Summary:

Heribert Illig discusses what may occur when discoveries are presented to the scientific community as paradigm shifts. When Heinsohn and Steiger claimed that their property economics was the first “scientific theory that deserves the name of economic theory”, they met with a scepticism that went far beyond a fierce controversy like, for example, in the community of natural scientists. The author illustrates the next step of accepting such a process by reporting the difficulties he himself faced after he had developed a theory outside the established academic community of historians, the so-called “phantom era thesis”. This thesis posed the question whether three centuries of the early Middle Ages were real or fictitious. After eight years of controversy, and after the failure of many libellous attacks, established historians have imposed a damnatio memoriae on the author, as they themselves concede.