ANTONIO GRAMSCI REVISITED : HISTORIANS OF SCIENCE , INTELLECTUALS , AND THE STRUGGLE FOR HEGEMONY

In 2001, Steven Fuller analysed the successful enterprise of Thomas S. Kuhn’s Structure of scientific revolutions as a two-sided story. In spite of its public image of neutrality and objectivity, the Structure, like all other products of academic research in the history of science, carried a political load. As chairman of the Anti-Communist Committee in the 1950s, and designer of science education policies, James B. Conant, Kuhn’s mentor, strongly supported an uncontroversial, neutral science, which was to be transmitted to the younger generations as a taken-for-granted worldview far from any critical reflection on the material conditions of thought. The Structure reinforced the idea that the scientific process remains essentially the same whenever and however it occurs. The Conant-Kuhn case has been widely discussed and has raised much controversy, but it would not be hard to find other examples in which, under the rhetoric of neutrality and objectivity, historians of science have tacitly shared the hegemonic values of the élites of their time. In spite of the longstanding perception of modern science as value-free knowledge of the external world, the new social and cultural history of science has contributed substantially in recent decades to the blurring of the old boundaries between a supposed ideology-free history of ideas and an ideology-loaded social history of science. As Dominique Pestre stated in a recent essay, professional scientists are progressively becoming experts in the service of political and economic power, and the old image of defenders of ‘truth’ seems to be fading quickly. We are today witnesses of the progressive disappearance of the old ideology-free rhetoric, which supposedly has allowed scientists to develop their careers successfully, detached from moral values, being socially and politically neutral. In the same vein, Sheila Jasanoff has pointed out that the dynamics of our contemporary politics, culture and power is intimately linked to the dynamics of science and technology. Through the study of the natural world and its transformations, politics today defines and refines the meaning of citizenship and civic responsibility, rivalry and solidarity, the boundaries between public and private, and the tensions between freedom and social control. At the 2001 annual meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science, Wiebe Bijker called for science and technology studies (STS) scholars to be more involved in the political debate. In his view:

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