Rethinking Power Through Kuhn:
Paradigm Change in the Study of Social Conflict
*last updated on April 4, 2026
This essay uses Thomas Kuhn’s concept of paradigm change as an analytical analogy for thinking about the development of modern frameworks for understanding social conflict, inequality, and social change. Its central claim is that Marx introduced a paradigm that fundamentally reorganized how many scholars, activists, and institutions interpreted social suffering: not as a diffuse feature of human existence, moral failure, or divine order, but as the product of historically specific structures of domination. That paradigm proved influential because it offered a coherent explanatory model, a clear political grammar, and an actionable account of injustice.
Over time, however, the paradigm also generated simplifications and explanatory limits. The argument developed here is not that Marx or later critical traditions were mistaken in any simple sense, nor that their insights have been exhausted. It is that the binary framework associated with Marx and subsequently expanded across a range of critical traditions has become so influential that its limits are now easier to see. What once clarified a great deal can, when generalized too far, begin to obscure other important dimensions of social reality.
Using Kuhn in this context requires caution. The history of social thought does not proceed as cleanly as Kuhn’s account of scientific revolutions sometimes suggests, and no exact date can be assigned to the beginning or end of a paradigm in the study of society. Still, his model offers a useful vocabulary for tracing a broad intellectual sequence: a field with many scattered explanations, the emergence of a compelling organizing framework, a long period of productive extension, the growing visibility of anomalies, and the possibility of a new paradigm. Read in that spirit, the movement from a binary paradigm of power toward the paradigm of complexity proposed in this project becomes easier to describe.
This essay uses Thomas Kuhn’s concept of paradigm change as an analytical analogy for thinking about the development of modern frameworks for understanding social conflict, inequality, and social change. Its central claim is that Marx introduced a paradigm that fundamentally reorganized how many scholars, activists, and institutions interpreted social suffering: not as a diffuse feature of human existence, moral failure, or divine order, but as the product of historically specific structures of domination. That paradigm proved influential because it offered a coherent explanatory model, a clear political grammar, and an actionable account of injustice.
Over time, however, the paradigm also generated simplifications and explanatory limits. The argument developed here is not that Marx or later critical traditions were mistaken in any simple sense, nor that their insights have been exhausted. It is that the binary framework associated with Marx and subsequently expanded across a range of critical traditions has become so influential that its limits are now easier to see. What once clarified a great deal can, when generalized too far, begin to obscure other important dimensions of social reality.
Using Kuhn in this context requires caution. The history of social thought does not proceed as cleanly as Kuhn’s account of scientific revolutions sometimes suggests, and no exact date can be assigned to the beginning or end of a paradigm in the study of society. Still, his model offers a useful vocabulary for tracing a broad intellectual sequence: a field with many scattered explanations, the emergence of a compelling organizing framework, a long period of productive extension, the growing visibility of anomalies, and the possibility of a new paradigm. Read in that spirit, the movement from a binary paradigm of power toward the paradigm of complexity proposed in this project becomes easier to describe.
1. Kuhn’s Model of Paradigm Change
Kuhn’s basic insight was that intellectual development does not proceed through the steady accumulation of facts alone. It also depends on paradigms: shared frameworks that shape what questions are asked, what counts as a legitimate problem, what methods are considered appropriate, and what kinds of answers appear persuasive. A paradigm does not simply provide conclusions. More fundamentally, it organizes perception. It establishes what is salient, what is backgrounded, and what a community has been trained to notice.
For that reason, paradigms are both enabling and limiting. They make inquiry more focused and more productive by giving researchers a common orientation. At the same time, they make some possibilities easier to see than others. A paradigm is not only an answer to a problem; it is also a way of defining what the problem is. Once such a framework becomes established, work within it often becomes highly generative. Researchers refine it, extend it to new cases, and solve puzzles within its terms rather than questioning its basic assumptions.
Kuhn described this phase as normal science. In that stage, the framework is not usually experienced as one interpretation among many. It becomes the taken-for-granted horizon within which serious work is done. Anomalies may appear, but they are often treated at first as local complications, not as reasons to abandon the paradigm itself. Only when those anomalies accumulate and become increasingly difficult to assimilate does the possibility of crisis emerge.
Although Kuhn developed this account in relation to the natural sciences, the vocabulary of paradigm, normal inquiry, anomaly, and crisis can still be used analogically in broader intellectual history. The point is not to claim that the study of society is identical to physics or chemistry. It is to suggest that large frameworks of interpretation can also stabilize fields, define legitimate questions, and shape what entire communities are prepared to see. Used carefully, Kuhn’s model helps illuminate not only how a framework becomes dominant, but also how its very success can later make its limitations more consequential.
2. Tracing the Emergence of the Binary Paradigm
In the study of social conflict, one can identify a major shift between earlier traditions of thought and the modern framework inaugurated by Marx. Before Marx, human suffering and social disorder were explained in many different ways: through sin, vice, greed, fear, ignorance, imbalance, poor governance, flawed institutions, or the limits of human reason. These traditions were often rich and sophisticated. What they generally did not provide, however, was a widely shared and politically portable framework for understanding structural inequality as the central engine of social conflict.
Marx did not invent the idea that societies contain antagonisms, nor was he the first to notice class division, exploitation, or the dependence of one group on the labor of another. What he did was give those realities a new centrality and a new systematic form. He reorganized the field of interpretation by locating conflict and suffering in historically specific relations of production and class domination. In this framework, inequality was not incidental or reducible to individual vice. It was generated by the structure of society itself.
This was a major reorientation. Social life could now be understood through oppositional groups whose positions were defined by their relation to economic power. In capitalism, this meant above all the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Poverty, exploitation, and instability became legible not as isolated misfortunes or failures of character, but as predictable effects of a social order in which one class benefited from the labor of another. The explanatory force of this move was considerable. It gave suffering a pattern, conflict a structure, and politics a direction.
In Kuhnian terms, Marx’s intervention can be read as revolutionary because it did not merely add another theory to an existing field. It changed the underlying assumptions through which social conflict was interpreted. It shifted attention away from explanations centered on personal failure, moral weakness, or general imperfection and toward structural explanation centered on domination, material interests, and historical contradiction. It also changed what counted as an adequate explanation. Accounts that failed to identify systemic causes could now appear superficial, ideological, or complicit with the status quo.
The strength of this paradigm lay not only in its explanatory capacity but also in its clarity. Marx offered a framework that could travel. Social suffering could be narrated as collective rather than merely individual. Historical change could be understood as struggle rather than fate. Responsibility could be located in systems rather than in personal weakness alone. This clarity helped make the paradigm intellectually influential, politically mobilizing, and historically transformative.
3. Normal Science of the Binary Paradigm
Once a paradigm becomes established, Kuhn argues, inquiry often enters a more stable phase in which the framework is elaborated rather than fundamentally questioned. Something like this occurred with the binary paradigm inaugurated by Marx. Later thinkers did not simply repeat Marx’s original analysis of class. They extended the underlying logic of structural domination into additional domains of social life, asking where else durable asymmetries were produced, reproduced, and normalized.
This expansion unfolded over a long historical period and across multiple traditions. Marxist thought itself developed in many directions, including Western Marxism, the Frankfurt School, and other critical approaches that widened the analysis beyond political economy in a narrow sense. During the twentieth century, and especially in its later decades, feminist thought, postcolonial thought, critical race theory, disability studies, and queer theory each developed their own analyses of how social hierarchies are embedded in institutions, norms, and cultural forms. These traditions were not identical, and they often differed sharply in method, emphasis, and politics. Still, many of them shared a common interpretive impulse: to identify patterned relations between dominant and subordinate positions and to show how those relations shape lived experience.
In that sense, the binary paradigm entered a prolonged period of productive normal inquiry. Scholars working within or near this paradigm asked increasingly refined questions. How is inequality maintained not only through force but through law, education, discourse, and habit? How do institutions stabilize asymmetry over time? How do norms become internalized? How do categories of identity interact with structures of advantage and disadvantage? These questions generated a great deal of important work. They made visible forms of injustice that had often been ignored, naturalized, or individualized.
This period also produced major intellectual and political gains. Structural analysis helped shift public attention away from explanations that blamed suffering solely on personal failure. It contributed to labor reforms, civil rights struggles, feminist critique, anti-colonial analysis, disability rights advocacy, and other efforts to contest entrenched inequalities. Even where outcomes were partial or uneven, the paradigm’s influence was real. It supplied a vocabulary for naming domination and a rationale for challenging it.
At the same time, the success of the paradigm reinforced a particular interpretive habit. Even where theories became increasingly subtle, the public and institutional uptake of those theories often favored their most legible form: a world divided between those with power and those without it, those who benefit from a system and those harmed by it, those positioned as dominant and those positioned as subordinate. The more widely the paradigm traveled, the more this binary grammar became culturally familiar.
This development helps explain both the strength and the limits of the binary paradigm. Its strength was that it offered a clear way to make injustice intelligible. But precisely because it was so clear, it also encouraged a tendency to treat binary opposition as the default structure of social reality. A framework that had once been revelatory could, through repetition and extension, begin to harden into an interpretive reflex.
4. Anomalies and Limits of the Binary Paradigm
Kuhn’s model directs attention not only to the strengths of successful paradigms but also to the point at which their success begins to generate strain. The issue is not whether a paradigm has been useful. The issue is whether it remains sufficiently adequate to the growing range of phenomena it is asked to explain. In the case of the binary paradigm, a number of anomalies become increasingly visible when social life is examined more closely.
One anomaly is that social actors often do not fit neatly into the categories of oppressor and oppressed. Individuals and groups may be constrained in one context and influential in another. A person may be socially privileged along one axis, vulnerable along another, and deeply limited by circumstances that do not reduce to dominance or subordination in any simple way. Even where structural asymmetries are real, lived positions are often more entangled than a binary model easily captures.
A second anomaly is that harms do not arise only from deliberate domination. Some do, and sometimes quite clearly. But harms can also emerge from coordination failures, institutional inertia, inherited patterns, unintended consequences, conflicting goods, and systems in which no single actor fully understands or controls the outcome. In such cases, the problem is not that domination is absent, but that domination alone is not a sufficient description of the causal field.
A third anomaly appears when reforms designed to correct injustice produce new tensions, trade-offs, or unintended effects. A binary framework can certainly describe resistance to reform, backlash, and the persistence of privilege. Yet it often has more difficulty accounting for situations in which well-intentioned interventions generate complications that are not well described as simple reassertions of domination. The social world contains feedback loops, threshold effects, and competing forms of vulnerability that do not always fit a two-sided model.
These anomalies point to what can be called an epistemic limitation. When inquiry begins with the expectation that the central task is to identify who holds power over whom, some kinds of evidence become especially salient while others recede. Domination is easier to notice than mutual dependency. Clear perpetrators and clear victims are easier to narrate than diffuse causation or overlapping forms of agency. A framework designed to detect asymmetry will reliably find asymmetry, but that very reliability can narrow the interpretive field.
This does not mean that domination is unreal or unimportant. It means that a framework built to identify one kind of pattern may begin, when generalized too broadly, to organize reality in its own image. The problem is not falsehood in the crude sense. The problem is selectivity. Some phenomena become highly visible, while others remain conceptually underdeveloped.
A useful example here is the concept of patriarchy. In many historical settings, and in some contemporary ones, that concept names severe and unmistakable structures of domination. It points to social arrangements in which women’s agency is drastically constrained and male authority is built directly into law, custom, property relations, and everyday life. In such cases, the framework is sharply illuminating. But when the same concept is extended into contexts where relations are more reciprocal, more institutionally mixed, or more internally differentiated, it may begin to explain too much by means of the same underlying opposition. The issue is not that patriarchy is always the wrong concept. It is that a concept developed to identify a real structure can become less precise when applied without sufficient attention to variation, context, and complexity.
Alongside this epistemic limitation, there is also a moral or affective one. Marxist and critical traditions generally present themselves, rightly, as explanatory frameworks rather than mere vocabularies of condemnation. Even so, the binary organization of the paradigm tends to orient discourse toward blame. Once social reality is primarily understood through antagonistic positions, inquiry is drawn toward identifying who benefits, who harms, who sustains injustice, and who stands on the wrong side of history. That orientation is historically understandable, especially where social harms had long been denied or concealed. In many cases, naming domination clearly was morally and politically necessary.
Yet the background pull toward blame can also affect the texture of analysis. A framework organized around oppositional positions can encourage a search for bad actors more readily than a search for entangled conditions. It can make accusation feel more intellectually satisfying than explanation, or make moral clarity feel more urgent than descriptive adequacy. This is not true of every scholar, every text, or every political use of the paradigm. It is a tendency, not a law. But it is a tendency that matters because paradigms shape sensibility as well as argument.
The growing visibility of these epistemic and moral limits suggests that the binary paradigm has reached an important threshold. It continues to illuminate genuine forms of structural injustice, and its achievements should not be minimized. But it no longer provides a sufficiently comprehensive default framework for understanding social conflict in general. In Kuhnian terms, this is the point at which anomalies begin to press not only for refinement within the existing paradigm, but for a shift in the underlying model itself.
5. The Complexity Paradigm
The alternative proposed here is a paradigm of complexity. This paradigm begins from the assumption that social life is composed of interdependent, layered, and dynamically interacting processes that cannot be adequately captured through a single binary of domination and resistance. In this view, power is not best understood as a fixed quantity possessed by one side and lacking on the other. It is relational, variable, and context-dependent. It operates through institutions, norms, roles, habits, meanings, material arrangements, and historical inheritances. It includes not only domination but also capacity, constraint, dependency, coordination, interpretation, and unintended effect. Most importantly, power and powerlessness are not treated as mutually exclusive conditions. They are understood as intertwined features of human and social life.
This paradigm responds first to the epistemic limits of the binary model. It widens the field of explanation by making room for causal dynamics that binary frameworks tend to underdescribe: feedback loops, reciprocal influence, institutional complexity, path dependence, conflicting vulnerabilities, partial agency, and systems in which harmful outcomes are produced without being fully intended by any single group. It does not deny that some structures are clearly asymmetrical. It argues, rather, that asymmetry is only one element within a more complicated social reality.
But the shift is not only epistemic. It also has a different moral orientation. A complexity paradigm encourages analysis to begin not from the desire to locate the guilty party as quickly as possible, but from the disciplined effort to understand how people act within conditions they did not fully choose, fully understand, or fully control. That moral orientation can be described as compassion. Compassion, in this context, does not mean sentimental softness, moral relativism, or the refusal to judge harm. Nor does it mean abandoning accountability. It means resisting the temptation to reduce human beings to flat moral roles within a simplified social drama.
In that sense, the epistemic and moral dimensions of the new paradigm are connected. Compassion is not added onto analysis as a separate ethical preference. It helps make better analysis possible. When inquiry is less governed by the need to sort people into morally legible camps, it becomes easier to see mixed motives, overlapping constraints, unintended harms, and forms of interdependence that a blame-oriented framework may overlook. Compassion does not weaken rigor. It can deepen rigor by making inquiry less reactive and more attentive to complexity.
This also changes how responsibility is understood. Under a complexity paradigm, responsibility is neither erased nor absolutized. People remain accountable for what they do, and some harms still involve direct domination, coercion, or exploitation. But accountability is situated within a broader recognition that action unfolds inside inherited systems of meaning, institutional structures, material pressures, and social patterns that no individual fully commands. Responsibility therefore becomes more differentiated. It is less a matter of locating a single source of blame and more a matter of asking how agency, constraint, and consequence are distributed across a system.
A complexity paradigm changes how social change is imagined as well. If conflict is not generated only by a clearly bounded oppressor class or dominant group, then change cannot be imagined only as defeat, reversal, or redistribution. Those may remain necessary in some cases, but they are not sufficient as a general model. Change also requires institutional redesign, conceptual revision, cross-group coordination, attention to trade-offs, and ongoing responsiveness to unintended consequences. It requires forms of criticism that are structurally alert without being interpretively reductive.
In this sense, the proposed paradigm does not reject the achievements of Marx or critical theory. It preserves one of their most important insights: that social suffering is often structured rather than accidental, and that inequality cannot be reduced to individual choices alone. What it rejects is the assumption that structural analysis must remain binary in form. The movement from a binary paradigm to a complexity paradigm is therefore not a retreat from critique but an attempt to deepen it. It seeks to retain the historical gains of structural thinking while abandoning the simplifications that now limit explanatory adequacy.
6. Conclusion
The broader argument developed in this essay, then, is that the modern study of social conflict can be read through a Kuhn-like sequence. A pre-Marxian field contained many important but diffuse explanations of suffering. Marx introduced a revolutionary paradigm that made structural conflict legible in a new way. That paradigm entered a prolonged period of productive extension as it was developed across Marxist and other critical traditions. Its success transformed scholarship, politics, and public language.
But the success of the paradigm also stabilized a binary model of power that now reveals growing anomalies. Social life is often too entangled, too layered, and too dynamically structured to be understood primarily through oppositional categories alone. When those anomalies are taken seriously, they suggest the need for another shift: from a paradigm centered on binary domination to one centered on complexity, interdependence, and the intertwining of power and powerlessness.
What is at stake in such a shift is not only a new theory of power. It is a new way of asking questions about social problems, responsibility, and change. Paradigms matter because they shape what appears thinkable. A binary paradigm makes some realities highly visible, but it can also narrow the range of explanations and responses that seem available. A complexity paradigm widens that range. It does not offer the same moral clarity as a divided world. What it may offer instead is a more adequate account of how human beings actually live together: in systems of unequal, overlapping, shifting, and often contradictory relations that cannot be fully understood through binary logic alone.
See also: Rethinking power: From Marx through critical theory to the new paradigm of complexity
Kuhn’s basic insight was that intellectual development does not proceed through the steady accumulation of facts alone. It also depends on paradigms: shared frameworks that shape what questions are asked, what counts as a legitimate problem, what methods are considered appropriate, and what kinds of answers appear persuasive. A paradigm does not simply provide conclusions. More fundamentally, it organizes perception. It establishes what is salient, what is backgrounded, and what a community has been trained to notice.
For that reason, paradigms are both enabling and limiting. They make inquiry more focused and more productive by giving researchers a common orientation. At the same time, they make some possibilities easier to see than others. A paradigm is not only an answer to a problem; it is also a way of defining what the problem is. Once such a framework becomes established, work within it often becomes highly generative. Researchers refine it, extend it to new cases, and solve puzzles within its terms rather than questioning its basic assumptions.
Kuhn described this phase as normal science. In that stage, the framework is not usually experienced as one interpretation among many. It becomes the taken-for-granted horizon within which serious work is done. Anomalies may appear, but they are often treated at first as local complications, not as reasons to abandon the paradigm itself. Only when those anomalies accumulate and become increasingly difficult to assimilate does the possibility of crisis emerge.
Although Kuhn developed this account in relation to the natural sciences, the vocabulary of paradigm, normal inquiry, anomaly, and crisis can still be used analogically in broader intellectual history. The point is not to claim that the study of society is identical to physics or chemistry. It is to suggest that large frameworks of interpretation can also stabilize fields, define legitimate questions, and shape what entire communities are prepared to see. Used carefully, Kuhn’s model helps illuminate not only how a framework becomes dominant, but also how its very success can later make its limitations more consequential.
2. Tracing the Emergence of the Binary Paradigm
In the study of social conflict, one can identify a major shift between earlier traditions of thought and the modern framework inaugurated by Marx. Before Marx, human suffering and social disorder were explained in many different ways: through sin, vice, greed, fear, ignorance, imbalance, poor governance, flawed institutions, or the limits of human reason. These traditions were often rich and sophisticated. What they generally did not provide, however, was a widely shared and politically portable framework for understanding structural inequality as the central engine of social conflict.
Marx did not invent the idea that societies contain antagonisms, nor was he the first to notice class division, exploitation, or the dependence of one group on the labor of another. What he did was give those realities a new centrality and a new systematic form. He reorganized the field of interpretation by locating conflict and suffering in historically specific relations of production and class domination. In this framework, inequality was not incidental or reducible to individual vice. It was generated by the structure of society itself.
This was a major reorientation. Social life could now be understood through oppositional groups whose positions were defined by their relation to economic power. In capitalism, this meant above all the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Poverty, exploitation, and instability became legible not as isolated misfortunes or failures of character, but as predictable effects of a social order in which one class benefited from the labor of another. The explanatory force of this move was considerable. It gave suffering a pattern, conflict a structure, and politics a direction.
In Kuhnian terms, Marx’s intervention can be read as revolutionary because it did not merely add another theory to an existing field. It changed the underlying assumptions through which social conflict was interpreted. It shifted attention away from explanations centered on personal failure, moral weakness, or general imperfection and toward structural explanation centered on domination, material interests, and historical contradiction. It also changed what counted as an adequate explanation. Accounts that failed to identify systemic causes could now appear superficial, ideological, or complicit with the status quo.
The strength of this paradigm lay not only in its explanatory capacity but also in its clarity. Marx offered a framework that could travel. Social suffering could be narrated as collective rather than merely individual. Historical change could be understood as struggle rather than fate. Responsibility could be located in systems rather than in personal weakness alone. This clarity helped make the paradigm intellectually influential, politically mobilizing, and historically transformative.
3. Normal Science of the Binary Paradigm
Once a paradigm becomes established, Kuhn argues, inquiry often enters a more stable phase in which the framework is elaborated rather than fundamentally questioned. Something like this occurred with the binary paradigm inaugurated by Marx. Later thinkers did not simply repeat Marx’s original analysis of class. They extended the underlying logic of structural domination into additional domains of social life, asking where else durable asymmetries were produced, reproduced, and normalized.
This expansion unfolded over a long historical period and across multiple traditions. Marxist thought itself developed in many directions, including Western Marxism, the Frankfurt School, and other critical approaches that widened the analysis beyond political economy in a narrow sense. During the twentieth century, and especially in its later decades, feminist thought, postcolonial thought, critical race theory, disability studies, and queer theory each developed their own analyses of how social hierarchies are embedded in institutions, norms, and cultural forms. These traditions were not identical, and they often differed sharply in method, emphasis, and politics. Still, many of them shared a common interpretive impulse: to identify patterned relations between dominant and subordinate positions and to show how those relations shape lived experience.
In that sense, the binary paradigm entered a prolonged period of productive normal inquiry. Scholars working within or near this paradigm asked increasingly refined questions. How is inequality maintained not only through force but through law, education, discourse, and habit? How do institutions stabilize asymmetry over time? How do norms become internalized? How do categories of identity interact with structures of advantage and disadvantage? These questions generated a great deal of important work. They made visible forms of injustice that had often been ignored, naturalized, or individualized.
This period also produced major intellectual and political gains. Structural analysis helped shift public attention away from explanations that blamed suffering solely on personal failure. It contributed to labor reforms, civil rights struggles, feminist critique, anti-colonial analysis, disability rights advocacy, and other efforts to contest entrenched inequalities. Even where outcomes were partial or uneven, the paradigm’s influence was real. It supplied a vocabulary for naming domination and a rationale for challenging it.
At the same time, the success of the paradigm reinforced a particular interpretive habit. Even where theories became increasingly subtle, the public and institutional uptake of those theories often favored their most legible form: a world divided between those with power and those without it, those who benefit from a system and those harmed by it, those positioned as dominant and those positioned as subordinate. The more widely the paradigm traveled, the more this binary grammar became culturally familiar.
This development helps explain both the strength and the limits of the binary paradigm. Its strength was that it offered a clear way to make injustice intelligible. But precisely because it was so clear, it also encouraged a tendency to treat binary opposition as the default structure of social reality. A framework that had once been revelatory could, through repetition and extension, begin to harden into an interpretive reflex.
4. Anomalies and Limits of the Binary Paradigm
Kuhn’s model directs attention not only to the strengths of successful paradigms but also to the point at which their success begins to generate strain. The issue is not whether a paradigm has been useful. The issue is whether it remains sufficiently adequate to the growing range of phenomena it is asked to explain. In the case of the binary paradigm, a number of anomalies become increasingly visible when social life is examined more closely.
One anomaly is that social actors often do not fit neatly into the categories of oppressor and oppressed. Individuals and groups may be constrained in one context and influential in another. A person may be socially privileged along one axis, vulnerable along another, and deeply limited by circumstances that do not reduce to dominance or subordination in any simple way. Even where structural asymmetries are real, lived positions are often more entangled than a binary model easily captures.
A second anomaly is that harms do not arise only from deliberate domination. Some do, and sometimes quite clearly. But harms can also emerge from coordination failures, institutional inertia, inherited patterns, unintended consequences, conflicting goods, and systems in which no single actor fully understands or controls the outcome. In such cases, the problem is not that domination is absent, but that domination alone is not a sufficient description of the causal field.
A third anomaly appears when reforms designed to correct injustice produce new tensions, trade-offs, or unintended effects. A binary framework can certainly describe resistance to reform, backlash, and the persistence of privilege. Yet it often has more difficulty accounting for situations in which well-intentioned interventions generate complications that are not well described as simple reassertions of domination. The social world contains feedback loops, threshold effects, and competing forms of vulnerability that do not always fit a two-sided model.
These anomalies point to what can be called an epistemic limitation. When inquiry begins with the expectation that the central task is to identify who holds power over whom, some kinds of evidence become especially salient while others recede. Domination is easier to notice than mutual dependency. Clear perpetrators and clear victims are easier to narrate than diffuse causation or overlapping forms of agency. A framework designed to detect asymmetry will reliably find asymmetry, but that very reliability can narrow the interpretive field.
This does not mean that domination is unreal or unimportant. It means that a framework built to identify one kind of pattern may begin, when generalized too broadly, to organize reality in its own image. The problem is not falsehood in the crude sense. The problem is selectivity. Some phenomena become highly visible, while others remain conceptually underdeveloped.
A useful example here is the concept of patriarchy. In many historical settings, and in some contemporary ones, that concept names severe and unmistakable structures of domination. It points to social arrangements in which women’s agency is drastically constrained and male authority is built directly into law, custom, property relations, and everyday life. In such cases, the framework is sharply illuminating. But when the same concept is extended into contexts where relations are more reciprocal, more institutionally mixed, or more internally differentiated, it may begin to explain too much by means of the same underlying opposition. The issue is not that patriarchy is always the wrong concept. It is that a concept developed to identify a real structure can become less precise when applied without sufficient attention to variation, context, and complexity.
Alongside this epistemic limitation, there is also a moral or affective one. Marxist and critical traditions generally present themselves, rightly, as explanatory frameworks rather than mere vocabularies of condemnation. Even so, the binary organization of the paradigm tends to orient discourse toward blame. Once social reality is primarily understood through antagonistic positions, inquiry is drawn toward identifying who benefits, who harms, who sustains injustice, and who stands on the wrong side of history. That orientation is historically understandable, especially where social harms had long been denied or concealed. In many cases, naming domination clearly was morally and politically necessary.
Yet the background pull toward blame can also affect the texture of analysis. A framework organized around oppositional positions can encourage a search for bad actors more readily than a search for entangled conditions. It can make accusation feel more intellectually satisfying than explanation, or make moral clarity feel more urgent than descriptive adequacy. This is not true of every scholar, every text, or every political use of the paradigm. It is a tendency, not a law. But it is a tendency that matters because paradigms shape sensibility as well as argument.
The growing visibility of these epistemic and moral limits suggests that the binary paradigm has reached an important threshold. It continues to illuminate genuine forms of structural injustice, and its achievements should not be minimized. But it no longer provides a sufficiently comprehensive default framework for understanding social conflict in general. In Kuhnian terms, this is the point at which anomalies begin to press not only for refinement within the existing paradigm, but for a shift in the underlying model itself.
5. The Complexity Paradigm
The alternative proposed here is a paradigm of complexity. This paradigm begins from the assumption that social life is composed of interdependent, layered, and dynamically interacting processes that cannot be adequately captured through a single binary of domination and resistance. In this view, power is not best understood as a fixed quantity possessed by one side and lacking on the other. It is relational, variable, and context-dependent. It operates through institutions, norms, roles, habits, meanings, material arrangements, and historical inheritances. It includes not only domination but also capacity, constraint, dependency, coordination, interpretation, and unintended effect. Most importantly, power and powerlessness are not treated as mutually exclusive conditions. They are understood as intertwined features of human and social life.
This paradigm responds first to the epistemic limits of the binary model. It widens the field of explanation by making room for causal dynamics that binary frameworks tend to underdescribe: feedback loops, reciprocal influence, institutional complexity, path dependence, conflicting vulnerabilities, partial agency, and systems in which harmful outcomes are produced without being fully intended by any single group. It does not deny that some structures are clearly asymmetrical. It argues, rather, that asymmetry is only one element within a more complicated social reality.
But the shift is not only epistemic. It also has a different moral orientation. A complexity paradigm encourages analysis to begin not from the desire to locate the guilty party as quickly as possible, but from the disciplined effort to understand how people act within conditions they did not fully choose, fully understand, or fully control. That moral orientation can be described as compassion. Compassion, in this context, does not mean sentimental softness, moral relativism, or the refusal to judge harm. Nor does it mean abandoning accountability. It means resisting the temptation to reduce human beings to flat moral roles within a simplified social drama.
In that sense, the epistemic and moral dimensions of the new paradigm are connected. Compassion is not added onto analysis as a separate ethical preference. It helps make better analysis possible. When inquiry is less governed by the need to sort people into morally legible camps, it becomes easier to see mixed motives, overlapping constraints, unintended harms, and forms of interdependence that a blame-oriented framework may overlook. Compassion does not weaken rigor. It can deepen rigor by making inquiry less reactive and more attentive to complexity.
This also changes how responsibility is understood. Under a complexity paradigm, responsibility is neither erased nor absolutized. People remain accountable for what they do, and some harms still involve direct domination, coercion, or exploitation. But accountability is situated within a broader recognition that action unfolds inside inherited systems of meaning, institutional structures, material pressures, and social patterns that no individual fully commands. Responsibility therefore becomes more differentiated. It is less a matter of locating a single source of blame and more a matter of asking how agency, constraint, and consequence are distributed across a system.
A complexity paradigm changes how social change is imagined as well. If conflict is not generated only by a clearly bounded oppressor class or dominant group, then change cannot be imagined only as defeat, reversal, or redistribution. Those may remain necessary in some cases, but they are not sufficient as a general model. Change also requires institutional redesign, conceptual revision, cross-group coordination, attention to trade-offs, and ongoing responsiveness to unintended consequences. It requires forms of criticism that are structurally alert without being interpretively reductive.
In this sense, the proposed paradigm does not reject the achievements of Marx or critical theory. It preserves one of their most important insights: that social suffering is often structured rather than accidental, and that inequality cannot be reduced to individual choices alone. What it rejects is the assumption that structural analysis must remain binary in form. The movement from a binary paradigm to a complexity paradigm is therefore not a retreat from critique but an attempt to deepen it. It seeks to retain the historical gains of structural thinking while abandoning the simplifications that now limit explanatory adequacy.
6. Conclusion
The broader argument developed in this essay, then, is that the modern study of social conflict can be read through a Kuhn-like sequence. A pre-Marxian field contained many important but diffuse explanations of suffering. Marx introduced a revolutionary paradigm that made structural conflict legible in a new way. That paradigm entered a prolonged period of productive extension as it was developed across Marxist and other critical traditions. Its success transformed scholarship, politics, and public language.
But the success of the paradigm also stabilized a binary model of power that now reveals growing anomalies. Social life is often too entangled, too layered, and too dynamically structured to be understood primarily through oppositional categories alone. When those anomalies are taken seriously, they suggest the need for another shift: from a paradigm centered on binary domination to one centered on complexity, interdependence, and the intertwining of power and powerlessness.
What is at stake in such a shift is not only a new theory of power. It is a new way of asking questions about social problems, responsibility, and change. Paradigms matter because they shape what appears thinkable. A binary paradigm makes some realities highly visible, but it can also narrow the range of explanations and responses that seem available. A complexity paradigm widens that range. It does not offer the same moral clarity as a divided world. What it may offer instead is a more adequate account of how human beings actually live together: in systems of unequal, overlapping, shifting, and often contradictory relations that cannot be fully understood through binary logic alone.
See also: Rethinking power: From Marx through critical theory to the new paradigm of complexity