Vetenskapen vid vägskälet: En studie av sovjetisk vetenskapssyn vid trettiotalets början

Abstract

At the Second International Congress of the History of Science in 1931, Soviet academics had a rare opportunity to present their view of science to an international audience. At this time, science was becoming an increasingly politicized endeavor in the Soviet Union. The purpose of this thesis is to examine what views of science Soviet delegates Nikolai Bukharin and Boris Hessen expressed in their congress contributions and how these views were shaped by the sharp dichotomization between bourgeois and socialist science then prevalent in the USSR. The delegates are shown to have acted from the premise of the congress being a moment of struggle between worldviews, reflecting the partyness of science. The practice-oriented and politicized conception of science promoted by the delegates leads them to perceive the building of socialism as the highest aim of science, thereby accepting an ontologizing version of dialectics shaped to mirror the achievements of non-Marxist-Leninist science, rather than to be mainly a tool for revolutionary action.