5. The UNESCO “History of Mankind

2021-01-01

Abstract The chapter focuses on the major product of Huxley's historical synthesis, UNESCO's History of Mankind project. At a time when commentators were grappling with what would later come to be called Big Science, it was a signal example of "Big History." It involved the leading historians of the time, working together in large teams. To design and implement this collaborative work, the project's two leaders, Lucien Febvre and Julian Huxley, drew on their own experiences of team research. When the Soviet Union joined the project in 1955, the Soviet team built on Soviet experiences of Union-wide, coordinated research in history. While the published volumes of the History of Mankind had little or no historiographic impact, the international, multilingual journals created to manage and organize the collaborative work became spaces in which critical work advancing the critique of Eurocentric perspectives on world history embedded in the project's very design was circulated for the first time. This critique, which later became central for successive generations of world historians, was shaped by the distinct but overlapping contexts of the Cold War and postcolonial nation-building and reverberated in the echo-chamber of Cold War internationalism.

3. Nikolai Vavilov, Genogeography, and History’s Past Future

2021-01-01

Abstract The chapter asks how the specific content of science entered the programs of the champions of scientific history. The answer comes in the form of the life and work trajectory of Nikolai Vavilov, one of the members of the Bukharin-led delegation to the Second International Congress of the History of Science and Technology in London, 1931. At London, Vavilov argued that plant genetics could shed light on the history of human settlements in the periods and regions for which there were no written records of the past. The chapter shows how the congruence of scientific and political agendas not only enabled Vavilov's ambitious genogeographic program, but also made his work widely known across national, linguistic, and disciplinary borders. In the 1930s, historians associated with the Annales school, such as Lucien Febvre, followed Vavilov's work closely. Vavilov, in turn, not only bridged biology and history in his work, but also served as a crucial link between biologists in the Soviet Union and historians in France.

2. Scientific History and the Russian Locale

2021-01-01

Abstract The chapter introduces Russia as a site of appropriation, adaptation, and circulation of knowledge associated with scientific history. Russian historians' close ties to their Western European counterparts, combined with their preoccupation with comparative approaches within the broader context of debate about "Russia and the West," placed them in an advantageous position as participants in the movement for scientific history through the venue of International Historical Congresses. After the Bolshevik revolution, the political entanglements of the leading champions of scientific history in Russia left them vulnerable to retaliation. When professional historians were removed from their posts as historical interpreters of contemporary events, politicians took their place. One such Marxist politician, Nikolai Bukharin, not only offered historical interpretations but also entered academics' debates on history, its method, its theory, and its relation to science. For Bukharin, the Second International Congress of the History of Science and Technology, held in London in 1931, presented an opportunity not only to showcase a Marxist synthesis but also to confront the dean of "historical synthesis," Henri Berr.

Scientometrics with and without Computers: The Cold War Transnational Journeys of the Science Citation Index

Springer eBooks · 2021 · 5 citations

• Social Science
• Political Science
• Sociology

1. The Quest for Scientific History

2021-01-01

Abstract The chapter situates the history of science within an international movement for the unity of knowledge of its particular, French, variety. Unlike the better-known movement of the Vienna Circle philosophers and scientists, which excluded history from their "unity of science" program, in the French context, history was at the center of a unified system of knowledge anchored in a philosophical tradition with roots in the writings of Auguste Comte and other French representatives of positivist thought. It was this all-embracing concept of history that underpinned the work of the entrepreneurial philosopher Henri Berr and his program of "historical synthesis." Berr's program of historical synthesis achieved prominence in the decades around 1900, and involved the future cofounder of the Annales, the historian Lucien Febvre. The chapter highlights the different ways in which Berr reconstituted Comtean positivism, in particular through the venue of the history of science, which he saw as a crucial mediator between the sciences and the humanities.

4. Julian Huxley’s Cold Wars

2021-01-01

Abstract The chapter asks how the beginning of the Cold War changed the pursuit of scientific history and its political commitments. It homes in on the biologist Julian Huxley, another participant of the Second International Congress of the History of Science and Technology in London, 1931. In late 1940s, Huxley propelled scientific history to an unprecedented level of visibility as the first director of UNESCO, a new organization championing world peace. In that role, Huxley launched an ambitious international program of "Scientific and Cultural History" that he considered a "key project" of UNESCO. To understand how this somewhat unlikely figure came to champion scientific history as a major path to world peace, this chapter traces Huxley's trajectory between his participation in the 1931 congress and his launch of the "Scientific and Cultural History" at UNESCO in the late 1940s. As this chapter demonstrates, Huxley's advocacy of scientific history at the onset of the Cold War was shaped by his earlier experiences, first, as a political traveler to the USSR in the summer of 1931 to observe the Soviet "experiment" in action, and then as a biologist actively following the unfolding crisis in Soviet biology.

Introduction

University of Chicago Press eBooks · 2021 · 1 citations

• Political Science
• History
• Political Science

Abstract The Introduction proposes that the quest for scientific history in the twentieth century is best understood as a situated circulation of forms of historical knowledge deeply involved with both scientific practices and world making. The book's introduction sets out an argument for a transnational history of the movement for scientific history by connecting Western intellectual history with the history of the radical ambitions and changing meanings of the Soviet socialist "experiment," which loomed large in the Western imaginaries for much of the twentieth century, from the Russian Revolution to the end of the Cold War.

Epilogue

2021-01-01

Abstract The Epilogue brings closure to the story traced in this book by looking at the uncanny parallels between post-historical projects of Big History in the West and the New Chronology in post-socialist Russia. The uncritical embrace of Big History in post-socialist Russia is an ironic finale to this book that rediscovers the continuing legacy of the socialist past in a rather unexpected place: the historical relationship between the natural sciences and the discipline of history.

6. Information Socialism, Historical Informatics, and the Markets

2021-01-01

Abstract The chapter examines the linkages between computers, quantification, and historical research by following a thread that takes readers back one more time to the Second International Congress of the History of Science and Technology in London, 1931. The chapter follows a participant of the congress, the British polymath J.D. Bernal, in his life-long campaign for a revolutionary, anticapitalist science shaped by both informationist and socialist visions. Bernal's campaign for information socialism intertwined with the trajectory of the Philadelphia entrepreneur Eugene Garfield. In the early 1960s, Garfield developed the Science Citation Index and pitched it as a tool for historians while envisioning history as a data science.

Scientific History

2020 · 12 citations

• History