Abstract Frolov, I. T. (1990) Man, Science, Humanism: A New Synthesis (Buffalo, NY, Prometheus Books), 342 pp. Graham, L. R. (Ed.) (1990) Science and the Soviet Social Order (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press), ix + 443 pp. Understanding the place of science in Soviet culture is essential if we are to understand the distinctive character of the Soviet Union, its failings and contradictions, and its prospects for the future. This paper examines Soviet conceptions of the role of science in the (...) socialist project. Focusing on Loren Graham's collection Science and the Soviet Social Order, the article critically assesses the claim that science and technology have been liberalizing influences on Soviet political culture. The paper concludes by considering Ivan Frolov's, Man, Science, Humanism, which attempts to reform Soviet conceptions of science by establishing a Marxist ?scientific humanism?. Although Frolov challenges the idea of science as a means to subordinate nature, his approach is belied by his uncritical acceptance of a classic Soviet attitude to science; namely, the necessity of a total, systematic theory of humanity, nature and society. It is argued that the later stages of perestroika saw a marked loss of confidence in the power of science as a source of such ?total theory?, and with this the history of Soviet Prometheanism appears to have come to a close. (shrink)

Naukovedenie (literarily meaning ‘science studies’), was first institutionalized in the Soviet Union in the twenties, then resurfaced and was widely publicized in the sixties, as a new mode of reflection on science, its history, its intellectual foundations, and its management, after which it dominated Soviet historiography of science until perestroika . Tracing the history of meta-studies of science in the USSR from its early institutionalization in the twenties when various political, theoretical and institutional struggles set the stage for the development (...) of the field, to the sixties when the field resurfaced within the particular political context of the Cold War, and using the history of Moscow Institute for the History of Science and Technology as a case-study, I situate Soviet naukovedenie project within the culture of late-socialism in the Soviet Union during the Cold War, asking what this discourse meant for its creators and practitioners, as well as for the high-ranked Soviet officials who provided the authoritative support for this field. (shrink)

ArgumentThis paper examines some of the ways that machines, mechanisms, and the new mechanics were treated in post-World War I discourse. Spengler's 1919Decline of the Westand Hessen's 1931 study of Newton have usually been tied closely to Weimar culture in Germany, and Soviet politics. Linking them also to the writings of Rathenau, Simmel, Chase, Mumford, Hayek, and others, as well as to Dada and film studies of the city will indicate central features of a wide-ranging, international discourse on the machine (...) and mechanization. I argue that machines were so thoroughly integrated into social and economic experience that we can treat this as a distinctive new phase in the cultural history of mechanics, what some contemporaries called the “machine age”: a period in which rather than the hand mill or steam engine, the city stands as an appropriate realization (and sometimes symbol) of the significance but also ambiguities and tensions of mechanical life; and concepts of mechanization were extended to encompass the economy and market mechanisms. (shrink)

Starting in the 1950s, computer programs for simulating cognitive processes and intelligent behaviour were the hallmark of Good Old-Fashioned Artificial Intelligence and ‘cognitivist’ cognitive science. This article examines a somewhat neglected case of simulation pursued by one of the founding fathers of simulation methodology, Herbert A. Simon. In the 1970s and 1980s, Simon had repeated contacts with Marxist countries and scientists, in the context of which he advanced the idea that cognitivism could be used as a framework for simulating dialectical (...) materialism. Simon's idea was, in particular, to represent dialectical processes through a ‘symbolic’ version of dialectical logic. This article explores the context of Simon's interaction with Marxist countries—China and the USSR—and also assesses the outcome of the simulation. The difficulty with simulating distinctive features of dialectical materialism is read in light of the underlying assumptions of cognitivism and, ultimately, in light of the attempt to tame a rival world view. (shrink)

In this paper, we focus on the launch of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, which was first published in 1925. We present the context of the launch and explain why it was closely connected to the period of the New Economic Policy. In the last section, we examine four articles about randomness and probability included in the first volumes of the encyclopedia in order to illustrate some debates from within the scientific scene in the USSR during the 1920s.

The intellectual movement to interpret fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism as “political religions” has generated lively debates and an intensive publication program for over a decade. The scholarly trend has been closely associated with a revival of the concept of totalitarianism, reconfigured to account for the popular appeal and violent fervor of twentieth-century mass movements of the extreme right and left. As theoreticians of political religion have been preoccupied with arguments about the definition of religion and the problems of comparison, two (...) stumbling blocks have become increasingly apparent. First, historians of Soviet communism, who since the early 1990s have empirically and conceptually transformed the study of Stalinism and Soviet history, have either exhibited “utter neglect” of the political-religion concept or have shunned it due to the scientism and official atheism of the regime. As a result, comparisons in the political-religion mode have generally been carried out by scholars not expert in Soviet history. Second, and closely related to this, even sympathetic critics have found secular religion too blunt a tool and too generic a concept to probe the “novel, supranational, but historically specific... sense of mission” produced by radical interwar regimes. Soviet communism as a project, more than fascism, was deeply invested in viewing its own ideology as genuinely scientific. (shrink)

The late Hungarian physicist Lajos Jánossy is respected in international physics first of all for his results achieved in the field of cosmic radiations, but his work in the alternative, Lorentzian tradition of relativity theory is also of historical importance. As an adopted son of the Hungarian Marxist philosopher, Georg Lukács, he was socialised in a left-wing spirit. He formulated a philosophical criticism of Einstein’s theory in terms of dialectical materialism in the 1950s and 1960s. In contrast to the new (...) Soviet thesis valid in Soviet ideology from 1955, he insisted that the positivist, Machian epistemological foundation determinatively influenced the physical level of Einstein’s relativity theory and distorted its real physical meaning. He also rejected the anti-commonsense character of Einstein’s new concepts of space and time and argued for the necessity of a commonsense-conform physics. However, in contrast to the Soviet critics of relativity theory of the Stalinist period, Jánossy never used ideology to destroy the scientific authenticity of Einstein’s theory, but, accepting the Einsteinian-Lorentzian mathematics as one of the great achievements of the history of physics, he announced and successfully implemented a positive program of a commonsense-conform, non-positivist, Lorentz-based reformulation of the theory. The socialcultural background of Jánossy’s reformulation of relativity theory is characterised by the strain of two contradictory elements: on the one hand, his left wing, Marxist commitment,on the other, his socialization in Western, “bourgeois” science and culture. Through a Marxist, “dialectical materialist” criticism of the positivist, Machian aspects of Einstein’s theory as well as through his work for a commonsense–conform physics, Jánossy defended not only Marxism but also the classical tradition of scientific rationalism as an essential element of European culture. (shrink)