When South Korea was struggling through the dark age of an authoritarian regime during the 1980s, spot-checking at the main gate was a common scene of Korean university life. The declared purpose was to take away potentially dangerous items, such as things used to make Molotov cocktails. But student leaders were not so stupid as to try to bring such crucial items for demonstrations through the police line at the gate. So most of the actual items confiscated were books with titles that police thought "improper" for students with healthy thoughts to read. Thomas S. Kuhn's 1962 The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (or, more precisely, one of its translations) was among them. The reason was clear and simple: the title of Kuhn's book contains the word revolution, which during the 1980s was an extremely alarming word in Korea. I, a moderate physics student in the late 1980s, lost to police my copy of Theda Skocpol's 1979 States and Social Revolutions.' Sometimes, I wonder what Kuhn might have said if he knew his book was classified in the same taxonomic group as Skocpol's.
