issue 4 , October 1979 , pp. 513 - 535
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1979

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References

1 Kuhn, T. S., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, 1962), pp. 6, 91, 169Google Scholar.

2 Kuhn, T. S., “The Function of Dogma in Scientific Research,” in Scientific Change, ed. Crombie, A. C. (New York, 1963)Google Scholar.

3 Newman, John Henry Cardinal, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (London, 1909), p. 40Google Scholar.

4 Ibid., 39.

5 Ibid., p. 73.

6 Ibid., p. 34.

7 Ibid., p. 38.

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15 The views criticized by Newman are quite closely paralleled by those criticized by Oakeshott, Michael in his “Political Education,” in Philosophy, Politics and Society, ed. Laslett, Peter (Oxford, 1956)Google Scholar. The reader may well be reminded even more particularly of Oakeshott by Newman's, remarks in Development of Christian Doctrine (p. 72)Google Scholar.

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32 Ibid., pp. 41, 148.

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48 Ibid., p. 173 (emphasis added).

49 Ibid., p. 175.

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53 Ibid., p. 146.

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56 Ibid., p. 39.

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58 Sorel, Albert, Europe and the French Revolution, trans. Cobban, A. and Hunt, J. W. (London, 1969)Google Scholar.

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62 See Avineri, Shlomo, The Social and Political Though of Karl Marx (Cambridge, 1970)Google Scholar.

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67 Butterfield, Herbert, The Whig Interpretation of History (London, 1931), p. 30Google Scholar. Butterfield himself has been accused of “falling into” it by Carr, E. H., What Is History? (Harmondsworth, England, 1964), p. 42Google Scholar.

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69 Ibid., p. 52 (emphasis added).