Volume 33, Number 3 · February 27, 1986
Science Turned Upside Down
By Ian Hacking
Revolution in Science
by I. Bernard Cohen
Harvard University Press (Belknap Press), 711 pp., $25.00
The word 'revolution' first brings to mind violent upheavals in the state, but ideas of revolution in science, and of political revolution, are almost coeval. The word once meant only a revolving, a circular return to an origin, as when we speak of revolutions per minute or the revolution of the planets about the sun. As a political metaphor, a revolution could, in that sense, mean only a return to better times, or to the true constitution, a ridding of excess or usurpers. The transition to our modern idea was made with the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which made Parliament supreme in England and brought in a Bill of Rights. Yet it could be called a revolution, in those days, partly because of the old sense of the word: the traditional rights of Englishmen had been returned to them. A century later the American and French revolutions were definitive breaks with the past, irreversible establishments of a new order, but even in those cases there was a lingering sense of return. The original rights of man had been restored.
Review, 6501 words
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