For an insight into trends and fads in the humanities world, it is hard to improve on the Arts and Humanities Citation Index. It lists all citations in the major humanities journals—that is, an army of trained slaves keys in every footnote of every article and the computer rearranges them according to the work cited. The compilers of the index examined the records for the years 1976–1983, and issued a report on the most cited works of the twentieth century. The most cited author was Lenin, which speaks volumes on the state of the humanities in the West towards the end of the Cold War. But the most cited single works were, in reverse order: in third place, Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism; second, Joyce’s Ulysses; and, well in the lead, Thomas Kuhn’s 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
Interest in Kuhn’s book has not waned. The Index is now online, and records one-hundred citations to the book for 1999—plus another four-hundred in the Social Sciences Citation Index. To call the tone of most of these citations reverential would be something of an understatement. It is reported that Structure is Al Gore’s favorite book, and William Safire’s New Political Dictionary has an article on “paradigm shift,” a phrase popularized by Kuhn, which reports both Bush (senior) and Clinton being much impressed with its usefulness.
The basic content of Kuhn’s book can be inferred simply by asking: what would the humanities crowd wantsaid about
