Historians and philosophers of science first voiced their dissatisfaction with the positivist-Whig interpretation of the Chemical Revolution in the 1950s and 60s. In his seminal study Lavoisier – The Crucial Year, published in 1961, Henry Guerlac challenged the prevailing opinion that Antoine Lavoisier was ‘the father of modern chemistry’ because it overlooked ‘the most significant ingredient of the Chemical Revolution’, which concerned Lavoisier's scientific heritage and not his creative genius. Guerlac argued that:

Following Guerlac's lead, subsequent scholars developed ‘thematic analyses of the Chemical Revolution from the perspective of larger developments in eighteenth century science’. New interpretations of the Chemical Revolution appeared when the positivist-Whig interpretative framework gave way to interpretive schemata associated with the rise of postpositivism, which shifted the epistemological centre of gravity of science from individual experimentalists to theoretical traditions.

Postpositivism emerged in the 1960s and 70s as a critical philosophy designed to modify or replace positivism. The dialectic between innovation and tradition was a productive one, which yielded in two or three decades almost as many studies of the Chemical Revolution as appeared in the previous century.