Three Marxist Lessons for 21st-Century History and Philosophy of Science

Abstract

What can we learn from a Marxist history and philosophy of science? There are at least three crucial lessons that scholars should seriously reassess. First, the idea that there is a constitutive relation between practice and theory in knowledge production. This was a central concern for many Marxist HPS scholars and led them to conceive “science” as a praxis and as a situated, and not exclusively intellectual, enterprise. Second, the idea that there is a thread connecting social relations, technologies, and scientific abstractions. Modes of thinking and understanding are related to particular social formations. And third, the idea that modern science is both a cause and product of capitalist modes of production, which expanded globally and generated all sorts of inequalities and polarizations. Altogether, these lessons put forward a coherent perspective addressing the socioeconomic nature of scientific knowledge, which is still relevant today.