NEW ESSAY: Rethinking Power through Kuhn:​ Paradigm Change in the Study of Social Conflict

This is the latest essay I published in my project POWER of meanings // MEANINGS of power. 

Thomas Kuhn’s idea of paradigm change can be used, with caution, as an analogy for understanding the development of modern frameworks for interpreting social conflict, inequality, and suffering. A paradigm is not simply a theory among others. It shapes what questions appear important, what counts as a legitimate problem, and what people are prepared to notice. In that sense, paradigms do not remain confined to scholarship in the narrow sense. They also influence political language, activism, and broader habits of interpretation. One of the most powerful modern paradigms for understanding social conflict emerged with Marx’s reorientation of attention away from individual moral failure and toward historically specific structures of domination.

That paradigm did not remain limited to Marxism alone. In different forms, it spread across a wider range of critical, political, and cultural traditions, organizing social reality through oppositions such as dominant and subordinate, oppressor and oppressed. Its power lay in making structural injustice more visible and in providing a framework through which suffering could be understood not as merely personal misfortune but as patterned and socially produced. In broadly Kuhnian terms, this development can be understood as the emergence of a paradigm followed by a long period of productive extension resembling normal science, during which the framework was elaborated, refined, and applied to new domains.

Yet the success of the binary paradigm also made its limits easier to see. The anomalies have become increasingly visible: social life is often more entangled than a two-sided model can capture; people occupy mixed and shifting positions; harms do not arise only from deliberate domination; and systems often generate consequences that no one fully intends or controls. These tensions suggest the need for a more complex paradigm of power, one that preserves the structural insights of earlier critical traditions while moving beyond binary logic toward a framework centered on interdependence, epistemic humility, compassion, and the intertwining of power and powerlessness.

Continue reading here.

[This essay will be included in Newsletter#22.]