After Nikolai Bukharin

Abstract

This article addresses the ideological context of twentieth-century history of science as it emerged and was discussed at the threshold of the Cold War. It is claimed that the bifurcation of the discipline into a socio-economic strand and a technical-intellectual one (the divide between ‘externalism’ and ‘internalism’) should be traced back to the 1930s. In fact, the proposal of a Marxist-oriented historiography by the Soviet delegates at the International Congress of History of Science and Technology (London, 1931) led by Nikolai Bukharin, set off the ideological and methodological opposition that characterised the later years. Bukharin’s views on science are closely considered, as well as those of his Marxist critics, György Lukács and Antonio Gramsci. It is argued that, despite the fluidity of the positions of the 1920s and 1930s, these theories soon crystallized as demonstrated by the leftist reception of Bukharin’s and his associates’ perspective in the history of science, especially in Great Britain, as well as by the anti-communist reactions. Intellectualist approaches renouncing socio-economic factors, typically those by Alexandre Koyré and Thomas Kuhn, are reconsidered in the light of the ideological confrontation of the Cold War era. Reflection on the political-cultural embedding of the history of science has often been overshadowed by claims about the objectivity and neutrality of science and its historiography. Thus, the seminal discussion of the 1930s remains one of the most lucid moments of reflection about the role of science and history of science as cultural phenomena shaped by political struggles.

Keywords

Nikolai Bukharin Cold War science cultural hegemony Antonio Gramsci history and philosophy of science

The 13^th Congress on the History of Science and Technology, which took place in Moscow in August 1971, was an occasion to assess the state of the art of the discipline and its developments on both sides of the Iron Curtain. At that time the field was seen as divided into two camps: the ‘internalist’ and ‘externalist’ approaches to historiography. The British historian of Chinese science, Joseph Needham, outlined the methodological confrontation as follows:

The debate between externalists and internalists will go on, no doubt, for many a long year yet, with those who feel they can descry profound influences of social structure and social change upon science and scientific thought opposing those who prefer to think only in terms of an internal logic of development powered by intellectual giants of mysterious origin. (Needham, 1971: viii)

Needham actually regarded this bifurcation as an ideological opposition (Shapin, 1992). He traced its origins back to the Second International Congress on the History of Science and Technology, which he had himself attended 40 years earlier, in London from 29 June to 3 July 1931.

In that conference, in fact, a Soviet delegation of historians of science led by Nikolai Bukharin set forth a Marxist approach to the discipline. To the astonishment of their ideologically unprepared academic audience, the Soviet scholars offered a coherent, structured and philosophically loaded viewpoint, which they meant to be the socialist perspective of the history of science. The left-wing British scientist John D. Bernal, who was sympathetic with their position, later reported of the London conference:

The Russians came in a phalanx uniformly armed with Marxian dialectic, but they met no ordered opposition, but instead an undisciplined host, unprepared and armed with ill-assorted individual philosophies. There was no defence but the victory was unreal…Their appeal to dialectic, to the writings of Marx and Engels, instead of impressing their audience, disposed them not to listen to the arguments which followed. (Bernal, 1949: 338)

The Soviets – Bernal observed – ‘had a point of view, right or wrong; the others had never thought it necessary to acquire one’ (1949: 336). The philosophy of science that they proposed focused on the material, social and economic roots of knowledge, that is, the opposite of traditional historiography dealing with the internal developments of ideas and with the biographies of ‘genial’ figures such as Galileo, Newton and the like.

One can say that in the history of science the Cold War began in 1931. At that time, ideas were still fluctuating which would later crystallize into definite positions. Thus, in order to understand the intellectual climate characterizing the disciplinary and methodological oppositions of the Cold War era, it is expedient to look back to the seminal years when these borders had yet to be drawn. In the following, I will therefore deal with the inception of Cold War history of science and especially focus on the Marxist challenge as the starting impulse. First, I will discuss the extension of the political struggle of the 1920s and 1930s on the meta-discourse of science, that is to say, the insertion of the history and philosophy of science into the ‘struggle of ideologies’ – in Bukharin’s phrase – or in the ‘struggle of political hegemonies’ – as the Italian Marxist and political leader Antonio Gramsci called it in the same years (Gramsci, 2007: 1385). Second, I will stress the central relevance of the problem of the status of science and the relation between science and historicity for the Marxist debates of the 1920s and 1930s, not only in the Soviet Union but also on a European scale. In this respect, I deem it expedient to report on internal discussions within the Marxist camp, namely the criticism of Bukharin’s views by the Hungarian philosopher György Lukács and by Antonio Gramsci. Their non-reductionist views on cultural phenomena, including science, would become increasingly relevant to socialist historiography especially after the cultural turn of the 1970s. Third, I will consider the specific approach to the history of science proposed by the Soviet delegates, and oppose the emergence of a Marxist historiography with the anti-communist historiography and philosophy of science, which developed contemporaneously in the Anglo-American context. In this respect, it will be proper to point out the political dimension of classical perspectives on science such as those embraced by Alexandre Koyré and Thomas Kuhn.

I Science and cultural hegemony

In his London talk in 1931, Bukharin emphasized the radical novelty of socialist society as opposed to capitalism and already envisaged the irreconcilability of the political, economic and ideological divides between the two camps. The conclusion of his London speech is a celebration of the new culture and of the new science that is being established in the post-revolutionary society:

In this way is arising a new society, growing rapidly, rapidly overtaking its capitalist antagonists, more and more unfolding the hidden possibilities of its internal structure. From the standpoint of world history the whole of humanity, the whole orbis terrarum, has fallen apart into two worlds, two economic and cultural-historic systems. A great world-historic antithesis has arisen: there is taking place before our eyes the polarization of economic systems, the polarization of classes, the polarization of the methods of combining theory and practice, the polarization of the ‘modes of conception’, the polarization of cultures. (Bukharin, 1931: 32)

Within the Second International and in the Soviet Union, Marx’s criticism of political economy as a class-oriented (and class-limited) science aroused the question whether the concept of ‘bourgeois science’ applied only to the humanities and the social sciences or whether it had also to be extended to the natural sciences. In the latter case, what would a socialist science look like (McLaughlin, 1996)? In particular, it has been remarked that for Leninism ‘the centrality attributed to the working class is not a practical but an ontological centrality, which is, at the same time, the seat of an epistemological privilege: as the “universal” class, the proletariat – or rather its party – is the depository of science’ (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985: 56–7). Bukharin tackled the issue of proletarian versus bourgeois science first as an economist, then as a Soviet politician, as a systematist of the Marxist doctrine and, eventually, as the leader of the group of historians and philosophers of science who participated in the 1931 London conference.

In order to comprehend Bukharin’s viewpoint on ideology and science one has to read his early writings. It should be remarked that some of his fundamental theoretical assumptions about science derived from economic studies. In his criticism of the so-called Austrian School of economics entitled The Economic Theory of the Leisure Class (1919), he sketched a series of theoretical and methodological theses that he later condensed into three general statements: 1. theoretical systems are ‘the outgrowth of a specific class psychology’; 2. the criticism of bourgeois science is part of ‘struggle between ideologies’; 3. the proletariat’s outlook reaches ‘objectivity’.

Note that for Bukharin ‘theoretical system’ is equivalent to ideology. Theory, according to him, is class-oriented, and therefore fundamental theoretical discussion cannot be separated from political struggle. It is the cultural side of political confrontation, or the ‘struggle between ideologies’. Moreover, Bukharin did not consider the class orientation of theory to imply the lack of ‘objectivity’, that is, the impossibility of a correspondence between knowledge and the reality it refers to.

He also argued that, although external sociological and methodological criticism of bourgeois science ‘is, strictly speaking, sufficient to justify its rejection’, nonetheless also the internal criticism is important. This is the criticism of all ‘ramifications’, ‘fallacious partial inferences of the system’, ‘internal contradictions of the old system’, or ‘its incompleteness’ (Bukharin, 1927[1919]: 8–9). In the preface to Economic Theory, he first recounted the turbulent biographical circumstances out of which his writing emerged. He then passed to the introduction of its contents and stated that, just as his book could not be understood only considering its gestation, similarly Marxist criticism of political economics could not rest with a sociological and methodological criticism but should also enter the system and confront its inner elements (ibid.: 8). Bukharin detailed the epistemological claim that the criticism of a class-oriented theory cannot be limited to the denunciation of its class-orientation but should also include a critical analysis of the subject.

Bukharin’s stress on criticism of ideology as an important moment in the scientific debate could be regarded as an application of and an expansion on considerations that Friedrich Engels already developed in several writings and, in particular, in Dialectic of Nature and Anti-Dühring. In the ‘old introduction’ to the latter, written between 1875 and 1876, he stressed the historicity of all knowledge:

In every epoch, and therefore also in ours, theoretical thought is a historical product, which at different times assumes very different forms and, therewith, very different contents. The science of thought is therefore, like every other, a historical science, the science of the historical development of human thought…In the first place, the theory of the laws of thought is by no means an ‘eternal truth’ established once and for all. (Engels and Marx, 1987: 338–9; emphases added)

Historical consciousness meant for Engels a passage from metaphysics to dialectics, that is, from a static conception to a dynamic view of reality. History received epistemological import, since a reflection on science should take into account its development and vice versa scientific advance reveals the historical character of science.

II Science and historicity

The relation between science and history was debated among Marxists in the 1920s and 1930s. They regarded the status of science as crucial to properly defining the viewpoint and revolutionary theory of the communist camp. The ‘Marxist laboratory’ of historical epistemology emerged out of these debates. Among the different positions that of Bukharin, as defined especially in The Theory of Historical Materialism: A System of Sociology (1934[1921]), was an attempt to reduce Marxism to a positive science, namely sociology. Bukharin’s treatment of the history and philosophy of science was part of his wider project to forge a Marxist culture in support of the Soviet post-revolutionary state. However, his project met with the opposition not only of anti-communist intellectuals, but also of Marxists who conceived of historical materialism differently and disagreed on the form a socialist approach to culture should take. For a long time Russia had been the scene of heated debates concerning the relation between science and philosophy (Joravsky, 1961), and the accordance of Marxism and epistemology – especially in the form taken by Mach’s empirio-criticism (Steila, 1996).

II:1 Bukharin’s foundations of historical materialism

In the textbook of 1921, Historical Materialism, Bukharin begins his introduction to Marxist philosophy with a distinction between two branches of human sciences; the first is historical, the second theoretical (Bukharin, 1934[1921]: xiii). The most general social sciences, dealing with ‘the entire social life in all its fullness’, are history and sociology. Whereas the former is the reconstruction of the manner in which social life was organized in certain times and places, the latter is the abstract discipline answering questions about society in general. Bukharin explains:

It is evident from the above what relation exists between history and sociology. Since sociology explains the general laws of human evolution, it serves as a method for history. If, for example, sociology establishes the general doctrine that the forms of government depend on the forms of economy, the historian must seek and find, in any given epoch, precisely what are the relations, and must show what is their concrete, specific expression. History furnishes the material for drawing sociological conclusions and making sociological generalizations…Sociology in its turn formulates a definite point of view, a means of investigation, or…a method for history. (Bukharin, 1934[1921]: xiv)

Bukharin had already pointed to the distinction between theory and history in the Economic Theory (1927[1919]). There, he tackled the Methodenstreit between the Austrian school led by Carl Menger and the German historical school of Gustav von Schmoller. Against the former school Bukharin argued that economic theory should be based on historical grounds but also argued, against the latter, that theory should guide historical inquiry and receive material from history. In Historical Materialism, Bukharin explicitly stated that the ‘historicism of Marx has nothing in common with the so called “historical school” in jurisprudence and political economy’ (Bukharin, 1934[1921]: 71). He also repeated his conviction that theory guides historical investigation whereas history constitutes the empirical basis for theory. Moreover, social science and economy should strive toward predictions akin to those of physics. Such predictions are, in principle, possible. Bukharin did not restrict these assumptions to positive sciences and economics. He applied the same principles to historical materialism, that is, to Marxism and philosophy in general.

According to Bukharin, as one reads in Historical Materialism, sociology can be called ‘philosophy of history’ and ‘the theory of the historical process’. Marxist sociology coincides with historical materialism. What makes Marxist sociology superior to bourgeois theories about society is that, since the working class has no interest in maintaining the status quo, it is capable of grasping its historicity, that is, the transformative processes inherent in acting. ‘The proletariat is not interested in the preservation of the phenomena and is therefore more farsighted…Proletarian social science…is superior because it has a deeper and wider vision of the phenomena of social life’ (Bukharin, 1934[1921]: xii).

As Bukharin stressed in his London speech, ‘The class subjectivism of the forms of cognition in no way excludes the objective significance of cognition…but the specific methods of conception, in their historical progress, variously condition the process of the development of adequateness of cognition’ (Bukharin, 1931: 24). Hence, Bukharin regards scientific advance as a progressively accurate representation of reality through science according to a principle of adaequatio mentis ad rem (ibid.: 18): ‘Cognition, considered historically, is the more and more adequate reflection of objective reality. The fundamental criterion of the correctness of cognition is therefore the criterion of its adequateness, its degree of correspondence to objective reality.’

In Historical Materialism Bukharin argues at length in favor of materialism as opposed to idealism (Bukharin, 1934[1921]: 53 ff.). Similarly, the first section of the London speech of 1931 addresses the ‘fundamental questions of philosophy: the question of the objective reality of the external world, independent of the subject perceiving it, and the question of its cognisability’ (Bukharin, 1931: 11 ff.). In 1931, he argued that both the world’s objectivity and the possibility of knowing it are confirmed by practical activity as its presupposition. They are always confirmed de facto (ibid.: 16): ‘Epistemology which is praxeology must have its point of departure in the reality of the external world: not as a fiction, not as an illusion, not as a hypothesis, but as a basic fact.’

Besides materialism as the condition of scientific thought, Bukharin reflected on the aims of science. Scientists seek for general laws, either natural or social (Bukharin, 1934[1921]: 20): ‘In nature and society there is a definite regularity, a fixed natural law. The definition of this natural law is the first task of science. This causality in nature and society is objective.’ Therefore, it is to be expected that, just as astronomy predicts eclipses, sociology, or historical materialism, predicts social developments (ibid.: 51).

The continuity between nature and society or, rather, the inclusion of the latter in the former, leads Bukharin to the naturalization of social processes. This tendency is documented by several passages, in which he justifies historical materialism by making reference to natural phenomena or by explaining social processes through physical ones. For instance, the movement of matter and the biology of Lamarck and Darwin make it clear that society, as part of nature, must be subjected to change as well (Bukharin, 1934[1921]: 65). The dialectical law regulating nature as well as society is one and the same.

Bukharin reworks Hegelian dialectics in the naturalized form of a ‘theory of equilibrium’ that he had already formulated in his considerations on the NEP, Economics of the Transitional Period (1920; see Gerratana, 1977: xix–xx). He conceives of social equilibrium by analogy with ‘mechanical equilibrium, chemical equilibrium, biological equilibrium’ (Bukharin, 1934[1921]: 74). Revolutions mark the passage from a stable system to another stable system, just as nature does:

Revolutions in society are of the same character as the violent changes in nature. They do not suddenly ‘fall from the sky’. They are prepared by the entire preceding course of development, as the boiling water was prepared by the preceding process of heating or as the explosion of the steam-boiler is prepared by the increasing pressure of the steam against its walls. (Bukharin, 1931: 82)

Determinism is a basic element in Bukharin’s understanding of Marxist theory. Chapter Two of Historical Materialism is entirely dedicated to ‘Determinism and Indeterminism (Necessity and Free Will)’. In the conclusion of his London speech, he reaffirmed the same outlook (Bukharin, 1931: 28). As a consequence of his materialistic and deterministic conception, of his assimilation of historical materialism and sociology, and of the analogy between social sciences and natural sciences, Bukharin conceived of the socialist leap from the realm of necessity into the realm of freedom as a stoic and Spinozan acceptance of necessity: ‘Freedom is the recognition of necessity’ (Bukharin, 1934[1921]: 42).

II:2 Lukács’s criticism of Bukharin: ‘Sachlich falsch und unmarxistisch’

In Soviet Russia the publication of Bukharin’s introduction to historical materialism continued a philosophical debate opposing a camp of the so-called mechanists, to whom he was closer, and the dialecticians. The former group fought for the autonomy of science. They resisted philosophical attempts to align the sciences rigidly to the jargon of dialectics (the group included Ivan I. Skvortsov-Stepanov, Arkady K. Timiryazev and, to some extent, Lyubov A. Akselrod). By contrast the dialecticians, led by Abram Moiseyevich Deborin, insisted on the necessity of subordinating the natural sciences to their interpretation of Marxist philosophy (Kołakowski, 2005: 841). Furthermore, discussions about Bukharin’s views on historical materialism and its assimilation to sociology, as well as on the relation between Marxist theory and the natural sciences, were not limited to the Soviet Union. The Hungarian philosopher Lukács penned a harsh review of his conceptions after the publication of the German translation of his introduction to Historical Materialism as Theorie des historischen Materialismus: Gemeinverständliches Lehrbuch der marxistischen Soziologie (Hamburg, 1922) (Sochor, 1980: 707–12). This criticism was directed against the foundations of Bukharin’s conception of Marxism, i.e. materialism, scientism and determinism. According to Lukács’s opinion, Bukharin offers a unitary and systematic presentation of the most important questions of Marxism but his treatment is either bad or wrong. His book is affected by oversimplification [allzu vereifachend, schematisch], which distorts the issues of central relevance (Lukács, 1968: 598–9).

As far as the issue of materialism is concerned, Lukács does not consider it necessary to expand too much on the limitation of Bukharin’s philosophy which Marx and Engels would have regarded with contempt as ‘bürgerlicher Materialismus’. In this regard, he hints at Bukharin’s lack of consideration of Marx’s criticism of Feuerbach and at the legacy of German classical philosophy in Marx’s thought (Lukács, 1968: 600). The reference is to The German Ideology and the Theses on Feuerbach. Lukács regards Bukharin’s adherence to bourgeois materialism as the source of a scientific reworking of Marxism whose most significant outcome is a form of false objectivity concerning human reality:

Bukharin’s theory comes under the compass of the category of science, according to the French meaning of the term, since it comes very close to bourgeois materialism – which is deduced from the natural sciences. In its application to society and history, it at times blurs the central aspect of the Marxist method: the reduction of the entire economical and sociological phenomena to human social interrelations. [Bukharin’s] theory is marked by a false ‘objectivity.’ It becomes fetishist. (Lukács, 1968: 600)

Metaphysical materialism and scientism result in historical determinism which, in Lukacs’s judgement, is mirrored by an illegitimate reversal of (Marxist) priority of economy over the Technik. This is a reversal of the priority of social evolution over technical advance. A technical-based determinism therefore results in the form of a wrong identification of technical capacity and productive forces [Identifizierung der Technik mit den Produktivkräften]. This form of ‘falscher Naturalismus’ implies that social development is the effect of technical development. But the relation is exactly the opposite:

If technology is not understood as a moment of particular systems of production, if its development is not explained by the development of the social forces of production…it is a fetishist principle, similar to ‘nature,’ climate, milieu, raw materials, etc. which transcends and is antipodal to humanity. (Lukács, 1968: 602)

Lukács offers two examples illustrating the priority of economy over technology. The first one is the passage from antiquity to the Middle Ages showing that different social constellations produced differently oriented technology. Lukács draws on Max Weber’s thesis that slavery hindered the development of guilds in antiquity and thus did not permit the formation of modern towns. Medieval technology hinged on a principle of efficiency [Arbeitsvollzug] whereas technology in the ancient world was evaluated only from the outcome [Arbeitsresultat]. In fact, slavery made an increase of efficiency unnecessary and undesirable. ‘It is not the imperfect development of technology that makes slavery possible. It is rather the contrary. Slavery as the dominating working mode makes the rationalization of the working process and – as a consequence – the emergence of a rational technology impossible’ (Lukács, 1968: 603). Thus, social evolution explains technical evolution, and not vice versa. The second example is the Industrial Revolution. Lukács argues that the passage from medieval production to industrial production is not the result of a technological revolution [keine Umwälzung der Technik]. It is rather the opposite: the division of work characteristic of capitalism creates the social environment which is the conditio sine qua non of modern machine technology. Industrialization is the acme [die Krönung und Vollendung] of modern capitalism, not its source (ibid.: 604).

According to Lukács, a fundamental error descending from Bukharin’s scientism is his reduction of historical materialism to sociology – a ‘Versuch, aus der Dialektik eine science zu machen’ [an attempt to transform the dialectic into a science]. Scientism and determinism are closely connected, too, as shown by the affirmation of the predictability of the phenomena in sociology ebenso wie in den Naturwissenschaften [just as in the natural sciences]. Methodologically, this reduction of social science to natural science results in the identification of social tendencies and natural laws. For Lukács in this period of his intellectual development, this identification is simply unacceptable. The difference between the exactitude of natural predictions and the tendencies of social sciences is not a sign of the imperfection of present knowledge. Rather, it rests on a difference ex parte objecti between nature and the social realm [objective qualitative Differenz der Gegenstände selbst]. Lukács derives this distinction from Marx’s third thesis on Feuerbach (Marx, 1976: 4). To understand the contingency of human affairs is fundamental for political action, in primis revolutionary praxis (such as Lenin’s umwälzende Praxis) (Lukács, 1968: 607).

II:3 Gramsci’s historicist criticism of Bukharin

Gramsci’s criticism of Bukharin was produced between 1932 and 1933 when he was a political prisoner of the Italian fascist regime. It is in many respects akin to Lukács’s but is much more detailed. Gramsci dedicated the central part of the 11^th of his Prison Notebooks to detecting the shortcomings of Bukharin’s synthesis of Marxist philosophy. Gramsci knew the latter’s general introduction to Marxist philosophy, probably in the French edition (La théorie du matérialisme historique: Manuel populaire de sociologie marxiste, 1921) since he used this text for the school educating members of the Italian Communist Party, in 1925 (Catone, 2008: 85 ff.). In 1931, Gramsci also received in prison Science at the Cross Roads, the collection of papers presented to the International Congress of the History of Science and Technology by the Soviet delegates, and could read Bukharin’s talk (Gramsci, 1965: 474). Yet, whatever his initial opinion on Bukharin might have been, by the time he penned his criticism, in 1932–3, it was quite negative. So much so that the 11^th Prison Notebook is also known as ‘Anti-Bukharin’ (Frosini, 2003: 103–4).

Like Lukács, Grasmci regarded Bukharin’s metaphysical materialism and ‘positivistic tendency’ as misled. Resting on Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach, he rejected philosophical materialism as a contemplative worldview. In his eyes, such a metaphysical conception supported a passive and fatalistic conception of human history as ruled by extra-human forces. By contrast Historical Materialism is a philosophy of action [filosofia della praxis] or, rather, a philosophy in action. Thus, Marx did not conceive of reality as independent of human activity (Frosini, 2003: 87).

Concerning the issue of objectivity, Gramsci assumes no reality independent of human activity and manipulation. He redefines ‘objectivity’ in historical terms: ‘Objective always means “humanly objective”. This can exactly correspond to “historically objective”.’ ‘Also objectivity is a becoming’ (Gramsci, 2007: 1415–16). There is no place left for an ‘extra-historical and extra-human’ objectivity, for a ‘viewpoint of the cosmos in itself’ (ibid.: 1415). Science cannot provide us with the certainty of a fixed and independent objectivity, since that ‘external world’ is a metaphysical presupposition (ibid.: 1455).

Matter is also not perceived in itself and grasped independently of manipulation. Matter is never given. Rather, it is a historical construct, a theory (Gramsci, 2007: 1442). Gramsci takes the example of the atom. The atomic theory – he argues – is a historical product and has to be explained historically. It cannot be the other way round: atomism cannot account for human history (ibid.: 1445).

Bukharin’s pseudo-scientific outlook, especially his mechanistic and deterministic views of history, should be criticized beginning with the very idea of science: ‘Actually, the very concept of science [of Bukharin]…ought to be critically destroyed; it is taken from natural sciences as if they were the only science, the science par excellence in the positivistic meaning’ (Gramsci, 2007: 1404).

Following the philosophical perspective of Antonio Labriola, Gramsci supported the Marxist philosophy of praxis as self-sufficient from any other philosophical school (such as metaphysical materialism and various forms of idealism, like Kantianism). According to this approach, the scientific basis of the natural sciences is rooted in a historical ground whose theory is provided by Marx. Due to its foundational character, the philosophy of praxis cannot derive its objectivity from natural science. As to the necessity underlying historical developments, as Gramsci wrote, one can scientifically foresee the struggle but not its concrete moments (Gramsci, 2007: 1403). Marxist history cannot expect certitudes similar to those of the natural sciences. It is rather the opposite: science has to be historicized and understood through praxis. Human actions are predictable only to the extent that they are heteronomous, that is to say, to the extent that they are constrained through mechanisms of coercion and propaganda. Necessity is serfdom to the interests of a dominating class. Since the political struggle of the subaltern classes is directed toward self-determination, both the path to emancipation and also the success of the revolutionary praxis are a leap from the realm of necessity into the realm of freedom (ibid.: 1244).

Also drawing on Hegelian interpretations of Marx by Italian neo-idealists (Omodeo, 2010: 55–8), Gramsci argued that historical materialism could not coincide with sociology, that is, with a positivistic and essentially ahistorical theory of society. And it is precisely in this respect that he rejected Bukharin’s separation of theory and history as two different approaches to human reality:

The root of all the errors in the book and of its author (whose position has not changed…as is evident from the considerations presented at the London conference) consists in this pretension to divide the philosophy of praxis into two parts: a ‘sociology’ and a systematical philosophy. If philosophy is separated from the theory of history and of politics, it cannot be but metaphysics. This is at odds with the great achievement in this history of modern thought culminating with the philosophy of praxis, namely the concrete historization of philosophy and its identification with history. (Gramsci, 2007: 1426; my translation)

For Bukharin, history is an epiphenomenon of nature, and therefore philosophy of history is subordinated to natural science. For Gramsci it is the opposite. Since ‘nature’ is a historical product, natural science is dependent on the philosophy of history.

No matter how distant his theoretical positions on the status of science could be, Gramsci as a political leader shared Bukharin’s concern about the political relevance of the issue and about the necessity to engage in the ‘struggle of political hegemonies’ (Gramsci, 2007: 1385). He was convinced that the affirmation of socialism depended on its capacity for substituting the hegemony of the ruling classes not only through the use of force but also through the construction of a wide consensus – that is, on the capacity of the working class to direct collectivity on the political-economical level as well as on the cultural one (Cospito, 2004: 89). Yet, he disagreed with Bukharin on the manner in which the ‘struggle of ideologies’ should be conducted. His harsh criticism of Bukharin ultimately rested on the fact that he regarded the latter as an adversary in cultural matters. Gramsci was convinced that Bukharin’s views could undermine the success of the socialist cause by promoting fatalistic determinism rather than action, and produce an arrest of the political advance of the subaltern classes. As to the anticipation of Cold War divides, Gramsci was no less prophetic (or programmatic) than Bukharin (Gramsci, 2007: 1434): ‘A theory is “revolutionary” insofar as it is an element of separation and of conscious distinction between two camps, since it is inaccessible to the opposite camp.’

III Marxist historiography of science and the anti-communist reaction

Critical perspectives on scientism such as those expressed in the 1930s by Lukács and Gramsci were to re-emerge in the socialist historiography of science in the cultural turn of the 1970s. Gramsci especially became a reference point for the New Left. He became more greatly appreciated due to the growing international interest in his ideas in the 1960s, as well as the de-Stalinization of the USSR and the prestige of the Italian Communist Party. Eventually, the first significant translation of the Prison Notebooks in English (by Hoare and Nowell Smith, 1971) permitted a wide reception of his ideas (Hobsbawm, 2011: 314–33). In this changing climate, Gramsci benefited from increased attention in the science studies. This occurred thanks to the efforts of scholars such as Perry Anderson, E. P. Thompson, Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall who sought to overcome earlier Marxist approaches à la Bernal, which were convicted of ‘economic determinism, naive externalism and uncritical scientism’ (Nieto-Galan, 2011: 454; cf. Cooter, 1984: xi).

These are the later developments. Before the turn of the 1970s, polemics against scientism made thinkers such as Gramsci dubious, as historians and philosophers of science tended to regard their positions as stances against the natural sciences and scientific culture tout court (e.g. Geymonat, 1958). Up to the 1970s most of the Marxist historians of science and their opponents looked at Bukharin and his group as a reference point of ‘externalist’ historiography in general. Hence, after discussing the theoretical framework of the Marxist reflections on historical epistemology, I would like to take a closer look at the perspective on history of science launched by the Soviet delegates and the counter-project that took shape, as a reaction, on the other side of the Iron Curtain (Omodeo, 2016).

III:1 Bukharin’s theses on science

Bukharin dedicates a large section of Historical Materialism to science, philosophy and their mutual relations, in his chapter VI (‘The Equilibrium between the Elements of Society’) dealing with the relationship between the structure, i.e. the economic basis, and the superstructure, i.e. ‘the social and political system of society…manners, customs and morals…science and philosophy; religion, art, and finally, language’ (Bukharin, 1934[1921]: 150). As already mentioned, according to Bukharin science belongs to the realm of ideology. ‘Social ideology’ – he writes – ‘will mean for us the system of thoughts, feelings or rules of conduct (norms) and will therefore include such phenomena as the content of science (not a telescope or the personal staff of a chemical laboratory) and art, the totality of norms, customs, morals, etc.’ Ideology has to be distinguished from social psychology, i.e. ‘the non-systematized or but little systematized feelings, thoughts and moods found in the given society, group, profession, etc.’ (ibid.: 208). The difference between the two lies in their degree of systematization. Science, in particular, is systematized by philosophy, which, on its part, rests on the accomplishments of the science (Bukharin, 1931: 161). According to this philosophical synthesis, ‘science is a unified coordinated system of thoughts, embracing any subject of knowledge in its harmony’ (Bukharin, 1934[1921]: 208).

The fundamental principle of epistemology, Bukharin writes, is that ‘every science is born from practice’ (Bukharin, 1934[1921]: 161) or, as he put it in the London speech, ‘science or theory is the continuation of practice’. Its social function is ‘orientation in the external world and in society, the function of extending and deepening practice, increasing its effectiveness, the function of a peculiar struggle with nature’ (Bukharin, 1931: 20). Accordingly, science is closely connected with and dependent on technological advance. This emerges from two basic theses concerning science (Bukharin, 1934[1921]: 169): ‘1. That the content of science is given by the content of technology and economy; 2. That its development was determined among other things by the tools of scientific knowledge.’ As to the first point, Bukharin remarked that the technical-economical basis of scientific advance is witnessed by many historical cases in which different scholars carried out discoveries simultaneously and independently from each other (ibid.: 164).

Note that, according to Bukharin, the practical determination of science does not mean a utilitarian (Baconian) conception: ‘It is not a question of the direct practical importance of any individual principle…It is a question of system as a whole’ (Bukharin, 1931: 20). It is also a question, from a historical viewpoint, of recognizing ‘that genetically theory grew up out of practice’ (ibid.: 19). In this respect, Bukharin often referred to Mach. Although he did not follow empirio-criticism, he deemed that this philosophy offered useful and correct historical reconstructions, based on the premise that science emerges as a continuation of practice.

The Soviet delegate Boris Hessen offered arguments in support of the practice-oriented and technique-oriented perspective on science in his talk on ‘The Social and Economic Roots of Newton’s Principia’. His thesis can be summarized in the following three points (Freudenthal and McLaughlin, 2009: 2–3):

Theoretical mechanics developed in the study of machine technology;

Conversely, in those areas where 17th-century scientists could not draw on existing technology the corresponding disciplines of physics did not develop;

Ideological (theological) constraints descending from the political sphere affected crucial philosophical concepts of Newton’s physics (such as matter).

The fact that the unity of theory and practice is obscure to most scientists and philosophers of science, Bukharin argued, is a social-historical by-product of the labor division in a class society. In capitalist society, specialization and abstraction go hand in hand. The relative separation between theory and praxis is due to the fact that the social roots and the social aims of science are obscured by specialization and labor division, which ensure that both the roots and aims are not universally evident. Instead, the aims are mediated by a society in which intellectual labor and physical labor are maintained as separate and the latter is subordinated to the former. Bukharin sees one aim of socialist society as to blur progressively the distinction between intellectual and physical work. In his vision of the future, theory and practice are destined to merge, and the connection between science and the economy will be established on a new basis since economic planning provides the model for scientific planning.

III:2 Reception of and reaction to Marxist historical epistemology

After the Second World War, a small but intellectually acute and visible group of historians, especially in the West, continued the line traced by the Soviet delegates and produced significant social and material accounts of the history of science (Young, 1990). As to the Wirkungsgeschichte of the Soviet challenge, Joseph Needham, in the 2^nd edition of Science at the Cross Roads (1971), claimed that a flourishing externalist tradition of studies in the history of science had emerged following the 1931 conference. According to him, ‘[Hessen’s] essay, with all its unsophisticated bluntness, had a great influence during the subsequent forty years’ (Needham, 1971: viii). Needham also acknowledged that his own multi-volume Science and Civilisation in China (the first volume was published in 1954) was a result of stimuli from Bukharin, Hessen and the other Soviet delegates. In a certain sense, the sociology of science launched by Robert Merton was also linked with the same Marxist legacy.¹ In ‘Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth-Century England’ (1938), he stated that he received from Hessen important insights concerning the relation between science, technology and society in the age of Isaac Newton (Merton, 1938: 501–2, n. 24).

Bukharin and his group’s provocation influenced significant developments of the history of science after the Second World War in positive as well as in negative ways. Science at the Cross Roads marked the beginning of an ideological bifurcation documented, in the 1940s, by the theoretical opposition between Edgar Zilsel’s materialist approach to early-modern science and Koyré’s intellectual historiography, and by the clash between ‘internalist’ and ‘externalist’ historians of science. Just as externalist history of science emerged from the Marxist camp, the internalist line had an ideological character as well. The latter was marked by political and politico-cultural concerns no less than the former. As a matter of fact, the majority of western historians of science responded to the Soviet challenge by wiping out from their considerations all elements external to pure theory. In this manner they, so to say, threw out the baby with the bath water (Porter, 1990: 35). Earlier authors, who did not belong to Marxist historiography and philosophy of science but nonetheless stressed material or social aspects in the genesis and development of science, were also generally marginalized from the prevailing narrative, as was the case with Ernst Mach, Leonardo Olschki and to some extent, Ludwik Fleck.

As indicated by Wolfgang Lefèvre (Lefèvre, 2001: 11–13) Koyré’s 1943 essay ‘Galileo and Plato’ can be seen as a manifesto of the opposite, anti-communist line. His article begins with a brief overview of his adversaries’ theses (Koyré, 1943: 400):

This revolution [the Scientific Revolution] is sometimes characterized, and at the same time explained, as a kind of spiritual upheaval, an utter transformation of the whole fundamental attitude of the human mind; the active life, the vita activa [i.e. the πράξιϛ] taking the place of the θεωρία, the vita contemplativa, which until then had been considered its highest form…[According to this perspective,] the science of Descartes – and a fortiori that of Galilei – is nothing else than (as has been said) the science of the craftsman or of the engineer.

Koyré is quick to add: ‘I must confess that I do not believe this explanation to be entirely correct.’ Actually, his intention is to show that that explanation is completely wrong. He reduces the practical and social reconstruction of early-modern science to a form of Baconianism: ‘The attitude we have just described is much more that of Bacon…than that of Galileo or Descartes’ (Koyré, 1943: 400–1). This is the typical misunderstanding of Bukharin’s and Hessen’s positions. Koyré confuses individual intentions with social functions and does not distinguish between perceived application of knowledge and socio-economic factors that support certain scientific practices and lines of natural investigation. Koyré claims that Galileo’s and Descartes’s ‘science is not made by engineers or craftsmen, but by men who seldom built or made anything more real than a theory’ (ibid.: 401). This is his main point. Galileo’s mathematized physics was a form of Platonic contemplation of the numbers and geometries hidden behind the natural phenomena. Just as Galileo was a Platonist (ibid.: 424), the Scientific Revolution was a ‘spiritual revolution’ (ibid.: 403).

The anti-Marxist intentions of this perspective are clearly documented by a dense footnote in the ‘Galileo and Plato’ article (Koyré, 1943: 401, n. 6), in which Koyré contrasts his own views with those of Marxist exponents. He does not mention the Soviet papers of the 1931 conference, but rather indicates two works stemming from the Frankfurter Schule: Franz Borkenau’s Der Übergang von feudalen zum bürgerlichen Weltbild (published in Paris, 1934) and Henryk Grossmann’s rectification, ‘Die gesellschaftlichen Grundlagen der mechanistischen Philosophie und die Manufaktur’ (also published in Paris, 1935). Whereas Borkenau’s image of ‘Descartes’ artisan’ is quickly dismissed as an ‘absurdity’, Grossmann’s writing is referenced only for its criticism of Borkenau’s too simplistic economicism, and not for its counter-proposal, which in many respects coincides with that of Hessen (as discussed by Freudenthal and McLaughlin, 2009). After them, Koyré then turns to Leonardo Olschki. He treats the latter’s interpretation of Renaissance science as the outcome of the technological culture of the late Middle Ages, especially in Italy, as if it was just the same interpretative line supported by Borkenau, Grossmann and Zilsel. For that, Olschki also has to be banned from historiography of science. Koyré also mentions Zilsel’s essay ‘The Sociological Roots of Science’ (1942) for its stress on ‘the role played by the “superior artisans” of the Renaissance in the development of the modern scientific mentality’. Note that for Koyré science cannot be anything else than a progression of mind, even when presenting the viewpoints of those who stress its extra-mental origins. It is remarkable that Koyré makes no mention of the Soviet papers of 1931. In general, he avoided mentioning even the name of Marx apart from one lapsus, in a postscript of 1961 to an essay of 1930, ‘Les études hégeliennes en France’, which is revelatory of his profound aversion to Marx and his followers:

[One should mention], last but not least, the rise of Soviet Russia as a world power and the victories of the communist armies and ideologies…Hegel genuit [generated] Marx; Marx genuit Lenin; Lenin genuit Stalin. (Cf. Elkana, 1987: 141; my translation)

To sum up Koyré’s perspective, he intentionally construed an immaterial and spiritualist alternative to the ‘dangerous’ social and material historiography of science. Thereby he inaugurated a politically correct historiography that was to be embraced by influential US scholars. Among them, Thomas Kuhn, who was a close collaborator of the anti-communist designer of education policies, James B. Conant (Marcum, 2005: 5–9 and Fuller, 2000: chs 3 and 4), praised Koyré as one of the most important recent scholars in his field right at the beginning of his most celebrated work in historical epistemology, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962). In this classic of historical epistemology, Koyré’s name appears together with those of other historians pursuing purely intellectual history and, most prominently, Arthur O. Lovejoy, whose approach to the developments of ideas was perfectly fit to an immaterial historiography (Kuhn, 1962: viii). In another essay, Kuhn extolled the merits of Koyré, in particular of his Études galiléennes (published in Paris in 1939), as a work inaugurating a novel approach to the history of science, namely an abstractly intellectual interpretation of Galileo’s achievement and legacy:

Within a decade of their appearance, they [the Études galiléennes] and his subsequent work provided the model which historians of science increasingly aimed to emulate. More than any other scholar, Koyré was responsible for…the historiographical revolution. (Kuhn, 1970: 67)

Probably, as Kuhn once observed relative to the ‘internalist–externalist debate’, this Koyréan Historiographical Revolution was also ‘about issues different from the ones its name suggests, and the resulting confusion is sometimes damaging’ (Kuhn, 1977: 32, n. 1). The immateriality, or ‘Platonism’, of Koyré’s proposal offered an alternative to outdated positivism, which, at the same time, avoided the pitfalls of socio-economic historiography. This conferred upon Koyréan history of science all the characteristics needed for the construction of an anti-communist history and philosophy of science.

III:3 The Harvard Entwurf of a philosophy of science for a ‘free society’

Kuhn’s bias toward Koyré befits the militant and anti-communist cultural climate of the 1940s and 1950s.² These are the years in which the Austrian economist Friedrich A. Hayek prepared the terrain for the Cold War, arguing, in his free-market manifesto The Road to Serfdom, ‘that fascism and communism are merely variants of the same totalitarianism which central control of all economic activity tends to produce’ (Hayek, 1976[1944]: vii). Another Austrian, the philosopher of science Karl Raimund Popper, was no less assertive in his attacks against the opponents of liberalism. Beginning in the 1940s, he alternated between epistemological works on the logic of scientific discovery and attacks against the ‘enemies’ of the ‘open society’ (Popper, 1945) and the ‘poverty’ of historicism (Popper, 1957), which he equated to a form of anti-democratic and impersonal prophesying (cf. Hacohen, 2000). As to Kuhn’s Harvard, his mentor, the University president James Conant, was one of those designing the new political-cultural direction of the country. He occupied crucial positions during the Second World War: in 1940 he became a member of the National Defense Research Committee and one year later he became its chair. He then entered the cabinet supervising the atomic bomb project and had direct responsibility for the uranium fission (Bartlett, 1983: 100). In the 1950s, Conant became chairman of the anti-communist Committee on the Present Danger.

Kuhn was still a student when he first became acquainted with Conant. During the wartime years he made himself visible through his public declarations in favor of the president’s political views. He authored an editorial in the daily student newspaper, The Harvard Crimson, in which ‘he supported Conant’s effort to militarize the universities in the United States. The editorial came to the attention of the administration, and eventually Conant and Kuhn met’ (Marcum, 2005: 6). In those years Conant had also organized a committee whose task was to outline the program for ‘a General Education in a Free Society’. The ideological commitment was unconcealed. Conant, in his autobiography, would call himself a ‘Social Inventor’ (Conant, 1970). Kuhn of course greatly benefited from the power and visibility of his mentor (Fuller, 2000: xiv).

Part of Conant’s educational project was to disseminate scientific knowledge among the general public, in an age when scientific-technological programs required the support of wide public opinion. At Harvard he planned classes on the history of science for upper-level undergraduates, merging humanities and sciences. In 1947, he appointed Kuhn as an assistant and, in the fall of the following year, sponsored him with a Harvard junior fellowship, which Kuhn spent to initiate his investigation of the history and philosophy of science. One of the first fruits of this research was his textbook on early-modern astronomy, The Copernican Revolution (1959[1957]), which appeared in Conant’s series of ‘Case Histories in Experimental Science’ (Swerdlow, 2004: 71–6). In the preface Kuhn cherished his benefactor:

Many friends and colleagues, by their advice and criticism, have helped to shape this book, but none has left so large or significant a mark as Ambassador James B. Conant [At that time Conant was U.S. Ambassador in Western Germany]. (Kuhn, 1959[1957]: xi)

In return, Conant endowed Kuhn’s book with a foreword, notwithstanding the fact that Kuhn supported a view of scientific advance as marked by ruptures and revolutions (his later theory of paradigms and scientific revolutions) which was at odds with Conant’s idea of steady cumulativeness (Reisch 2016). His foreword to Kuhn began with a reference to the ideological curtain that was being erected in the aftermath of the Second World War:

In Europe west of the Iron Curtain, the literary tradition in education still prevails. An educated man or woman is a person who has acquired a mastery of several tongues and retained a working knowledge of the art and literature of Europe. By a working knowledge I do not refer to a scholarly command of the ancient and modern classics or a sensitive critical judgment of style or form; rather, I have in mind a knowledge which can be readily worked into a conversation at a suitable social gathering. An education based on a carefully circumscribed literary tradition has several obvious advantages: the distinction between the 5 to 10 percent of the population who are thus educated and the others makes itself evident almost automatically when ladies and gentlemen converse. (Kuhn, 1959[1957]: xv)

Conant’s words imply that east of the Iron Curtain the humanistic tradition had been interrupted along with the expulsion of aristocrats, ‘ladies, and gentlemen’. He implicitly excluded the communist camp from the ‘Western culture’, which he celebrated as the educational basis for the free society of which he considered himself a social inventor. The ideological intention is clear. The reader will also note that in the above-mentioned passage an elitist understanding of culture prevails, where ‘culture’ is the privilege of a small group of conversant gentlefolk, who are not to be confused with the general populace. Moreover, the reader should note the Eurocentric viewpoint.

Koyré was no less elitist and Eurocentric than Conant (he was a ‘hardcore elitist’, according to Elkana, 1987: 129). His famous From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe was affected by acute Hellenophilia: ‘The conception of the infinity of the universe, like everything else or nearly everything else, originates, of course, with the Greeks’ (Conner, 2005: 117). In the cultural climate of the 1940s and the 1950s, his philosophy became the paradigm for an elitist-rationalistic, Eurocentric and spiritualized history of science, to be opposed to the economy-and-technology narrative of those sympathizing with the socialist camp. On his part, Kuhn did not limit himself to continue the Koyréan program for the history of science. He also implemented on its basis a politically correct philosophy.

I would like to stress that the resulting epistemology was irreconcilable with the most important theses of the Marxist program outlined by the Soviet scholars before the Second World War.³ As a matter of fact, the socio-economic approach that prevailed among eastern scholars was irreconcilable with crucial elements of Kuhnian epistemology:

Irrelevance of the economic structure: in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions no technical or practical aspects significantly account for the historical development of science. The economic factor is completely absent. Thus, the structure underlying science has nothing to do with the socio-economic basis. It rather refers to conceptual frameworks. Science is a cumulative but discontinuous intellectual process, framed in conceptual structures and punctuated by revolutions of thought. On this account, Kuhn has been regarded as ‘a Kantian with movable categories’ (Marcum, 2005: 18).

Individualism of discovery: Kuhn’s scientists are not creative as a collectivity but only, rarely, as individuals. The community of those practising ‘normal science’ is rather a conservative majority. Accordingly, Kuhn assumes that scientific discovery is individual. As one reads in the Structure: ‘The major turning points in scientific development [are] associated with the names of Copernicus, Newton, Lavoisier, and Einstein’ (Kuhn, 1962: 6).

Mysticism of discovery: Kuhn does not dismiss or explain the mystery of discovery, in one word, geniality, which is the inexplicable element in intellectual history: ‘The new paradigm…emerges all at once, sometimes in the middle of the night, in the mind of a man deeply immersed in crisis’ (Kuhn, 1962: 89–90).

Contingency of historical development: the development of science is contingent. Kuhn, even more than Koyré, was convinced of this. A historiography centered on technology and economy menaced the fostering of deterministic views. This, at least, was Bukharin’s idea of Marxist historiography, on which his program in History and Philosophy of Science (HPS) also rested. This could be seen as the weak point of Marxist historiography, namely determinism. What Koyré and Kuhn were probably unaware of (or rather not interested in) was the fact that Bukharin’s naturalization of social processes was also debated in a lively way and even criticized from within the Marxist camp.

Summary and concluding remarks

To summarize, although the question of the ideological embedding of science had already been raised in the 19^th century – for instance, by Engels in Anti-Dühring and Dialektik der Natur – nonetheless it is only in the 1930s that the focus of ideological criticism shifted from epistemology to historiography. Nikolai Bukharin’s publications and talks (especially his popular introduction to Historical Materialism and his communication at the International Congress on the History of Science and Technology, London, 1931) produced a debate echoed by other Marxist intellectuals such as György Lukács and Antonio Gramsci. Whereas Bukharin regarded science as the basis for Marxist philosophy, and therefore emphasized the cultural relevance of the history and philosophy of science, his Marxist opponents criticized his naturalization of history and society, a tendency that could be collected under the label ‘historical determinism’. They rather stressed the radical historicity of knowledge and the priority of philosophy reflecting on the historical foundations of human reality over scientific epistemology and metaphysical materialism.

After the 1930s and the Second World War, although eastern historians of science continued with their socio-economic approach, their forerunners were not duly acknowledged. Bukharin and most of the delegates of 1931 had been eliminated during Stalin’s purges. Hence, at the Moscow Congress on the History of Science and Technology in 1971 their legacy was celebrated not by Russian but by British scholars. On that occasion, the Edinburgh lecturer in Science Studies, P. G. Werskey, produced a second edition of Science at the Cross Roads aimed at reflecting ‘upon this influential work forty years on’. In the foreword of this new edition Needham lamented the ‘tragic fact of the disappearance of so many of these delegates in the years after the Congress, according to the dreadful principle that all revolutions devour their own children’ (Needham, 1971: ix). He recounted that, after London, he had had the occasion to meet only one of the members of Bukharin’s delegation again, Professor Kolman, at the 11^th International Congress of the History of Science that had taken place in Poland in 1965. In the ‘New Introduction’ to Science at the Cross Roads Werskey remarked upon the British reception of its ideas by scholars such as Needham and Bernal, and the paradoxical circulation of these conceptions on both sides of the Iron Curtain:

When we realize that an important part of Bernal’s thinking on planned science derived from Bukharin (persona non grata to this day in the U.S.S.R.), we cannot miss the irony of this intellectual debt here repaid. The high esteem in which Bernal is held in Russia has thus helped scholars in that country to return circuitously to the work of their fellow-countrymen in the 1920s. (Werskey, 1971: xxiv)

Between London 1931 and Moscow 1971, Marxist historiography and philosophy of science produced tangible effects on the history of science, such as the ideological bifurcation between Koyréan and post-Koyréan intellectual historiography and Zilsel’s and other Marxists’ materialist approach to science. In the formalized competition between ‘internalists’ and ‘externalists’ reference to the Marxist institutionalization of the querelle was not always explicit (Shapin, 1992: 339). ‘The analogy which springs to mind’ – Robert Young has observed – ‘is that of a planet which is not seen but is inferred because of the perturbations of other planets due to the gravitational effect of the unseen one’ (Young, 1990: 77). In extreme cases, like that of the philosopher of science, Karl Popper, anti-communism was vehement (Popper, 1997: 13–21); in what manner and to what extent Popper’s hatred of all forms of historicism (but especially Marxism) determined his abstract and ahistorical understanding of science still has to be more deeply understood. However, in the history of science Kuhn’s historical epistemology had a significant impact; it was direct and enduring. Kuhn’s approach, renouncing socio-economic considerations, was less explicitly political than Popper’s. However, he sensed that the internalist–externalist divide had a meaning going far beyond academic controversies.

In fact, the opposition between different approaches to the history and philosophy of science had cultural-political roots. The choice between a socio-economic and a technical-conceptual treatment of science signaled adherence to opposite views on history, society and politics in the divided age of a bi-polar world. A clear reflection on this political-cultural location in the Cold War climate has often been overshadowed by claims about the objectivity and neutrality of science and its historiography. The seminal discussions of the 1930s remain one of the most lucid moments of reflection about the role of science and history of science as cultural phenomena shaped by political struggles. In particular, Bukharin’s engagement and Gramsci’s views on culture, ideology and the intellectuals are crucial points in the assessment of the interrelations between science, history and cultural hegemony.

Footnotes

Notes

References

Bartlett

P. D.

(1983) James Bryant Conant 1893–1978: A Biographical Memoir. Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences.

Bernal

J. D.

(1949) The Freedom of Necessity. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Bukharin

(1927[1919]) The Economic Theory of the Leisure Class. New York: International Publishers.

Bukharin

(1931) ‘Theory and Practice from the Standpoint of Dialectical Materialism’, in Science at the Cross Roads: Papers presented to the International Congress of the History of Science and Technology. London: Kniga, pp. 9–33.

Bukharin

(1934[1921]) Historical Materialism: A System of Sociology. New York: International Publishers.

Catone

(2008) ‘Gramsci, Bucharin e la scienza’ [Gramsci, Bukharin and Science], in Palladini Musitelli

(ed.) Gramsci e la scienza: Storicità e attualità delle note gramsciane sulla scienza [Gramsci and Science: Historical Meaning and Current Validity of Gramsci’s Notes on Science]. Trieste: Istituto Gramsci del Friuli Venezia Giulia, pp. 81–108.

Conant

J. B.

(1970) My Several Lives, Memoirs of a Social Inventor. New York: Harper & Row.

Conner

C. D.

(2005) A People’s History of Science: Miners, Midwives, and ‘Low Mechanics’. New York: Nation Books.

Cooter

(1984) The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science: Phrenology and the Organization of Consent in Nineteenth-century Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

10.

Cospito

(2004) ‘Egemonia’ [Hegemony], in Le parole di Gramsci: Per un lessico dei Quaderni del carcere [Gramsci’s Words: Towards a Lexicon of the Prison Notebooks]. Rome: Carocci, pp. 74–92.

11.

Elkana

(1987) ‘Alexandre Koyré: Between the History of Ideas and Sociology of Disembodied Knowledge’, History and Technology 4: 115–48.

12.

Engels

Marx

(1987) Collected Works, vol. 25. London: Lawrence & Wishart.

13.

Freudenthal

McLaughlin

, eds (2009) The Social and Economic Roots of the Scientific Revolution: Texts by Boris Hessen and Henryk Grossmann. Dordrecht: Springer.

14.

Frosini

(2003) Gramsci e la filosofia. Saggio sui Quaderni del carcere [Gramsci and Philosophy: An Essay on the Prison Notebooks]. Rome: Carocci.

15.

Fuller

(2000) Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times. Chicago, IL and London: Chicago University Press.

16.

Gerratana

(1977) ‘Presentazione’ [Preface], in Bucharin

, Teoria del materialismo storico: Manuale popolare di sociologia marxista [Theory of Historical Materialism: Popular Handbook of Marxist Sociology]. Florence: La Nuova Italia, pp. v–xxxvii.

17.

Geymonat

(1958) ‘Per un intervento al convegno di studi gramsciani’ [Contribution to the Conference of Gramscian Studies], in Studi gramsciani [Gramscian Studies]. Rome: Editori Riuniti, pp. 147–8.

18.

Gramsci

(1965) Lettere dal carcere [Prison Letters]. Turin: Einaudi.

19.

Gramsci

(1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Hoare

Nowell Smith

. London: Lawrence & Wishart.

20.

Gramsci

(2007) Quaderni del carcere [Prison Notebooks]. Turin: Einaudi.

21.

Hacohen

M. H.

(2000) Karl Popper: The Formative Years, 1902–1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

22.

Hayek

F. A.

(1976[1944]) The Road to Serfdom. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

23.

Hobsbawm

(2011) How to Change the World: Reflections on Marx and Marxism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

24.

Joravsky

(1961) Soviet Marxism and Natural Science. New York: Columbia University Press.

25.

Kołakowski

(2005) Main Currents of Marxism, 3 vols. New York and London: W. W. Norton.

26.

Koyré

(1943) ‘Galileo and Plato’, Journal of the History of Ideas 4: 400–28.

27.

Kuhn

T. S.

(1959[1957]) The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought. New York: Random House.

28.

Kuhn

T. S.

(1962) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

29.

Kuhn

T. S.

(1970) ‘Alexandre Koyré and the History of Science’, Encounter 34: 67–9.

30.

Kuhn

T. S.

(1977) The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change. Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press.

31.

Laclau

Mouffe

(1985) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, 2nd edn. London and New York: Verso.

32.

Lefèvre

(2001) ‘Galileo Engineer: Art and Modern Science’, in Renn

(ed.) Galileo in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 11–27.

33.

Lipset

S. M.

Ladd

E. C.

(1972) ‘The Politics of American Sociologists’, American Journal of Sociology 78(1): 67–104.

34.

Lukács

(1968) ‘N. Bucharin: Theorie des historischen Materialismus’ [N. Bukharin: Theory of Historical Materialism], in Lukács

, Werke, Frühschriften [Works, Early Writings], vol. 2. Neuwied and Berlin: Hermann Luchterhand, pp. 598–608.

35.

Marcum

J. A.

(2005) Thomas Kuhn’s Revolution: An Historical Philosophy of Science. London and New York: Continuum.

36.

Marx

(1976) ‘Theses on Feuerbach’, in Marx

Engels

, Collected Works, vol. 5. London: Lawrence & Wishart, pp. 3–5.

37.

McLaughlin

(1996) ‘Wissenschaft, bürgerliche’ [Bourgeois Science], in Mittelstraß

(ed.) Enzyklopädie Philosophie und Wissenschaftstheorie [Encyclopedia of Philosophy and Science Theory], vol. 4. Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler, pp. 721–2.

38.

Mendelsohn

(1989) ‘Robert K. Merton: The Celebration and Defense of Science’, Science in Context 3(1): 269–89.

39.

Merton

R. K.

(1938) ‘Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth Century England’, Osiris 4(2): 361–632.

40.

Needham

(1971) new foreword to Science at the Cross Roads: Papers presented to the International Congress of the History of Science and Technology. London: Frank Cass, pp. vii–x.

41.

Nieto-Galan

(2011) ‘Antonio Gramsci Revisited: Historians of Science, Intellectuals, and the Struggle for Hegemony’, History of Science 49: 453–78.

42.

Omodeo

P. D.

(2010) ‘La via gramsciana alla scienza’ [Gramsci’s Approach to Science], Historia Magistra 4: 53–68.

43.

Omodeo

P. D.

(2016) ‘Copernicus as Kuhn’s Paradigm of Paradigms: The Epistemological Dimension of The Copernican Revolution ’, in Blum

Gavroglu

Joas

Renn

(eds) Shifting Paradigms: Thomas S. Kuhn and the History of Science. Berlin: Edition Open Access, pp. 71–104.

44.

Popper

K. R.

(1945) The Open Society and Its Enemies. London: Routledge.

45.

Popper

K. R.

(1957) The Poverty of Historicism. London: Routledge.

46.

Popper

K. R.

(1997) The Lessons of This Century. London and New York: Routledge.

47.

Porter

(1990) ‘The History of Science and the History of Society’, in Olby

R. C.

. (eds) Companion to the History of Modern Science. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 32–46.

48.

Reisch

G. A.

(2016) ‘Aristotle in the Cold War: On the Origins of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of the Scientific Revolutions ’, in Richards

R. J.

Daston

(eds) Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions at Fifty. Chicago-London: University of Chicago Press, pp. 12–30.

49.

Shapin

(1992) ‘Discipline and Bounding: The History and Sociology of Science as Seen through the Externalism–Internalism Debate’, History of Science 30: 333–69.

50.

Sochor

(1980) ‘Lukács e Korsch: la discussione filosofica degli anni venti’ [Lukács and Korsch: The Philosophical Debates of the 1920s], in Hobsbawm

E. J.

. (eds) Storia del Marxismo [History of Marxism], vol. 3/1. Turin: Einaudi, pp. 702–52.

51.

Steila

(1996) Scienza e rivoluzione: La recezione dell’empiriocriticismo nella cultura russa (1877–1910) [Science and Revolution: The Reception of Empiriocriticism in the Russian Culture (1877–1910)]. Florence: Le Lettere.

52.

Swerdlow

N. M.

(2004) ‘An Essay on Thomas Kuhn’s First Scientific Revolution’, The Copernican Revolution: Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 148(1): 64–120.

53.

Werskey

P. G.

(1971) ‘On the Reception of Science at the Cross Roads in England’, new introduction to Science at the Cross Roads: Papers presented to the International Congress of the History of Science and Technology . London: Frank Cass, pp. xi–xxix.

54.

Wittich

(2003) ‘Thomas S. Kuhn und der Marxismus’ [Thomas S. Kuhn and Marxism], Utopie kreativ 149: 197–208.

55.

Young

R. M.

(1990) ‘Marxism and the History of Science’, in Olby

R. C.

. (eds) Companion to the History of Modern Science. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 77–86.

56.

Zilsel

(2000[1942]) ‘The Sociological Roots of Science’, [The American Journal of Sociology 47 (1942)] reprinted Social Studies of Science 30(6): 935–9.