The Social Study of Science (SSS) constitutes an interdisciplinary domain dedicated to examining the profound influence of social, political, and cultural factors on the development of scientific research and practice. Rejecting conceptions of science as an autonomous, self-directed enterprise, SSS posits that scientific knowledge is fundamentally a social product, deeply embedded within specific historical and cultural contexts. This field employs analytical frameworks from sociology, history, philosophy, and anthropology to elucidate the practices, institutions, history, and intellectual content of science. The scrutiny of science’s social dimensions has fundamentally reconfigured understandings of scientific work and methodology. During the 1960s and 1970s, the field was significantly shaped by contemporaneous protest movements, with historical materialism emerging as a critical framework for sociologists and historians of science seeking to critique power structures and alienation inherent in scientific practices. However, a subsequent intellectual shift witnessed a movement away from this materialist approach towards postmodern and constructivist analyses. Recently, a resurgence of interest in Marxian historical materialism has become evident. This is marked by a renewed engagement with pre-World War II Marxist theorists such as Boris Hessen and Edgar Zilsel, whose works are being republished and re-evaluated in light of the ongoing technological revolution in automation and machine intelligence. This paper delineates this development within SSS, highlighting the contributions of these foundational Marxist thinkers to the critical assessment and understanding of the social ramifications of the new technological revolution.
Throughout much of the twentieth century, the dominant epistemological framework for understanding science was characterized by an internalist and idealist perspective. This “standard view,” heavily indebted to logical positivism and later to Popperian falsificationism, conceived of scientific progress as a rational, cumulative, and internally driven process. Within this paradigm, science was construed as a uniquely privileged form of knowledge, its authority deriving from a singular, rigorous methodology capable of filtering out social and subjective bias.
The emergence of the Social Study of Science (SSS) represented a seminal challenge to this orthodoxy. As an interdisciplinary project synthesizing sociology, history, philosophy, and anthropology, its foundational axiom is that scientific knowledge is not discovered in a social vacuum but is actively
produced through complex social processes
[1]. Science, from this perspective, is a human institution like any other, its contours shaped by the interests, resources, biases, and power structures of the society. The formulation of research questions, the validation of methods, the acceptance of theories, and the development of technologies are all understood as being mediated by socio-cultural and economic conditions. This is not to advocate for a radical constructivism that denies the reality of a natural world, but rather to insist that our
comprehension of the natural world is socially and materially mediated
[2].
The initiation of SSS can be traced to the 2nd International Congress of the History of Science, organized by the International Academy of History of Science in London, from 29 June to 3 July 1931. The paper mostly highlighted in this Congress was Boris Hessen’s
The Social and Economic Roots of Newton’s Principia [3], which marked the beginnings of the field of SSS
[4].
The formative period of SSS, coinciding with the political upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s, was deeply infused with a critical, often explicitly Marxist, orientation. Scholars utilized the analytical tools of historical materialism to describe science as an institution of power, to elucidate its function within ideological and capital accumulation processes, and to reveal alienation within its own practices. This period represented a subversive project, aligned with New Left critiques of established authority.
However, as the revolutionary impulses of the 1960s faded and the postmodern turn gained ascendancy in the 1980s and 1990s, the epistemological centre of gravity within SSS shifted markedly. The approach of Marxism, with its emphasis on class, mode of production, and political economy, was frequently dismissed as “reductionist” or “totalizing.” It was replaced by approaches such as the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK) and Actor–Network Theory (ANT), which prioritized micro-sociological analyses, ethnographic studies of laboratory life, and the discursive practices through which scientific facts are supposed to be constructed
[5][6][5,6]. While these approaches yielded valuable insights into the workings of scientific practice, this methodological shift often occurred at the expense of a broader critique of the political–economic structures that contextualize and fund that practice.
Presently, a significant renaissance of historical materialist analysis within SSS is observable. The profound socio-economic transformations precipitated by the new technological revolution—encompassing automation, artificial intelligence (AI) and data analytics—have necessitated a theoretical re-evaluation. The questions posed by Marxist theorists in the second half of the 20th century concerning technology, labour, and power have acquired a renewed and urgent contemporaneity. Consequently, there is a resurgent scholarly interest in the foundational texts of Marxist science studies, particularly the pioneering work of Boris Hessen and Edgar Zilsel. Their materialist analyses, which root the content and trajectory of science in the economic base of society, provide indispensable critical tools for understanding the social consequences of the twenty-first-century technological revolution.
This paper traces this intellectual resurgence. It will first delineate the core tenets of the historical materialist framework for the analysis of science. It will subsequently explore the pivotal contributions of Hessen and Zilsel, analysing their arguments and their seminal impact. The paper will then chart the postmodern turn in SSS and the consequent eclipse of the materialist tradition. Finally, it will argue for the potent relevance of a revived historical materialism in analysing the social dimensions of the current technological revolution, contending that the work of these early Marxists offers a critical lens for examining the intertwined features of science, technology, capital, and society in the 21st century.
A note on methodology and positioning is warranted at the outset. This paper is explicitly a theoretical synthesis rather than an empirical study. It does not present new primary data or case analyses but instead maps and interprets an intellectual trajectory within SSS. The author writes from within the historical materialist tradition and is committed to its normative and analytical potential. This positionality is acknowledged openly as a condition of the argument rather than a disqualification from it. Readers are invited to evaluate the interpretive claims advanced here against the body of scholarship reviewed, rather than against a standard of ostensible neutrality that the author regards as itself ideologically positioned.
