Kuhn vs Popper - About James H. Collier

narrator considers herself at least partly responsible;hence, her criticism is always a form of selfcriticism.The ancient Greek paradigm of Toryhistory, Thucydides, was himself an Atheniangeneral who went down to defeat early in the warthat would eventually bring down Athens itself.Lakatos notoriously signalled the Tory sensibility inthe philosophy of science by placing the normativelydesirable course of history in the main bodyof his own text, while relegating the actual historyto the footnotes. Such a posture irritated Kuhn, whowas keen to let the history speak for itself, and hasbefuddled postmodernists, who generally expectthe voice of resistance to come from a victim of thepower structure, not a disinherited member ofthe élite.Clearly, both Whigs and Tories have treated thepast less as foreign lands for professional historiansto colonise than as raw material out of which thepresent has been constructed for better or worse –which is to say, legitimately or illegitimately. Inthe Cold War era, Whig histories loomed large inthe competing accounts of the Global March ofCapitalism and Communism, where the one isportrayed as a temporary obstacle to be overcomebefore the triumph of the other. But Tory historieswere in evidence as well.The Tory counterpart of Communist97