Kuhn vs Popper - About James H. Collier

triumphalism was Leon Trotsky’s account of theSoviet Union’s failure to launch a worldwide‘permanent revolution’. In the case of Capitalisttriumphalism, the Tory sensibility was representedby the sociologist C. Wright Mills, who inspiredAmerican campus radicals in the 1960s by arguingthat the United States had betrayed its own liberaldemocratic values by concentrating power in themilitary-industrial complex. Not surprisingly,Trotsky and Mills were considered traitors in theirrespective lands. For they were losers without beingvictims. Consequently, there was always the chancethat they would return to reclaim their legacy.Here it is worth mentioning the ‘scientific’provenance of the Tory image of the ‘return ofthe repressed’, which fuelled the imaginations ofnot only Hegel and Nietzsche but also Ernst Machand Sigmund Freud – as well as the Popperians,especially Lakatos. It goes back to the idea thatNature promotes atavisms, that is, throwbacks tosupposedly extinct life-forms that neverthelessmanage to survive in a second incarnation.Contrary to popular views of evolution as consistingof an irreversible sequence of endlesslyprogressive species, the presence of atavismssuggested that what might be otherwise seen asNature’s drafts on the blueprint of life are in factconserved in the ‘germ plasm’ (or ‘gene pool’, as we98