For the history of science the 1940s were a transformative decade, when salient scholars like Herbert Butterfield or Alexandre Koyré set out to shape postwar culture by promoting new standards for understanding science. Some years ago I placed these developments in a tradition of enduring arts–science tensions and the contemporary notion that previous, “scientistic”, historical practices needed to be confronted with disinterested codes of historical craft. Here, I want to further explore the ideological dimensions of the processes through which the (...) academic study of science became institutionalized. Butterfield’s generation of science historians moulded perception of science in highly specific ways. Whereas the scientist-historians of the 1930s put scientific innovation into its socio-economic contexts, postwar accounts portrayed the birth of modern science as an intellectual revolution. Anti-Marxism formed a defining feature of the process by which the image of scientific work as a disinterested journey of the mind came to be institutionalized. Rather than spelling the end of ideology, appointments processes in the early Cold War years reveal disagreement about what science was to be invariably coextensive with dissent about social and political order. Rather than testifying to irreconcilable conflicts between interestedness and historical craft, the work of both the 1930s and 40s speaks of surprisingly productive relations between the two.Author Keywords: Author Keywords: Hessen; Bernal; Pagel; Needham; Butterfield; Cold War; Cambridge. (shrink)

Boris Hessen’s ‘The Social and Economic Roots of Newton’s Principia’ (see https://doi.org./10.1163/1569206X-00002041) is considered a pioneering work in the historiography of the natural sciences. For some, it marks the founding moment of the ‘externalist’ approach to this field of study. Previously, Hessen published another paper on Newton entitled ‘Preface to Articles by A. Einstein and J.J. Thomson’, which, some maintain, bears a stronger resemblance to works in the ‘internalist’ camp of the historiography of the natural sciences. For decades, scholars have (...) puzzled over why Hessen chose to argue for, seemingly, diametrically opposed positions. In this paper, however, I argue that Hessen does not advance two different historiographical methods, but a single, dialectical-materialist approach that accounts for the ‘unity in opposition’ of the external and internal dimensions of natural-scientific theory. I draw from Hessen’s two papers on Newton, his previously untranslated writings, as well as selections from the secondary literature. (shrink)

In 1858, August Kekulé and Archibald Scott Couper independently published similar ideas regarding the tetravalence and self-linking ability of carbon atoms; three years later, the Russian chemist Aleksandr Mikhailovich Butlerov read a paper at the German Naturforscherversammlung in Speyer, which restated, clarified, and enlarged upon the ideas of Kekulé and Couper. In 1958, the centenary of the structure theory was celebrated in Chicago, London, Heidelberg, and Ghent; the celebrations in Moscow, Frunze, and Kazan took place three years later. For over (...) a century chemists and chemical historians have disputed the origins of structure theory. Sometimes this activity has been confined to occasional sniping, but at other times determined battles have been fought. The polemic has never been characterized by cool and dispassionate discourse. Western historians have in general been unwilling or unable to master the extensive Russian literature on the question; the arguments of Soviet historians have often been clothed in Marxist rhetoric or otherwise influenced by political considerations. (shrink)