Dominant paradigms can blind analysts even while outperforming all rivals

Evidence

For forty years students and practitioners of international relations thought and acted in terms of the highly simplified but very useful Cold War paradigm of world affairs. This paradigm could not account for everything that went on in world politics. There were many anomalies, to use Kuhn’s term, and at times the paradigm blinded scholars and statesmen to major developments, such as the Sino-Soviet split. Yet as a simple model of global politics, it accounted for more important phenomena than any of its rivals, it was an essential starting point for thinking about international affairs, it came to be almost universally accepted, and it shaped thinking about world politics for two generations. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 49

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Kuhn’s paradigm theory referenced in the passage itself; also echoes how I’ve read about rival paradigms in Milgrom’s trade institutions work.