The Marxist Critique of Capitalist Science: A History in Three Movements?
2007; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 16; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/09505430701706749
ISSN1470-1189
Autores Tópico(s)History of Science and Natural History
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgements I presented an earlier version of this paper to the 2006 Princeton History of Science Workshop: 'Science at the Crossroads: Geopolitics, Marxism, and Seventy-Five Years of Science Studies', held on 31 March–1 April 2006. I thank Princeton's Michael Gordin and Helen Tilley for their original invitation and support, as well as David Edgerton who organized two excellent seminars for me at Imperial College to discuss this work further. As befitted those occasions, I offered a history of the Marxist critique of capitalist science that emphasized its interconnections with the evolving sub-disciplines of what we now refer to as Science and Technology Studies (STS). Unfortunately, this resulted in an article which came across to many reviewers and readers more as a history of STS itself than the twentieth-century political movements in which I was more interested and knowledgeable. I have therefore revised the paper to keep the focus on the political theories and practices which animated my subjects, while still noting the reciprocal influences of Marxist and non-Marxist commentators in such fields as the history, politics, and sociology of science. This emphasis has resulted in a more concise analysis of the prospects for a renewed critique of capitalist science in the coming decade. I could not have researched and written this extended essay without the kindness of both Hans Pols of the University of Sydney, who offered me library privileges, and my wife Hilary Hughes, who, in effect, granted me a three-month 'sabbatical' from our business. A special thanks also to Roy MacLeod, whose engagement of me as Minerva's Reviews Editor has served to reconnect me to my old profession. I also want to acknowledge various kinds of help and encouragement which I have received from: Rony Armon, Gregory Blue, Mark Brake, Francesca Bray, Stephen Casper, Chris Chilvers, Sabine Clark, Harry Collins, Aant Elzinga, Vidar Enebakk, Ken Green, Steve Fuller, Loren Graham, Ifran Habib, Christopher Hamlin, Oren Harman, David Hollinger, Antony Howe, Andrew Jewett, Adrian Johns, Allan Jones, John Krige, Rebecca Lowen, Donald MacKenzie, Anna-K. Mayer, Everett Mendelsohn, Patrick Petitjean, John Pickstone, Ravi Rajan, Jerry Ravetz, Jessica Reinisch, Simon Schaffer, Helena Sheehan, Patrick Slaney, Geert Somsen, Matt Stanley, Peter Taylor, Nasir Tyabji, Stephen Weldon, and, not least, Bob Young. Thanks, finally, to Les Levidow and to the referees and commentators he asked to review my paper for Science as Culture. As always, the essay's views and shortcomings are my own. Notes 1. See Gary Werskey, The Visible College: A Collective Biography of British Scientists and Socialists of the 1930s (London: Allen Lane, 1978; and New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1978); 2nd edn (London: Free Association Books, 1988). 2. For a fuller and more explicit auto-critique of my work, see Gary Werskey, 'The Visible College revisited: second opinions on the Red scientists of the 1930s', Minerva, 45(3), (2007), pp. 305–319. 3. Robert Boyle, Works, vol. 1, edited by T. Birch (London, 1744), p. 20; as quoted in Margery Purver, The Royal Society; Concept and Creation (London: 1967), p. 195. 4. Eric Hobsbawm, Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life (New York: Pantheon, 2002), p. xii. 5. Ibid., p. 11. 6. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991 (New York: Pantheon, 1994), pp. 29–30. 7. Noel Annan, Our Age: Portrait of a Generation (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1990). 8. See David Edgerton, 'British scientific intellectuals and the relations of science, technology, and war', in: Paul Forman and José M. Sánchez-Ron (eds.), National Military Establishments and the Advancement of Science and Technology: Studies in 20th Century History (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1986), pp. 1–36; David Edgerton and John V. Pickstone, 'Science, technology and medicine in the United Kingdom, 1750–2000', in: Ron Numbers (Ed.) Cambridge History of Science, Vol. viii, Modern Science in National and International Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming ); Roy MacLeod, 'The social function of science in Britain: a retrospect', in: Helmut Steiner (Ed.) J.D. Bernal's The Social Function of Science, 1939–1989 (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1989), pp. 342–363; and John Pickstone, Ways of Knowing: A New History of Science, Technology and Medicine (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), esp. pp. 162–188. 9. David Edgerton, Warfare State: Britain, 1920–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), esp. pp. 15–58. 10. Anna-K. Mayer, '"A combative sense of duty"; Englishness and the Scientists', in: Christopher Lawrence and Anna-K. Mayer (eds.), Regenerating England: Science, Medicine and Culture in Inter-War Britain (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), pp. 67–106. 11. Lancelot Hogben's description of the Eugenics society as 'a circus of snobs and racist cranks' remains apt: see Anne Hogben and Adrian Hogben (eds.), Lancelot Hogben: Scientific Humanist—An Unauthorised Autobiography (Woodbridge: Merlin Press, 1998), p. 74. 12. See Anna-K. Mayer, 'Fatal mutilations: educationism and the British background to the 1931 International Congress for the History of Science and Technology', History of Science, 40, (2002), pp. 445–472; Anna-K. Mayer, 'Moralizing science: the uses of science's past in national education in the 1920s', British Journal for the History of Science, 30, (1997), pp. 51-70; and Anna-K. Mayer, 'When things don't talk: knowledge and belief in the inter-war humanism of Charles Singer (1876–1960)', British Journal for the History of Science, 38(3), (2005), pp. 1–23. 13. Bertrand Russell, The Scientific Outlook (London: Macmillan, 1931), p. 99. 14. See Giovanni Arrighi, Terence K. Hopkins and Immanuel Wallerstein, Antisystemic Movements (London: Verso Books, 1989); and Steven M. Buechler, Social Movements in Advanced Capitalism: The Political Economy and Cultural Construction of Social Activism (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Cf. Steve Fuller, Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for our Times (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), pp. 402-410. 15. Maurice Cornforth, A Generation for Progress, BBC Radio 3 documentary transcript, 1972. 16. C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures and a Second Look (New York: Mentor Books, 1963), p. 17. 17. Loren R. Graham, The Soviet Academy of Sciences and the Communist Party, 1927–32 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), p. viii. 18. V. I. Lenin, as quoted in: W. H. G. Armytage, The Rise of the Technocrats (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965), p. 226. 19. Loren Graham, Science in Russia and the Soviet Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 137–155. 20. Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, p. 96. 21. See N. I. Bukharin et al., Science at the Cross Roads, 2nd edn (London: Frank Cass, 1971), and the following analyses: C. A. J. Chilvers, 'The dilemmas of seditious men: the Crowther–Hessen correspondence in the 1930s', British Journal for the History of Science, 36, (2003), pp. 417–435; C. A. J. Chilvers, 'Five tourniquets and a ship's bell: the special session at the 1931 Congress', unpublished paper; C. A. J. Chilvers, 'The historical significance of Boris Hessen', unpublished paper; and Loren Graham, 'The socio-political roots of Boris Hessen: Soviet Marxism and the history of science', Social Studies of Science, 15, (1985), pp. 705–722. 22. For an insightful précis of and commentary on Hessen's paper, see Simon Schaffer, 'Newton at the crossroads', Radical Philosophy, 37, (Summer 1984), pp. 23–28. 23. Bukharin et al., Science at the Cross Roads, p. 31. Bukharin's contribution worried both his CP minder (Graham, 'The socio-political roots of Boris Hessen', pp. 713–714) and an imprisoned Antonio Gramsci, who felt that Bukharin 'privileged the natural sciences to the detriment of Marxism': see Helena Sheehan, Marxism and the Philosophy of Science: A Critical History, the First Hundred Years (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: 1993), pp. 286–301. 24. See Chilvers, 'The dilemmas of seditious men'. 25. Ibid. 26. I excluded Blackett from the 'college' because of my emphasis on those Left scientists who contributed most to Marxist thinking on science. But he was an obviously influential figure in the scientists' movement, and far 'redder' than some, notably Hogben. Cf. Werskey, 'The Visible College revisited'. 27. Chris Freeman, 'The social function of science', in: Brenda Swann and Francis Aprahamian (eds.), J. D. Bernal: A Life in Science and Politics (London and New York: Verso, 1999), pp. 101–131, at p. 127. 28. J. R. Ravetz, 'The Marxist vision of J. D. Bernal', in: J. R. Ravetz (Ed.) The Merger of Knowledge with Power: Essays in Critical Science (London: Cassell, 1990), pp. 153–173, at p. 165. 29. See Annan, Our Age, p. 10 ff. 30. Klauss Hentschl employed Theodore Geiger's useful distinction between individuals' deeper 'mentalities' and the subsequent 'ideologies' they may more easily adopt, adapt, or even drop in later life, in Klauss Hentschl's 'On the mentality of German physicists, 1945–1949', paper delivered to the XXII International Congress of the History of Science, Beijing, July 2005. 31. This includes Blackett who—perhaps because of my exclusion of him from the original Visible College—has become for some later historians the less radical, more acceptable face of the 1930' movement. However, his actions and utterances utterly belied this characterization. See Mary Jo Nye, Blackett: Physics, War, and Politics in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). Cf. Werskey, 'The Visible College revisited'. 32. On the significance and impact of 'being Communist', see the reminiscences of Hobsbawm, Interesting Times, pp. 127–151; and Roy Pascal in Werskey, The Visible College, pp. 216–217. 33. Fred Steward, 'Political formation', in: Swann and Aprahamian (eds.), J. D. Bernal, pp. 37–77, esp. p. 60 ff. 34. P. M. S. Blackett, 'The frustration of science', in: Frederick Soddy et al. (eds.), The Frustration of Science (London: Allen & Unwin, 1935), pp. 129–144, at p. 144. 35. Nye, Blackett, pp. 1–2. I may share this distinction with Blackett. Following my broadcast talk in September 1972, on 'Socialism: A Historical Side-bet', the very unamused BBC Controller of Radio 3 telephoned my producer to complain that the Corporation would not tolerate the airing of Marxist propaganda! Still an innocent abroad, I was as surprised at being told I spoke Marxism as Moliere's bourgeois gentilhomme was to learn that he had always been speaking prose. 36. Andrew Brown, J.D. Bernal: The Sage of Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 76. 37. Joseph Needham, Time: The Refreshing River (London: Allen & Unwin, 1943), p. 11. 38. Paul Langevin, as quoted in J. D. Bernal, In Memory of Paul Langevin (London: 1947), p. 18. 39. Hobsbawm, Interesting Times, p. 115. 40. Eric Hobsbawm, 'Preface', in: Swann and Aprahamian (eds.), J. D. Bernal, pp. ix–xx, at p. xv. 41. Annan, Our Age, p. 189. 42. Hobsbawm, Interesting Times, p. 117. Cf. Andrew Boyle, The Fourth Man (New York: Dial Press, 1979); and T. E. B. Howarth, Cambridge Between Two Wars (London: Collins, 1978), pp. 209–229. 43. See William McGucken, Scientists, Society, and State: The Social Relations of Science in Great Britain 1931–1947 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1984); Peter M. D. Collins, 'The British Association as public apologist for science, 1919–1946', in: Roy M. MacLeod and Peter M. D. Collins (eds.), The Parliament of Science: Essays in Honour of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1831–1981 (Northwood: Science Reviews, 1981), pp. 211–236; and Gary Werskey, 'British scientists and "outsider" politics, 1931–1945', Science Studies, 1(1), (1971), pp. 67–83; reprinted in Barry Barnes (Ed.) Sociology of Science (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), pp. 231–250. 44. See Patrick Petitjean, 'Needham, Anglo–French civilities and ecumenical science', in: S. I. Habib and Dhruv Raina (eds.), Situating the History of Science: Dialogues with Joseph Needham (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 152–197. 45. See Peter J. Kuznick, Beyond the Laboratory: Scientists as Political Activists in 1930s America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Russell Olwell, '"Condemned to footnotes": Marxist scholarship in the history of science', Science and Society, 60(1), (1996), pp. 7–26; and Fuller, Thomas Kuhn, p. 162 ff. 46. Geert Somsen, 'Value-laden science: J. M. Burgers and the promotion of a scientific society in the Netherlands', paper delivered to the XXII International Congress of the History of Science, Beijing, July 2005. 47. Christopher Lawrence and Anna-K. Mayer, 'Regenerating England: an introduction', in: Lawrence and Mayer (eds.), Regenerating England, pp. 1–23. 48. [J. V. Stalin], History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1943), p. 94. 49. See Loren R. Graham, Science and Philosophy in the Soviet Union (New York: Knopf, 1972). 50. J. D. Bernal, The Social Function of Science (London: Routledge, 1939), p. 415. 51. Werskey, The Visible College, esp. pp. 185–199. Cf. Petitjean, 'Needham, Anglo–French civilities and ecumenical science'; Sheehan, Marxism and the Philosophy of Science, esp. pp. 301–385; and Edwin A. Roberts, The Anglo-Marxists: A Study in Ideology and Culture (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1997), esp. pp. 143–208. 52. Freeman, 'The social function of science', p. 125. 53. It is worth noting in passing how a different set of 'mentalities' could lead to a very different reception and use of Soviet Marxism in the 1930s, and more particularly its historical materialism. As noted earlier, the only group of Left intellectuals to rival the scientists' influence and commitment in this era were the young Communist historians. Eric Hobsbawm recalls how he and his peers, like their scientific comrades, regarded Marxism as '"scientific" in a rather nineteenth-century sense. … What made Marxism so irresistible was its comprehensiveness'. But unlike the scientific Left, the historians came to both Marxism and history via literature and, more specifically the anti-Marxist F. R. Leavis—'Cambridge communists who read English swore by him'! So it would appear that not even a common ideology and cause could bridge the 'two cultures' within the Cambridge Left. To the subsequent frustration of those in the second radical science movement, none of these distinguished Marxist historians ever addressed the social relations of science in their influential works. This seems to have been a consequence partly of their intellectual formation, and partly of an informal division of labour within the Left in which anything related to science, including its history, was left to the Party's scientists (and its philosopher-officials). See Hobsbawm, Interesting Times, p. 97 ff. 54. Freeman, 'The social function of science', p. 101. 55. Some of Bernal's account—e.g. his analysis of the amount and influence of military R&D—still holds up to scrutiny, while he underestimated the strength of British civil R&D. See Edgerton and Pickstone, 'Science, technology and medicine in the United Kingdom'; and David Edgerton, Science, Technology and the British Industrial 'Decline' 1870–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 67. 56. For similar commentary on Social Function, see Freeman, 'The social function of science'; and MacLeod, 'The social function of science in Britain'. 57. See Sheehan, Marxism and the Philosophy of Science, pp. 301–385, esp. for her analysis of Christopher Caudwell's contribution; and Roberts, The Anglo-Marxists, esp. pp. 179–199, for his précis of Haldane's philosophy. 58. A possible influence on the Visible College's preference for using 'Dia-Mat' in exploring problems at the boundaries between biology and physics is another paper from the 1931 Congress: see B. M. Zavadovsky, 'The "physical" and "biological" in the process of organic evolution', in: Bukharin et al., Science at the Cross Roads, pp. 69–80. Cf. Pnina Abir-Am, 'The biotheoretical gathering, transdisciplinary authority, and the incipient legitimation of molecular biology in the 1930s: new historical perspective on the historical sociology of science', History of Science, 25, (1987), pp. 1–71. 59. Robert Proctor, Value-Free Science? Purity and Power in Modern Knowledge (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), p. 213 ff. Proctor notes the contributions of Otto Bauer, Franz Borkenau, and Ludwik Fleck, as well as the Americans Lewis Mumford and Robert Merton. He could also have added to his list Leonardo Olschki, Henry Sigerist, and Edgar Zilsel. Cf. Robert Fox, 'Fashioning the discipline: history of science in the European intellectual tradition', Minerva, 44(4), (2006), pp. 410–432. 60. See Chilvers, 'The dilemmas of seditious men'. 61. Ravetz, 'The Marxist vision of J. D. Bernal', p. 166 ff. 62. See Mayer, 'When things don't talk', for further comment on the Needham–Singer relationship. 63. But Needham was not game to jeopardize his reputation as a 'sound' scientist prior to becoming a Fellow of the Royal Society. So he published The Levellers and the English Revolution (London: Left Book Club, 1939) under the pseudonym of 'Henry Holorenshaw'. (Needham became an FRS in 1941.) Holorenshaw was later reincarnated as the author of Needham's autobiographical essay, 'The making of an honorary Taoist', in: Mikuláš Teich and Robert Young (eds.), Changing Perspectives in the History of Science (London, Heinemann, 1973), pp. 1–20. 64. See Anna-K. Mayer, 'Setting up a discipline: conflicting agendas of the Cambridge History of Science Committee, 1936–1950', Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, 31(4), (2000), 665–689; and Anna-K. Mayer, 'Setting up a discipline, II: British history of science and "the end of ideology", 1931–1948', Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, 35(1), (2004), pp. 41–72. 65. C. H. Waddington, The Scientific Attitude (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1941); 2nd edn (London: Hutchinson Educational, 1968), p. 146. 66. For the Visible College's responses to the first wave of Lysenkoism in the 1930s, see Werskey, The Visible College, pp. 205–210. 67. See McGucken, Scientists, Society, and State, esp. pp. 265–306. 68. Fears of interference by the State in the conduct of science were historically much stronger in Britain than on the continent. See MacLeod, 'The social function of science in Britain', pp. 345–347. 69. A. V. Hill, 'The international status and obligations of science', Nature, 132, (23 December 1933), pp. 952–954, at p. 952. 70. A. V. Hill to A. G. Tansley, 1 August 1941, as quoted in McGucken, Scientists, Society, and State, p. 288. 71. Lancelot Hogben, Lancelot Hogben's Dangerous Thoughts (London: Allen & Unwin, 1939), p. 42. See also Werskey, The Visible College, pp. 199–203. 72. Ibid., pp. 203–204. 73. Needham, Time, pp. 70 and 65–66. 74. Joseph Needham, 'Science, religion and socialism', in John Lewis et al. (eds.), Christianity and the Social Revolution (London: Gollancz, 1935), p. 428. 75. Benjamin Farrington, interview with the author, 17 April 1972. 76. Their recent biographers seem far more comfortable narrating Bernal and Blackett's wartime exploits than understanding their political commitments. See Brown, J. D. Bernal, pp. 165–273; and Nye, Blackett, pp. 65–99. Cf. Werskey, 'The Visible College revisited'; and Helena Sheehan, 'John Desmond Bernal: philosophy, politics and the science of science', paper delivered to the Institute of Physics in Ireland's conference on John Desmond Bernal: Science & Society, June 2006. 77. See McGucken, Scientists, Society, and State, pp. 215–263. 78. Inevitably, their propaganda exaggerated the contribution of academic scientists and the less destructive applications of science in the war effort. The prominence of scientists in OR was probably testimony more to the lack of numerate graduates in other fields than to the virtues of 'the scientific attitude' per se. See Edgerton and Pickstone, 'Science, technology and medicine in the United Kingdom'; and Edgerton, 'British scientific intellectuals and the relations of science, technology, and war', p. 13 ff. 79. From J. D. Bernal's World Without War (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958), as quoted in Ritchie Calder, 'Bernal at war', in: Swann and Aprahamian (eds.), J. D. Bernal, pp. 160–190, at p. 188. 80. As quoted in C. P. Snow, 'J. D. Bernal, a personal portrait', in: Maurice Goldsmith and Alan MacKay (eds.), Society and Science (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1964), pp. 19–29, at p. 28. 81. Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, p. 9. 82. On the cultural Cold War in Europe, see: Volker R. Berghahn, America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe: Shepard Stone between Philanthropy, Academy, and Diplomacy (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001); Peter Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Struggle for the Mind of Post-war Europe (New York: The Free Press, 1989); and Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (London: Granta Books, 2000). 83. The UK's status as an American client-state was soon brutally demonstrated in the US's refusal to bail Britain and France out of the Suez debacle in 1956. This episode marked the end of Britain's own self-recognition as a world/imperial power and proved to be a great dividing line in its history and culture. See Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, p. 86 ff. 84. Hobsbawm, Interesting Times, pp. 197–218. Until 1956, Hobsbawm believed that there was a strong case for defending the USSR as a countervailing force to the US and supporter of anti-colonial movements, but also because it was still seen as a regime with great potential, whose achievements outweighed its faults. 85. Edgerton and Pickstone, 'Science, technology and medicine in the United Kingdom'. See also Pickstone, Ways of Knowing, pp. 183–185. 86. McGucken, Scientists, Society, and State, pp. 307–341. See also the claims that the science lobby's influence resulted in too great an expansion of scientific manpower, and was too much biased towards science as opposed to engineering: Edgerton, Science, Technology and the British Industrial 'Decline'. 87. See Petitjean, 'Needham, Anglo–French civilities and ecumenical science'; and P. Petitjean, 'The joint establishment of the World Federation of Scientific Workers and of UNESCO after World War II', paper delivered to the XXII International Congress of the History of Science, Beijing, July 2005. See also Aant Elzinga, 'UNESCO and the politics of scientific internationalism', and David Horner, 'The Cold War and the politics of scientific internationalism: the post-war formation and development of the World Federation of Scientific Workers, 1946–1956', both in: Aant Elzinga and Catharina Landström (eds.), Internationalism and Science (London: Taylor Graham, 1996), pp. 89–131, and pp. 132–161, respectively. 88. On the conduct of the Lysenko controversy in Britain, see: Oren Solomon Harman, 'C. D. Darlington and the British and American reaction to Lysenko and the Soviet conception of science', Journal of the History of Biology, 36, (2003), pp. 309-352; Greta Jones, Science, Politics and the Cold War (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), pp. 16–59; and Werskey, The Visible College, pp. 292–304. Two recent accounts of Lysenko and Soviet biology are: Nikolai Krementsov, Stalinist Science (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), esp. pp. 54–83 and 158–183; and Nils Roll-Hansen, The Lysenko Effect: the Politics of Science (New York: Humanity Books, 2005). 89. One of the main protagonists in the British debate over Lysenkoism, C. D. Darlington, received critical support and encouragement from the socialist writer George Orwell. Orwell was as viscerally anti-technocratic as he was anti-communist, and reserved a special loathing for Bernal's 'slovenly' language and anti-liberal disregard for individual freedoms, especially the freedom of conscience. See Harman, 'C. D. Darlington and the British and American reaction to Lysenko and the Soviet conception of science'; and Werskey, The Visible College, p. 288 ff. It has even been suggested that the dialogue of 'O'Brien', the ideologue in Orwell's 1984, was modelled on Bernal's broadcasts: see Fuller, Thomas Kuhn, p. 327. Fuller, however, cites no source for this claim. 90. Eric (Lord) Ashby, interview with the author, 6 April 1972. 91. See David A. Hollinger, Science, Jews, and Secular Culture: Studies in Mid-Twentieth-Century American Intellectual History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 97–120, esp. pp. 101–110. Two years ago, when doing some research on the Minerva and Polanyi papers at the University of Chicago, I came across a letter from Shils to Polanyi (dated around September 1971), urging the latter to review the reissued edition of Science at the Cross Roads. Shils notes in passing my work on the scientific Left of the 1930s and that I am known to be sympathetic to it. There is nothing like encountering one's name in a primary source to confirm that one is already a part of history! 92. See the articles by Mayer, 'Setting up a discipline' and 'Setting up a discipline, II'. 93. Annan, Our Age, p. 270. 94. Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science (London: Bell and Sons, 1949). 95. See Benjamin Farrington's early but futile attempt to create a space within the new society for serious research into the social history of science: Geoffrey Cantor, 'Charles Singer and the early years of the British Society for the History of Science', British Journal for the History of Science, 30, (1997), pp. 5–23, at p. 21. 96. See, for example, S. Lilley, 'Social aspects of the history of science', Archives internationals d'Histoire des Sciences, no. 6, (January 1949), pp. 376–443; and Stephen F. Mason, A History of the Sciences: Main Currents of Scientific Thought (New York: Colliers, 1962). See also R. M. Young, 'Marxism and the history of science', in: R. C. Olby et al. (eds.), Companion to the History of Modern Science (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 77–86. Available at: www.human-nature.com (accessed 16 January 2006). 97. A. Rupert Hall, 'Merton revisited, or science, technology and society in the seventeenth century', History of Science, 2, (1963), pp. 1–16, at p. 13. Cf. Fox, 'Fashioning the discipline'. 98. Freeman, 'The social function of science', p. 101. 99. Robert Young, Is Nature a Labour Process? Available at: www.human-nature.com (accessed 16 January 2006). At the first of these conferences in 1957 Bernal was rebuked by none other than Ernest Kolman—the only survivor of the 1931 Soviet delegation to the London Congress—for over-emphasizing in his historical work the role of craftsmen and undervaluing science! See Peter Mason, 'Science in history', in: Swann and Aprahamian (eds.), J. D. Bernal, pp. 255–267, at p. 261. An even greater contemporary irony is that some rehabilitated Soviet geneticists were conducting experiments on 'the vegetative reproduction of living beings' which they hoped one day would allow scientists to reproduce at will gifted human beings. As one of them (Dr A. Neytakh) said, 'Men of real genius are rare … "but the progress of all mankind nevertheless depends to a large extent on them". What, he asks, would the world be like if there had not been a … Newton'? Clearly Soviet understandings of the role of genius in the history of science had veered sharply away from Hessen's—and toward the kind of unsophisticated genetic determinism that had once so alarmed the scientific Left. See Victor Zorza, 'Russian raises spectre of genetic "arms race"', The Guardian, (3 December 1969), p. 3. Note as well the nice 'Cold War' spin in the headline to this story. 100. Hobsbawm, Interesting Times, p. 174. 101. Birkbeck was also Eric Hobsbawm's academic home for most of his long and distinguished career. He believes that between 1948 and 1958 'no known communists were appointed to university posts … nor, if already in teaching posts, were they promoted'. See Hobsbawm, Interesting Times, p. 182; and also Annan, Our Age, p. 268. 102. Bernal's defence of Lysenko and Stalinist science has an element of tragedy about it, but more understandable, certainly now if not at the time, were Blackett's trenchant criticisms of American and British nuclear policy at the outset of the Cold War. The fact that much of what he had to say about the futility of a defence policy based on mutually assured destruction and the need for stronger conventional forces was vindicated—as early as the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950—did not stop the likes of Edward Shills and I. I. Rabi doing everything they could to discredit Blackett's scientific and strategic credentials, his politics, and his personal integrity. See P. M. S. Blackett, The Military and Political Consequences of Atomic Energy (London: Turnstile Press, 1948); P. M. S. Blackett, Studies of War: Nuclear and Conventional (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1962); Nye, Blackett, esp. pp. 65–99; and Jones, Science, Politics and the Cold War, pp. 79–118. 103. See Krishna Dronamraju (Ed.) Haldane. The Life and Work of J. B. S. Haldane with Special Reference to India (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1985). 104. Hobsbawm, 'Preface', p. xi. 105. See Edgerton, Science, Technology and the British Industrial 'Decline'; Edgerton, Warfare State, pp. 230–269; Edgerton and Pickstone, 'Science, technology and medicine in the United Kingdom'; Freeman, 'The social function of science'; and Pickstone, Ways of Knowing, p. 184 ff. 106. Polanyi's views on militarization and patent reform are reviewed in Adrian Johns, 'Intellectual proper
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