Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1970) challenged the logical positivist account of science and provided a basic impetus for post-positivist philosophers and historians of science. Not only did Kuhn attack logical positivism’s central premise of the separation of theory and fact, as well as the correspondence theory of truth, but he sought to replace the orthodox textbook account of the history of science with the idea of a discontinuous history marked by scientific revolutions, that is, “those non- cumulative developmental episodes in which an older paradigm is replaced in whole or part by an incompatible new one” (Kuhn, 1970: 92). Kuhn’s theory of paradigms and scientific revolutions represented a signifi- cant challenge to the orthodox account of scientific development. The crucial point of Kuhn’s revisionist account of the history of science was his argument that there was no transcendental vantage point from which to claim that the replacement of one paradigm by another constituted “progress,” because the criteria for progress was paradigm- specific. While Kuhn made a significant impact on philosophers and historians of science, many of whom were displeased by the relativistic implications of the argument that resulted in the inability to vindicate scientific progress, his book had an equally dramatic impact on the field of IR, especially with respect to how many scholars have come to understand the history of the field. The fact that IR scholars increasingly have turned to Kuhn and other philosophers of science, particularly Imre Lakatos (1970), who, for many, appeared to reestablish evaluative criteria of progress, serves to illustrate the point that the task of writing the history of the field often has been sub- ordinate to the more fundamental goal of demonstrating progress in the field.