Boris Hessen's ideas and Russian philosophy

Abstract

In the present article, the main theses of Boris Hessen's 1931 paper are brought under examination against the broader background of Russian philosophy in general and the philosophy and history of science in particular. Among other things, the author attempts to explain why Hessen's Marxist thinking met with little or no acceptance in the country of triumphant Marxism. In the Soviet Union, history and philosophy of science developed mainly within an internalist framework, first following mainly the positivist paradigm and later, from 1970s and 1980s, gravitating toward the post-positivist approaches of Thomas Kuhn and Alexandre Koyré. Most of these studies, however, considered technological, and socioeconomic factors to be of little relevance to the genesis of science. As a result, Hessen's ideas could find their place neither within the positivist nor within the post-positivist explanatory models used in Russian historical and philosophical studies of science. This only started to change at the beginning of the 1990s, in the post-Soviet era. Gradually, in a new intellectual climate, interest in Hessen's ideas began to grow. A compound answer to the problem posed at the beginning of the article is then outlined, taking as the starting point the holistic interpretation of Hessen’s paper offered by Gideon Freudenthal and Peter McLaughlin.