On Both Sides of the Iron Curtain: The Marxist Struggle for Cultural Hegemony and HPS for a ‘Free Society’

Abstract

This chapter is devoted to the inception of Cold-War history of science and especially focuses on the Marxist challenge as the starting impulse. First, it deals with 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 Gramsci called it in the same years). Second, the chapter addresses 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, it is expedient to report on internal discussions within the Marxist camp, namely the criticism of Bukharin’s views by the Hungarian philosopher Gyorgy Lukacs and by Antonio Gramsci. Third, the chapter deals with the specific approach to the history of science proposed by the Soviet delegates, and opposes the emergence of a Marxist historiography with the anti-Communist historiography and philosophy of science, which developed contemporaneously in the American context. It particularly discusses the political context and meaning of Kuhn’s epistemology, of his Koyrean commitment within the project of a politically correct HPS irradiating from Harvard.