Top Highlights

• The fully modern conception of revolution as involving a break from the past—an abrupt, humanly-made overturning rather than a natural overturning
• his conception of revolution as overturning was compatible with a cyclical view of history as a continuous process.
• philosophers of science until the 1960s—the logical empiricists and the Popperians—rejected innovation as a legitimate topic, even though it is the primary intellectual driver of scientific change and producer of the wealth of skilled knowledge that results.
• Although talk of revolution is often exaggerated, most analysts agree that there have been transformative scientific developments of various kinds, whether Kuhnian or not.
• And since revolution is typically driven by new results, or by a conceptual-cum-social reorganization of old ones, often highly unexpected, we also confront the hard problem of understanding creative innovation.

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