Abstract

Thomas Kuhn's, book The Copernican Revolution deserves to be regarded as the best of that small group of longue duree histories that mark postwar historiography of science. In many respects, it is probably the single most influential one. Tightly written and brilliantly argued, it is responsible, together with The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, for the continued popularity of the metaphor of revolution in science among scholars and students alike. Yet, surprisingly, while aspects of the story conceived in Kuhn's original account have been debated, researched, and considerably revised, his overall understanding of a scientific revolution initiated by Copernicus has received no detailed scrutiny. The same may be said of the deployment of Copernican episode in Structure. Finally, a critical appreciation is in order not least because Kuhn's story is so compact and his language at times metaphorical.