Kuhnian Scientific Revolutions and the Keynesian Revolution
"The most obvious way in which sciences advance is by new departures, that is, by the discovery of new facts, or new aspects of old facts, or new relations between facts. . . . But there is another way. When we use the concepts and theorems that we have inherited from our predecessors . . . [w]e add here and correct there and so this apparatus slowly develops into a different one."' It is the thrust of this article that the history of science paradigm provided by Thomas S. Kuhn is a useful framework for understanding the two developmental paths to which Joseph Schumpeter alludes.2 In this view, the gradual development of the apparatus or paradigm is seen as a process of articulation, of exhausting the potential of that paradigm. In the process, the way is cleared for a new departure or scientific revolution-the installation of a new paradigm. The procedure is to demonstrate the applicability of the Kuhnian paradigm to the new departure called the Keynesian revolution. To do so, the basic Kuhnian model is reviewed and compared with phenomena leading to and flowing from the watershed appearance of Keynes's General Theory.