Introduction: histories of science and the planning debate
From the early 1930s, elements of the British left increasingly came to argue that capitalism was frustrating the growth of scientific knowledge and failing to make best use of scientific innovation and discovery. Many of them, particularly scientists, started to demand a “planned science”—a rationalized and state-directed reorganization of science and technology in parallel with socialist economic reforms, intended to steer and direct scientific research towards social welfare. These scientific intellectuals criticized the prevailing vision of the scientist as an isolated, socially aloof pursuer of knowledge,Footnote 1 and theorized instead an active role for politics in shaping the agendas, direction, and application of science and technology. The ensuing debate around the planning of science would see two loose ideological coalitions form. As detailed in the two most prominent histories of the movement, Gary Werskey’s 1978 The Visible College and William McGucken’s 1984 Scientists, Society, and State;Footnote 2 the predominantly left–liberal and socialist Social Relations of Science (SRS) movement, coalescing in the wake of the 1931 International Congress of the History of Science and Technology in London, brought together scientists such as the X-ray crystallographer John Desmond Bernal, the physiologist and geneticist J. B. S. Haldane, and the zoologist and statistician Lancelot Hogben, articulating various political programs for the conscious planning and application of science and technology.Footnote 3 The Society for Freedom in Science, founded by Michael Polanyi and John Randal Baker in 1940, opposed this as a technocratic and authoritarian “Bernalism” which would infringe both the liberty of the scientist and the growth of science, and brought together primarily conservative and right–liberal scientists in opposition to the principle of state planning.Footnote 4
In this struggle, scientific intellectuals on both left and the right concerned themselves with mapping the historical conditions—social, psychological, and political—of science’s flourishing. Works such as Benjamin Farrington’s “What Light from the Ancient World?” (1948), Bernal’s Science in History (1954), and John Randal Baker’s The Scientific Life (1942) used the history of science as an argumentative resource for their competing philosophical and political visions of science. These works—written for other scientists, for political activists, or for a broader reading public—represent an entanglement of the methodological development of the history of science, on one hand, with the political thought of mid-century scientists, historians, and science popularizers, on the other.
The histories of the left coalesced around broadly “externalist” conceptions of science, stressing the social and economic background to scientific knowledge and treating the history of science as a history of material contexts, social incentives, and culturally transmitted problems.Footnote 5 Their histories focused on science in its capacity as practical control of nature, and charted science’s shifting relationships with social classes and political forms. The “internalist” histories of the right stressed the psychological conditions of scientific discovery, the role of genius and individual character in scientific progress, and the value of “pure science” as a social ideal. Their histories focused on science in its capacity as theoretical knowledge, and charted science’s history as a history of ideas, arguments, problems, and solutions—reacting against what they perceived, on the part of left–externalists, as an overly loose distinction between science and technology, and a reductive reliance upon social forces as an explanatory category.
The two factions used these rival historiographies to theoretically ground and advocate for two opposing philosophies of science and its politics. The externalist vision of the left, emphasizing the social and economic background to scientific knowledge and the character of science as practical mastery over nature, advanced a conception of scientific knowledge as abstractable, practical recipes for action, with its trajectories of growth able to be anticipated in advance and directed down theoretically and practically fruitful avenues of inquiry. The internalist histories of the right, emphasizing the character of science as an individualized and personal logic of problems and solutions, used history to argue for science as dispersed—unable to be centralized in any planning authority; as tacit and personal—unable to be formalized into any single system of knowledge; and as unpredictable regarding the relative fruitfulness of different problem sets.Footnote 6 Science’s history became a vital resource for political argument: historical enquiries into the practice of the scientist, the social preconditions of scientific discovery, and the relationship between knowledge and application all carried serious implications as to what was reasonable and desirable to expect from the politics of science.Footnote 7
The case of classicist and historian of science Benjamin Farrington (1891–1974) is an illustrative one for exploring the politics of these histories. As I will demonstrate, reading Farrington’s histories in parallel with his political thinking is illuminating for both his histories and his politics, allowing a detailed reconstruction of both the ways in which his political concerns shaped his analysis and craft of history, and the particular political impetuses of the arguments he made about science in its history. Reading Farrington in this light provides, also, a window onto the broader relationship between history and political argument on the scientific left at this mid-century moment, and onto the tensions that could come with the uses of history for the purposes of politics.
Born in Ireland in 1891, Farrington studied Classics and Middle English at Cork and Dublin, before teaching Latin at the University of Cape Town between 1920 and 1934, during which he associated with Irish nationalist, Leninist, and antisegregationist political groups.Footnote 8 Farrington gained renown as a public intellectual in Cape Town, writing for newspapers such as Die Burger and the Irish Republican Association’s The Republic, and addressing socialists, students, and other activist groups on classics, the history of science, and the Irish national struggle.Footnote 9 Due in part to the intensification of segregationist policies in the early 1930s,Footnote 10 and in part to his controversial marriage to Ruth Schechter—the former wife of prominent lawyer Morris AlexanderFootnote 11—Farrington and Schechter left South Africa for the United Kingdom in 1935, where he taught Classics at Bristol, before taking up the chair of Classics at University College Swansea from 1936.Footnote 12 In Britain, Farrington soon came into contact with J. D. Bernal, J. B. S. Haldane, J. G. Crowther, and others in the SRS, and wrote on the history of classical science from a materialist perspective. Some works were written for circles of Marxist scholarship like the Modern Quarterly—such as his 1938 essay “The Gods of Epicurus and the Roman State”—while some, such as the 1939 Science and Politics in the Ancient World, were “polemical,” intended to disseminate to the reading public a Marxist understanding of the history of science.Footnote 13 In a range of public lectures and pamphlets, Farrington advanced further Marxist analyses of the historical entanglement of science with class struggle; later speaking on modern anthropology and its insights for a Marxist history of technology (Has History a Meaning?, delivered in 1950); the philosophical and scientific significance of Marx’s doctoral dissertation on Democritus and Epicurus (“Karl Marx: Scholar and Revolutionary,” delivered in 1951); and the salience of science’s history to its contemporary politics (“What Light from the Ancient World?”, broadcast in 1946 and published in 1948).Footnote 14 His later work focused on Francis Bacon, reading him as a philosophical progenitor of the instrumentalist conception of science and the Marxist vision of scientific planning (Francis Bacon: Philosopher of Industrial Science, 1949; Francis Bacon: Pioneer of Planned Science, 1963).
Farrington’s inclusion in the historiography surrounding the SRS is fairly minimal. He is usually listed alongside other left historians and scientists of the time—Joseph Needham, Sam Lilley, Edgar Zilsel, Dirk Struik—with little having been written about him specifically as a participant in the movement.Footnote 15 Only three article-length studies of Farrington exist. John Atkinson’s two articles discuss his participation in the intellectual and political life of South Africa and his growing interest in Marx, particularly his fascination with Marx’s doctoral dissertation on Democritean and Epicurean philosophy.Footnote 16 Christopher Stray considers Farrington’s relationship to the wider community of classicists, and traces his friendship with the classicist E. R. Dodds, which was increasingly strained by Farrington’s commitment to Marxism and to the Soviet Union as its practical embodiment.Footnote 17 The most detailed analysis of Farrington’s relationship to the broader scientific left comes from two pages in Werskey’s The Visible College, drawn from a 1972 interview between Werskey and Farrington. Werskey’s presentation of Farrington’s reflections on the SRS frames the Marxism of Farrington as a flexible, humanistic counterpart to the more scientistic and uncompromisingly Soviet Marxism of Bernal and Haldane, and Farrington himself as a private critic of these positions.Footnote 18
While scholars have drawn attention to the politics of science’s historiography during the Cold War,Footnote 19 there has been little systematic study of the histories written by the Social Relations of Science or the Society for Freedom in Science, and Werskey, in particular, has argued that such histories are a rich yet significantly understudied element to their thought.Footnote 20 In approaching Farrington’s histories of science as a distinct and intentional mode of political argument, I work both to redress this gap in the scholarship and to demonstrate shared concerns between the history of political thought and the history and philosophy of science. To read Farrington’s histories of science as political thought is to argue that the history of science is a language through which scientific intellectuals talk both to their community and to the public sphere. This language has a dual function: an analytic, reconstructive sense, intending to find regularity in their disciplines’ pasts and draw practical generalizations from this; and a rhetorical, persuasive sense, intending to convince scientists and publics of specific normative visions of the function and prospects of science.
In treating Farrington’s histories of science as political thought in this sense, this article has two primary aims. First, to analyze Farrington’s histories through the lens of his political thinking and that of the Social Relations of Science, mapping the particular ideological positions that underpinned his histories of classical science, and showing how they worked as political arguments to theoretically ground and to propagate the movement’s claims. Through a discussion of three such cases drawn from his histories—the problem of instrumentalism and experiment, the question of economic incentives, and the relationship of science to education and the state—I demonstrate that his histories and his politics are mutually illuminating and each essential for understanding the other. Studying these in dialogue allows us both to map how his particular political positions shaped his historical arguments and his theoretical ambitions for his histories, and to understand the political charge that his histories were intended to carry and disseminate.
The second aim is to build on this in order to examine and explain the discrepancy between two seemingly contradictory aspects of Farrington’s life and thought. On the one hand, there is the Farrington who emerges from reading these histories as above—a politically committed historian, making arguments and writing histories that reflect and make the case for a broadly Bernalist position on the socialist planning of science and technology. On the other, there is the Farrington who, as Werskey brings attention to, is a private critic of Bernalism and its tendencies toward deterministic and dogmatic approaches to science’s history. Recognizing Farrington as a historian who, while writing histories to advance particular political projects, was also conscious of the tensions and ambivalence that the political use of history could entail, I argue that discrepancies between Farrington’s private criticism of Bernalist thought and his public advocacy of the movement and its demands are best understood as a calculated decision on the part of an outsider to the community of scientists, who, while holding private misgivings, found in the scientific left the best practical hope for taking seriously and propagating the mutual alliance of science and socialism.
Causal lessons from science in antiquity
The distinctiveness of the histories of science of Farrington and the SRS can be usefully illustrated by comparison with their contemporaries in the liberal tradition of the history of science. As Anna-K. Mayer, Robert Fox, and Stephen Toulmin have charted, the prevailing tradition throughout the professionalization of the history of science in the early to mid-century, exemplified by eminent (and predominantly scientifically trained) historians such as Charles Singer and George Sarton, was liberal and humanistic. Though sharing some personal and professional ties with these historians, intellectuals of the SRS departed from them across several dimensions regarding the methodology, form, and cultural politics of science’s history. I outline five such dimensions here that characterize the liberal tradition.
First, there is a vision of science as predominantly a theoretical, rather than practical, activity. Science, in this tradition, was viewed primarily as a tradition of “question, experiment, and answer,”Footnote 21 generative of essentially theoretical knowledge and distinct from technology proper, which tended to be seen, in the case of Singer, as “largely the material by-product” of science.Footnote 22 Second, and deriving from this, there is a methodology that took its prime object of analysis as the history of scientific ideas, rather than the history of craft, application, and practice.Footnote 23 Third, there is the relative isolation of these scientific ideas from both the philosophical contexts of their time, and the political and economic conditions in which they were generated.Footnote 24 Fourth, there is an ethical vision that took science as a liberalizing, civilizing force in world history, instructive of virtues such as sociability, toleration, and a sense of common humanity.Footnote 25 Finally, there is a correspondingly liberal–humanist set of cultural and political tasks afforded to the history of science: constructing a heroic image of the scientist as exemplar of curiosity, individual agency, and intellectual vitality,Footnote 26 and instilling a delicate balance of scientific knowledge and humanistic virtue in a new generation of citizens and elites.Footnote 27
Charles Singer and George Sarton, contemporaries (and in Singer’s case, a friend) of Farrington, took up also the question of classical science’s decline. Farrington’s histories share with the mainstream accounts of Singer and Sarton a concern for the problem of the stagnation of classical science, but Farrington is more preoccupied than his liberal counterparts with trying to draw practical guidance from this. While Singer and Sarton both identify causes for this collapse that carry social and political implications—in Singer’s analysis, a principled cultural reluctance in antiquity to explicitly document the details of method and justification,Footnote 28 and in Sarton’s analysis theological incompatibilities between and “self-defeating” “intolerance and persecution”Footnote 29 on the part of both Pagan and Christian thought—Farrington criticizes liberal histories for their lack of theoretical ambition in learning from the past, and attempts to draw out much more determinate lessons.
Farrington’s critical reviews of Sarton are a particularly useful insight into how he intended his own histories to deviate from, and aspire to more than, his liberal contemporaries. His criticisms fall into three main categories: resistance to grand-scale theorizing and the political inferences that Marxists draw from this; a neglect of the entanglements of science with the politics and economics of its time; and the prioritization of ideas over technique, causing such historians to overlook science’s character as the practical mastery of nature. His 1955 review of Sarton’s Ancient Science and Modern Civilization, while conceding that expecting any “instruction concerning the Marxist problem of the social conditioning” from Sarton would be in vain, criticizes him nevertheless for not even attempting “something in the way of philosophy of history”—providing accounts of isolated incidents in decline, like the murder of Hypatia, that “do not add up, and are not meant to add up, to anything.”Footnote 30 Farrington’s later “Comments on Sarton as Historian of Science” judges him similarly—as a compiler of the “materials of history” but “not yet the history itself.”Footnote 31 This deficit, Farrington argues, is compounded by two further flaws: only the most superficial engagement with the impact of social and political forms upon scientific practice, by categorizing agriculture as “‘eminently social’ and mining ‘eminently anti-social’,”Footnote 32 and, parallel to this, failing to recognize, as even the ancients themselves recognized, the work of science as technique and craft in transforming the “conditions of life.”
The result is an approach that satisfies neither Farrington’s criterion for a scientific approach to history—one that can chart the development of science in relation to its social conditions in order to explain why some periods demonstrated rapid advance, or stagnation, or collapse—nor his criterion for the practical value of history—one that, in drawing such insights, can provide the groundwork for the politics of science. Farrington’s ambitions for the history of science, expressed most explicitly in Has History a Meaning?, draw on Marx and Vico as progenitors for a truly scientific approach to history—one that charts the material conditions that shape the consciousness of each age, recognizes these as nevertheless a product of social agency, and uses this reflexive understanding to guide further social and political action, such that the course of events is no longer a “blind instinctive process,” but is steered by this historical self-consciousness, becoming driven by “tact, insight, deliberation, and conscious purpose.”Footnote 33 The place of science in such history, moreover, ought not to be purely one of ideas, but, as Marx recognized, “the central thread of history,” a history of the conquest of nature as embodied in the productive techniques and social relations of each age, and of the action of class conflict in accelerating or impeding the growth of these.Footnote 34 A scientific history of science, then, is to be also a social history of thought—of ideologies, cultures, and religions, and of how at any particular stage these might be hindered by ideologies of reaction or spurred by ideologies of progress. Reading Farrington’s histories of classical science with such values in mind is thus a useful way to understand both the particular ambitions that shape his craft of historical narrative, and the political stakes he takes to be embedded in this.
Farrington’s own theoretical project across his writings on ancient science should be understood, in large part, as that of drawing causal lessons from the decline of science in antiquity: of explaining why the thriving scientific tradition that flourished in late Archaic and early classical Greece stagnated and declined in the intellectual world of post-Socratic antiquity, and how the early optimism and ambition of Ionian science “ceased to be, or had failed to become, a real force in the life of society.”Footnote 35 In the narratives crafted by Farrington, this period—spanning, roughly, from 650 until 400 BC—was characterized by an ambitious, worldly, and socially beneficent tradition of science—formulating the first systematically materialist theories of nature, drawing explanatory power from the natural processes harnessed by craftsmen, applying its theories in service of social needs, and developing an embryonic theory of experiment. While Farrington’s histories also pay great attention to the origins of ancient science, which lay, in his view, in the rationalization of artisanship and manual technique, my focus here is on his account of decline. This account, offering a complex catalogue of reasons that spans philosophical, economic, and political spheres, allows a broad-ranging study of his histories in the light of his own political thinking in these domains. Against what Farrington refers to as the prevailing narrative of the “Socratic revolution in thought”—wherein Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle brought philosophy “down from heaven to earth”—he considered the Socratic and Platonist traditions (and, to a lesser extent, the work of Aristotle) to have stifled many of the most promising aspects of Presocratic science—reorienting philosophical method around the conceptual analysis of ideas rather than the experimental study of nature, stigmatizing the work of the craftsman, and taking the knowledge of divine intention in the world, rather than the materialistic understanding of nature, to be the primary aspiration of philosophy.Footnote 36
The limited archival evidence that remains regarding Farrington suggests close personal, political, and scholarly connections with others on the radical scientific left. Farrington provided the foreword for Bernal’s 1952 book Marx and Science;Footnote 37 edited, alongside Vere Gordon Childe and other communist historians, the book series Past and Present: Studies in the Histories of Civilization; contributed to Science and Society and the Modern Quarterly with Marxist analyses of the history of science; and became a member, on Crowther’s 1942 invitation,Footnote 38 of the Tots and Quots club alongside Bernal, Hogben, Haldane, and other prominent scientific intellectuals. In 1944, Farrington wrote to Haldane asking for his contribution to a prospective “Marx Memorial Volume,” to deal with the topic of “Marxism and the Freeing of Science.”Footnote 39 Farrington intended this volume to “facilitate serious study” as a “clue to a body of already established Marxist classics,” and to emphasize the achievements of Soviet science, in order both to “fight the bourgeois hostility to theory, to planning,” and to “make clear that the possibility of this freeing of science was foreseen by Marx and the rest, that a correct theory of history and society is a pre-requisite to such an achievement.”Footnote 40 Farrington’s impetus here was the paradoxical opinion of South African prime minister Jan Smuts—who “voiced the hostility to theory very clearly the other day when he said that the achievement of the USSR was ‘inexplicable’ but must be accepted ‘as a fact.’”Footnote 41 This confusion, for Farrington, was to be “the point where we muscle in—with the explanation”—resolving the seeming paradox between a Western conception of Marxism as dogmatic and hostile to science, and the rapid technological advances of the USSR.Footnote 42
Bernal, upon Farrington’s request, provided him with the draft of a chapter for this volume entitled “Dialectics and Science,” commissioned in order to discuss Soviet science, Marxism and scientific practice, and “the difference between Marxism and the scientific method”Footnote 43—with Farrington laying particular emphasis on the volume’s “effectiveness as propaganda with the educated middle classes, which is a definite aim of the series.”Footnote 44 The volume, Farrington wrote to Bernal, was timely, because “it is felt that there is a large middle-class public prepared to show an active sympathy for Marxism if they can be made to see that culture and freedom are not threatened by it.”Footnote 45 Though such a volume was never realized—Haldane, and most likely the other contributors approached, were too busy with wartime research to produce chapters in time—such an expression of intent provides a useful clue to understanding the politics of Farrington’s wider historiographical and theoretical project. Farrington would pronounce in Has History a Meaning?—a public lecture—that
recent advances in physics hold out the prospect that human civilisation may be destroyed. Recent advances in history, revealing to us with a startlingly clearer insight what the nature of civilisation is, might, if they were more widely understood, give us the little bit of extra wisdom which would induce us to continue with the experiment rather than destroy it.Footnote 46
Farrington’s histories, as I demonstrate, are usefully understood both as a search for this “extra wisdom” and as “muscling in” with a Marxist explanation—using the genesis, development, and decline of classical science as a case study for understanding the social background of science’s growth and stagnation, and drawing, from this, practical lessons to be integrated into a Marxist framework of politics and society.
Instrumentalism and experiment
The political character of Farrington’s histories—the particular narratives he chose to craft around the genesis and stagnation of ancient science, and the rhetorical and theoretical functions these played within the discursive space of the Social Relations of Science—can be usefully understood with reference to three main domains of the political thought of Farrington and his allies: an instrumentalist and melioristic attitude to science; an emphasis on the role of political-economic incentives in determining science’s social relations; and the vision of a mutually beneficial alliance between planned science, education, and a socialist state. Reading Farrington’s histories through these political commitments benefits our understanding of both politics and histories—helping to understand how the large-scale visions of science in these histories provided a theoretical foundation for socialist claims as to the proper politics of science, and how Farrington’s own historical narratives both reflected and worked to advance his political claims and those of his allies.
The vision of science that Farrington and others in the SRS put forward was pragmatist in both its methodological approach and its social ethos. Scientific truth is something that is established through experiment, technique, and craft—tested and developed in its practical application to nature—and the original and proper motivations of science are melioristic ones, finding motivation and insight in using this knowledge to transform nature in accordance with human needs. Science, in this understanding, is essentially experimental, adjudicating between opposing world-models through practice, and is hindered when it either cannot do this, due to material constraints, or is discouraged from doing this by the philosophical norms of its time. In the political thought of the movement, this pragmatist motif took on great significance as the cornerstone of their critique of “pure science”—the ideology, they claimed, of taking science as essentially theoretical in form, self-sufficient from social commitments, and driven by the motive of curiosity rather than an attempt to transform nature.Footnote 47 It functioned similarly in their critique of what Werskey names “high science”:Footnote 48 a socially elite and politically aloof culture which, suspicious of industry, application, and political interference with scientific pursuits,Footnote 49 opposes any role for principles of social utility in shaping or reorganizing the structure of scientific research. The political valence of this instrumentalist conception of science was thus an assault on the values and politics of the “pure”-scientific establishment. If science, their reasoning led, was thoroughly a creature of the social—emerging out of a desire to do things, responsive to the cultural and ideological worlds of its time, and tested through working on the world to accomplish useful ends—then science ought to be consciously reorganized along this principle: treated, by its practitioners, and structured, in its politics, as a tool for social and economic betterment.
Farrington’s philosophical and political positions, across his works, fall squarely within this instrumentalist attitude to scientific truth and melioristic attitude to science’s purpose. Taking science “in the practical sense” as “the necessary basis for abstract and speculative science,”Footnote 50 he was often at odds with more conventional historians of science for drawing a loose and permeable boundary between knowledge and its practical applications. Farrington addressed the British Society for the History of Science on 25 October 1947 with a talk entitled “What Must We Include in the History of Science?”—in which he argued that Herbert Dingle, in his inaugural lecture, stood for a limited, one-sided conception of science as the development of ideas—as “the progressive correlation of our sensations”—“science in its thought aspect.”Footnote 51 Science, Farrington argued, should be considered “from the point of view of the mastery it gives over nature”—“the way in which science has transformed mankind from a handful of scattered nomads to a population of 2,000 millions”; “early technological invention”—these “technological strivings which eventually gave rise to the ideal of the disinterested search for truth.”Footnote 52 Science should, second, be considered “as an integral part of human history in general,” rather than as a pure succession of ideas—as something entangled with the helping or hindering impact of politics, culture, and social thought.Footnote 53 His notion of science’s social function, likewise, is consistently melioristic—seeing, through the conceptual language of Marxism, the historical and proper purpose of science as the improvement of production and control over nature in order to bring about, when coupled with a socialist political economy, a state of widely dispersed plenty and social well-being.Footnote 54 Accordingly, Farrington’s histories—particularly his writing on the transition from Presocratic to Postsocratic science, reflect and propound this attitude towards instrumentalism, holding its undermining under Platonist and Aristotelian science to have dealt a serious blow to the collective endeavor of science.
Farrington, in his 1936 Science in Antiquity, argues first that early Ionian science had an instrumentalist and experimental culture at its outset, which was gradually eroded by the Postsocratic “Greek ideal of science” and its Roman and medieval successors.Footnote 55 An ethos of science as useful-control-of-nature was replaced by an ethos that took natural philosophy as an adjunct to theology, and the inspired experimentalism of the Presocratics gave way to a new norm of strict logical systems and tight deductive proofs. The Presocratics for Farrington were early yet keen experimenters,Footnote 56 with the Pythagoreans developing a culture of the application of “precise measurement to the investigation of a physical phenomenon,” and the Ionian movement having a proven “addiction to the practice of observation and experiment.”Footnote 57 The character of these natural philosophies drew from the processes of manual craft in which its philosophers were trained—Anaximander’s motion of the sun being drawn from the action of a potter’s wheel, revolving while fixed in place; Anaximenes’ conception of qualities as reducible to densities, and thus quantities, drawn from his practice as a fuller and felter; his willingness to consider the celestial bodies as being the same substance as Earth, drawn from the centrifugal force of a sling.Footnote 58 At the high-water mark of such thought, Farrington finds that philosophers such as Alcmaeon, through vivisection and dissection, neither “accept or reject uncritically the evidence of the senses,” but “determine experimentally the limits of its validity.”Footnote 59 The Hippocratic school took this experimentalist trend further—though having “no thermometer, no magnifying glass, no stethoscope,” their observation of bodily function in the sick and well, and their insistence on closely recorded experiment, constituted their entry into the “domain of science in its fullest sense.”Footnote 60
This promising experimental tradition, however, was undermined by the rationalism and philosophical hostility to sense data on the part of the Socratic and Platonist traditions. Farrington’s presentation of this shift in Science in Antiquity accuses Socratic and Platonist philosophy of having opened up a gulf between sense data and systematic knowledge of nature, interrogating the implicit assumption of a direct correspondence between craft/technique and laws of nature—holding rationalistic knowledge of forms and first principles, rather than analogical reasoning from direct experience, to be the principal criterion of philosophical soundness. With this skepticism toward practical experience in favour of a reflective rationalism, manual labor and technical craft were denigrated, and held as unworthy of freeborn citizens.
As these prejudices against the manual solidified, finding an ideological affinity with the intensification of the slave economy, nature-knowledge would be dirempted into two essentially disconnected traditions: a class of speculative thinkers, learning natural philosophy as an essentially humanistic art, without experimentation and practical work on nature, and a class of technical workers, illiterate and lower-class, who lacked the theoretical knowledge or social rank to have their craft integrated into the canon of “science.” Aristotle’s teleological conceptions of nature, for Farrington, were similarly hostile to the observational–experimental ethos of early science: such systems prioritized the ability to deduce the course of events from a set of original principles, but “physical processes do not culminate in the maturity of an individual’s form which can be looked upon as the goal of nature’s endeavour. It is a question rather of connecting event with event and determining the law of their connection.”Footnote 61
Farrington’s later assessment in his Greek Science: Its Meaning for Us (1953) is somewhat more evenhanded towards Aristotle. While maintaining that his prejudices against experiment and practical technique were an active impediment to the growth of scientific methods, Farrington does afford him more genuine a role in the development of positive and observational science. While, as in Science in Antiquity, holding Aristotle to be one of the main perpetrators of the prejudice against craft and manual labor that led to a regressive ethos and set of epistemic norms in classical science, Farrington credits him in Greek Science with, in his critique of Plato’s theory of forms, having “again made possible a science of nature.”Footnote 62 Farrington here moderates his judgment of Aristotle, and focuses on Platonism as the primary philosophical obstacle to the natural science of its day: directing the gaze of philosophy from the natural world to the soul; “depressing the intellectual status of the technician”Footnote 63 into a mere imitator of eternal forms; orienting social thought to the work of the master in “managing men,”Footnote 64 rather than helping them work creatively upon nature; denigrating the “certain amount of systematic experiment” that did take place in Plato’s Greece;Footnote 65 and reorienting epistemology towards deduction and a priori certainty rather than observation and inference.
In Farrington’s revised portrait, Aristotle is credited with helping ameliorate the first and the fifth of these scars. Farrington credits Aristotle, in his insistence that Platonist ideas are always embodied in matter, as having (after some early works such as On the Heavens, which Farrington ascribes to a more dogmatic adherence to Plato) made natural philosophy compatible again with the positive study of nature: treating the world as a broadly secular object of enquiry, and reinvigorating the practice of systematic observation—particularly in biology, in which Aristotle made his “great contribution to science.”Footnote 66 He remains, however, sharply critical of the role of Aristotelian philosophy in the development of science’s practical character, ascribing no credit to Aristotle for any perpetuation or advance in the method of experimentation, and taking him to have reproduced the Academy’s tendency to “despise techniques.”Footnote 67 While Aristotle became increasingly receptive to observation and empirical demonstration over the disputational methods of Plato, coming to “give sense-evidence the primacy where it promised greater accuracy,”Footnote 68 his attitude to craft and application remained one of contempt—as the “stolen sciences,” against which philosophy stands “as a free man is to his slaves.”Footnote 69
In his account of Ionian experimentalism and its supersession, Farrington’s histories thus craft a narrative of science as something emerging from and—ideally—embedded in manual labor and the craft of the worker,Footnote 70 rather than stemming from contemplative philosophy or the speculations of social elites. Science, in essence, is technical control of nature applied to human ends: good science, and a good social order of science, would recognize this truth, and use this principle to steer the course of research. Science which misapprehends itself as knowing-that, not knowing-how, or imagines itself to be free from the demands and conflicts of the social, will delude itself as to its own nature, squander its potential, render itself sterile.
Economy and incentives
In keeping with this social and instrumentalist conception of science, Farrington and the movement held the economic structures and incentives that surround science to be a critical force in determining the extent to which, and the pace at which, science would flourish—in terms of both its internal development and its application to human needs. Critical of pure-scientific and internalist accounts of the history of science, as failing to provide a convincing explanation for periods of relative stagnation or growth, the movement shared the position that the development of science and the application of technology happen only when the incentives to do so bear upon those with the power to shape the course of scientific research and control the social use of technology: it is not enough for science and technology to abstractly benefit humanity at large, or even to benefit those using it to produce. Understanding capitalism, while responsible for a vast development of the productive forces, as imposing its own sets of limitations on scientific progress through the particular economic incentives it creates, they saw the prospect of a state-directed planning of science directly for social well-being as a way to bypass these imperfect incentives through the centralized, democratic control of research and its application, in tandem with socialist economic planning.Footnote 71
Farrington, though not developing a systematic political program for planning like Bernal’s Social Function of Science, fit firmly alongside his allies in the movement on the question of planning. Alongside his letters to Haldane and to Bernal, enlisting their contributions to a volume to make the case for planning and for the Soviet approach to science, his works on Francis Bacon illustrate this allegiance, painting a heroic image of Bacon—exemplified by the title of his 1963 book, Francis Bacon: Pioneer of Planned Science—as one who, in setting out clearly the connection between the instrumentalist attitude to science and the prospects for its systematic reform, was the earliest progenitor of the Marxist vision of planning.Footnote 72 The parallels between his portrait of Bacon and the projects of the SRS are myriad—a deliberate, positive relationship between science and government; the extended construction and financing of scientific research institutes; democratic, cooperative organization with the welfare of the public as its prime justification; and a consciously international character with a universally beneficent purpose. Farrington’s Bacon was the first to clearly perceive that science has determinate social relations which can help or hinder its growth—recognizing that “science could flourish, and had in the past flourished, only in a society suited to it.”Footnote 73 Bacon, for Farrington, recognized that the world was gradually becoming conscious of the power of science, but in a fragmentary and isolated manner, subject to subversion by selfish interests: “What he wanted done with system and foresight was happening at haphazard and blindly. What he vaguely hoped might be an act of planned philanthropy under government direction and royal patronage was being carried out by individuals actuated by selfishness and in fulfilment of no plan.”Footnote 74 Similarly to Lancelot Hogben, for whom Bacon was the first to recognize the potential of an organized program of scientific research,Footnote 75 Farrington valorizes Bacon as essentially the first Bernalist—the original theorist of scientific planning on the principle of social needs, and one who recognized that science was to be organized as a “democratic, co-operative enterprise intended for the public good and seen to be so,” inviting “international co-operation as a thing of concern for all mankind.”Footnote 76
Recognizing Farrington, in this light, as a political ally of the project of scientific planning (even if, as I later discuss, a critic of some of the movement’s theoretical premises), helps us understand another aspect of his histories: that his concern for economic incentives and political direction in sculpting the growth and uses of science strongly shapes his account of the role played by the practice of slavery in arresting the growth of classical science and technology. While the role he ascribes to slavery is in part a cultural one—in being the vessel for an institutionalized philosophical disdain for manual labor and technique—he affords it on the other hand an economic significance—in disincentivizing the application of science and technology to the processes of production—with the intent of demonstrating that if implementing new productive technology is not useful or profitable to those who own it, rather than its beneficiaries or users at the point of production or consumption, it will not take root in society, and its benefits will be squandered.
Farrington’s later Greek Science would promote the motif and explanatory power of slavery to a central cultural and epistemic category in the intellectual life of antiquity. His overarching thesis in Greek Science—that “the separation of science from the fertilizing and controlling contact with techniques dealt it a crippling blow from which throughout the whole period of antiquity and the Middle Ages it failed to recover”—takes the “division between citizen and slave” in Plato and Aristotle to express a pivotal philosophical structure in their society: taking matter as inert and disordered, and identifying mind, the active subject, with the free citizen, and nature, the passive object in need of structuring, with the slave.Footnote 77 His arguments in Greek Science—more philosophically ambitious than in Science in Antiquity—place Aristotle’s influence as not just the social devaluation of craft, but that of “seeing the master-and-slave relation as a pattern that pervades all nature.”Footnote 78
Farrington’s discussion of slavery in his earlier Science in Antiquity, however, focuses on the role of slavery as an economic institution structuring the dissemination and deployment of technology, and on the importance of the right economic incentives if technology is to be utilized for human well-being: scientific discoveries were squandered by a slave economy which disincentivized the use of technology to reduce toil. Regarding science’s practical character, the “economic motive for the invention of machines” was absent—the cheapness of slave labor made investment in technological improvement of agriculture unnecessary, and inefficient for any particular landowner to invest in.Footnote 79 While improved mining machinery, better drafting of animals, and improvements in agricultural equipment lay within the technological capacity of classical Greece, there was little direct incentive on the part of those who owned the forces of production to utilize science for this purpose: investment in quantity of labor, rather than efficiency of production, was a more rational way to improve yield, and so these potentialities went unrealized.Footnote 80 The cheapness of labor both “obviated the necessity for the invention of the machine” and made slave owners wary of such improvements, believing that “slaves cannot be entrusted with any but the clumsiest implements and could not have been entrusted at all with machines.”Footnote 81 When scientific knowledge was practically utilized, it was in cases which Farrington does not normatively classify as socially useful—“almost entirely reserved for engines of destruction or for toys,”Footnote 82 rather than the production of useful commodities or “labour-saving devices.”Footnote 83
Farrington’s conceptual focus here is thus on the social and economic preconditions that make the useful application of scientific knowledge a realistic prospect. While there were voices for the amelioration of the hardship faced by slaves, these were drowned out by the “convenient belief … that nature had cast men in two moulds, the thinker and the manual worker.”Footnote 84 The notion that science should aspire to combat privation and suffering was alien to classical natural philosophy: “science was the preserve and privilege of the economically independent and was not felt to have a social function, but to be of value primarily as a discipline for the individual soul of one designed by nature to be a thinker.”Footnote 85 The rise of a practical, meliorist ethos of science, for Farrington, could only come with the gradual disappearance of European slavery in the Middle Ages—in which a flurry of new technical inventions were grounded in “the recovery by the workman of a relative independence and the ownership of his tools and of the product of his labor,” and in the ascendance of an early bourgeoisie who were both scientifically literate and directly invested in technologically rationalizing the processes of production.Footnote 86
Farrington’s discussion of the economic incentives that shape the growth and application of science and technology, drawing on factors such as ancient slavery to map these relations, works thus as a demonstration that though science’s wellspring is in the amelioration of human conditions, through working on nature, it cannot automatically be relied upon to serve this end unless its political economy steers it in such a direction. Science’s meliorism is contingent; its capacities are squandered or turned to harm if its politics do not direct it towards social welfare. This principle lay at the heart of Farrington and the movement’s push for planning, and of socialist planning’s promise to circumvent the flawed incentives of science under capitalism.
Science, education, and the state
The third political concern that usefully illuminates Farrington’s histories and their rhetorical functions is that of the Social Relations of Science’s attitude to the state, and their vision of the role it ought to play in the promotion of science and science education. Farrington and his allies, critical of a culture of political aloofness on the part of scientists, of a lack of concern for the steering and financing of science on the part of the state, and of the failures of national education to instill in the public a sense of the spirit, method, and social prospects of science, held the alliance between a planned science and a reconstructed socialist state as a vital ambition of their movement.
Farrington’s particular formulation of this problem is set out in his 1939 Science and Politics in the Ancient World. Discussing the analogies and disanalogies between the politics of modern science and its politics in antiquity, he concedes that antiquity faced a different problematic: balancing the need for efficient and expert governance with the need to preserve, for its stabilizing effects, widespread superstition. So long as the labor of the masses remained unskilled and unaided by machine, “there was therefore no problem to be solved of combining technical training with political incompetence,” as a programme of state religion for the broader populace would allow the diremption of social thought into a superstitious mass and a skeptical, philosophically educated ruling class.Footnote 87 In the modern world, the problem has a different shape: “pure science, in our western democracies, may still to some extent be the preserve of an oligarchy, but without a wide dissemination of technical knowledge modern society is unworkable.”Footnote 88 The future of science “is now plainly a political question,” one in which the attitude political authority takes towards the spread and application of science for social well-being is critical, and a fusion of scientific knowledge with a humanistic and historically conscious recognition of the role and origin of science is vital to this.Footnote 89
The twin tasks upon which Farrington takes this project to depend, to determine whether humanity is to “base our civilization more thoroughly on scientific foundations” or “destroy science itself,” are thus that of educating the public towards a popular politics which demands a planned, socialist, and melioristic science, and of promoting a state politics which recognizes and facilitates this.Footnote 90 These political projects shape and help make sense of his telling of two episodes from the history of classical science in late republican and imperial Rome: the gradual loss of the spirit and method of science and of science education, and the decline and stifling of the emancipatory scientific current represented by Epicurean and Lucretian philosophy.
Farrington’s accounts of what he perceives as the stagnation of Roman science stress science’s dependence upon a specific ethos of education to instill it with instrumentalist, experimental, and socially beneficent values. The Romans, for Farrington, preserved and taught many of the Greek natural philosophers, but kept the tradition of this knowledge as an essentially humanistic discipline, rather than an experimental one. Seneca, for example, never perceived “the distinction between science and philosophy … for him scientific truth is established by argument rather than by experiment. The most that can be said for him is that, like other enlightened Romans, he was interested in the results if not in the method of scientific pursuits.”Footnote 91 Other than fragmentary advances in medicine, scientific knowledge was preserved but not developed, impeded by an educational culture that praised rhetoric and artfulness of expression over clarity and fine-grained distinctions. Roman culture “tried to adopt the results of the science without the method,”Footnote 92 with traditions such as dissection, central to the science of Greek medicine, never taking root—“the profession of doctor established itself, but not the habit of medical research”Footnote 93—and what little scientific education did exist became “directed to words rather than to things. The verbal disciplines, rhetoric, grammar, and logic, did not wholly perish; but nature was a book that was not directly studied.”Footnote 94 The Roman appropriation of Greek science, retaining some of the content but disregarding the method and ethos, failed to maintain a tradition of practice that preserved the impetus for scientific novelty.
The final point brought out in his histories of relevance here is the dependence of science upon a positive relationship with political authority for its continued survival and popular flourishing. The narrative crafted in Science and Politics in the Ancient World and his 1938 “The Gods of Epicurus and the Roman State” is one in which an ascendant Roman state, backed up by an institutional Platonism which held positive knowledge of nature to be politically suspect, deliberately promoted superstitious beliefs to counter the ostensibly seditious materialism of the Lucretian and Epicurean sects, and, in so doing, stifled the prospect of a scientifically literate populace. For Farrington, the philosophy of Epicurus, and to some extent its later revival in Lucretius’ De rerum natura, offered what was at the time the fullest program for a marriage of nature-knowledge and the amelioration of social ills: its “master-conception” being that “a true knowledge of the Nature of Things was the sovereign remedy for the ills of mankind, both individually and socially.”Footnote 95 In so doing, Epicurus continued the tradition of Ionian philosophy “both as pure science and as a solvent of superstition, with the consciousness derived from the career of Anaxagoras and the Sophists that this task carried implications that were social and political as well as scientific.”Footnote 96
Against this alliance of philosophical materialism and popular anti-superstition, “the reorganisation of the State on a conservative basis with religion playing a leading role began to present itself” as the best mechanism for preserving class domination in the late Roman RepublicFootnote 97—with Farrington glossing Cicero’s remark to a friend that “for the ability of the augurs to spike popular legislation such estates would long ago have been broken up under the operation of agrarian reforms.”Footnote 98 Instrumental to the decline of the materialist worldview in antiquity is thus both the earlier Platonist doctrine of the noble lie, and the “Roman practice of exploiting the proneness of ignorant men to superstition with a view to the maintenance of order in a class-divided State.”Footnote 99 Even though the democratic currents of the ancient world only “dimly and fitfully perceived that its fate was linked with science, oligarchy had no manner of doubt that ignorance was its shield,” and thus the “politico-religious organization of oligarchal society became increasingly opposed to the progress of science.”Footnote 100
Farrington warns that science “failed in antiquity because it was the narrowly-conceived occupation of a privileged class which did not take root in the general education nor yield the benefits it is capable of to men at large”—and “should it fail again it will be for the same reason.”Footnote 101 The political impetus of Farrington’s analyses of science in its relation to education and state is thus the propagation of a vision of science across its history as a dually emancipatory force, breaking down social and cultural superstition as well as improving material well-being, yet also something that is contingent and politically fragile. If science is to thrive, it must be supported by an education that both teaches its spirit and method—rather than merely a body of technical knowledge—and teaches science in its own historical function and its modern prospects—conveying an understanding of science in its social relations across history, its modern politics, and its as yet untapped potentials for social transformation.Footnote 102 The planning and reorganization of science, meanwhile, must be, second, a state-led project—for science, in the long run, is too fragile an institution to survive the suspicions and persecutions of a hostile state. The state, in turn, must be a socialist one: if the state is to forge such an alliance with science, and use it in the deliberate and genuine pursuit of social needs, it must be run by and for the people, rather than by a capitalist elite.
Theory and rhetoric: scientific and moralistic histories
The picture that Farrington paints across his historical arguments here is a distinctly Bernalist one—that the mutual alliance of a scientific approach to society and a socialist politics of science is essential to social progress. Read through this lens, Farrington seems to be a straightforward ally of the movement—his histories being shaped by the concerns of, providing theoretical foundations for, and working to propagate the political thought of the Social Relations of Science. Yet in his 1972 interview with Werskey during the writing of The Visible College, Farrington claimed to have significant doubts as to the optimism and historical coherence of Bernalist attitudes towards science: “In England, chiefly among scientists, I found a complete optimism about Marxism and science. It seemed to them and I heard the actual words from them, that Marxism was the theory which gave science its opportunity … And it seems as if science and Marxism had absolutely been married to one another—they were the same kind of thing.”Footnote 103
These reservations, for Werskey, constitute an attempt by Farrington to speak “for other Marxists who were less than scientific” in his objection to the scientism of Bernalists—“their over-evaluation and reification of their science as the revolutionary force behind the collapse of capitalism and the rise of socialism”—and to establish Farrington as a critic of “the ways in which they specifically magnified the role of scientific and technological advances as the key factor in social change.”Footnote 104
This presentation of Farrington as challenging “the influence of a ‘scientized’ Soviet Marxism” seems striking when compared to Farrington’s books, articles, and public lectures of the time.Footnote 105 If there were doubts, they were not public ones: Farrington presents Marxism as the sole vessel for a rigorous, practical science of society; extols the virtues of the Soviet utilization of science (and tries to enlist Bernal and Haldane’s assistance in this); and, rather than challenging the Bernalist “magnification” of science, argues that Marxism “discloses the essential process of history as an interpenetration between man and nature resulting from the progress of technology.”Footnote 106 How to account for this tension between private doubts and public pronouncements? Farrington’s professions of doubt in 1972 could be an attempt, prompted by his changing political beliefs, to downplay his advocacy for the Soviet project in his earlier life. Farrington broke with the CPGB over the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956; after touring the People’s Republic of China in 1950–51 and writing a series of articles for the Labour Monthly between 1952 and 1956 in which he praised Mao’s government for their “emancipation of the Chinese people from their long bondage,” he looked to China in the 1960s as a firmer vessel of hope in the communist project.Footnote 107 He would later break with China, however, dismayed by increasing censorship and restrictions on liberty, and remain a “Marxist but not a Communist”—holding Marxism not to be wrong, but misapplied, in both the USSR and the PRC.Footnote 108 Reflecting in 1972 from the vantage point of his disillusionment with socialist regimes, Farrington may have been attempting to minimize his active support for Soviet and Chinese Marxism and for the instrumentalization of science by both. The tension is perhaps best resolved, however, by understanding him neither as a Bernalist of pure conviction, nor as an anti-scientistic critic of Bernalism—but as having made a strategic decision borne of compromise: making the choice to press for his own influence, as a trained classicist and a nonscientist, in a section of the communist left overwhelmingly dominated by professional scientists, spurred by a sincere belief that they were the only stratum of the left who took seriously enough the need for a mutual alliance between socialism and natural science.
Anja Skaar Jacobsen’s discussion of a dispute between Bernal and the Marxist historian of science Leon Rosenfeld is instructive here. Rosenfeld developed his approach to the history of science independently of the Boris Hessen-influenced British left in the wake of the 1931 congress.Footnote 109 While accepting Hessen’s thesis that “scientific problems had arisen from social needs, how the history of thermodynamics was a particularly striking example of this, and of how historical progress in society in terms of the industrial revolution was intimately connected with scientific development at the time,” Rosenfeld championed a more individualistic method, with “more focus on the individual and on the theoretical content of the science in question and less on the social context,” and refrained from using his histories to endorse Soviet utilizations of science.Footnote 110 Rosenfeld worked closely with members of the SRS in the 1940s and 1950s, and in 1954 was asked by the World Peace Movement’s journal Horizon to review Bernal’s Science in History.Footnote 111 Rosenfeld’s critique was “devastating”Footnote 112—arguing that Bernal “collectivized scientific achievement too much … there was too much focus on the collective at the expense of individual contribution to the development of science,” and forced science into a “ready-made, Leninist-inspired framework.”Footnote 113 Bernal, in response, accused Rosenfeld of pedanticism, of lacking the sense of proportion otherwise appropriate between political allies. Farrington, “while maintaining a friendly tone … wholeheartedly took Bernal’s side in the dispute,”Footnote 114 writing to Rosenfeld, “my heart goes out to Bernal because he makes no bones about the side he is on, not in a narrow theoretical sense, but in the political sense. He believes, and I believe with him, that the Communist World is capable of using and is actually using science in the interest of mankind.”Footnote 115 Farrington here seems to have prioritized the unity—and adherence to pro-Soviet rhetoric—of the scientific left over the open criticism of its varying methodological commitments regarding science and society.
At the same time, it would be amiss to take Farrington’s histories as primarily propagandist, unconcerned either with scholarly veracity on its own terms, or with establishing a sound, practical basis for present action. Raphael Samuel, in a 1980 retrospective on the Historians Group of the Communist Party of Great Britain, argues that Farrington and other Marxist historians were engaged in a “species of democratic Kulturkampf, in which superstition was a cloak for vested interests, while enlightenment was a popular cause”—taking Farrington’s Science and Politics in the Ancient World as a prime example of this.Footnote 116 Farrington’s histories, by this understanding, play out the struggle between materialist, popular thought and idealist, elite thought as a grand battle of ideas on the historical stage: groups such as the Epicureans are cast as advancing a proto-Marxist popular materialism against the reactionary elites of Greece and Rome, while the moralizing contempt for manual labor on the part on the ruling classes is made to stand for the transhistorical role of tradition and vested interest in suppressing the working classes. This is certainly part of Farrington’s intention in writing: writing an ancient genealogy for a philosophy of popular liberation, charting the rise of a concept of science that holds human well-being to be its true purpose, and valorizing the Marxist tradition as the rightful heir of this. This rhetorical, affective dimension, however, is only one aspect of these histories. Farrington distinguishes, in his 1952 Marx Memorial Lecture “Karl Marx: Scholar and Revolutionary,” between moral-rhetorical and causal-scientific ways of writing history, and self-consciously favors the latter. It is this dimension, the scientific, that his histories also aim at: the reconstruction of causality in the social relations of past science, such as to serve as a better practical guide for present political action.
Introducing his discussion of Marx’s doctoral dissertation, Farrington refers first to the liberal German historian Theodor Mommsen, who attempted to propagandize for the class struggle through his histories of the Roman Empire. This mode of scholarship, for Farrington, is doubly flawed: in its moralistic attitude to history, using the class conflict in Rome as an essentially emotive, rhetorical appeal to the present, and in its detachment from any practical movement. Farrington’s critique of Mommsen, while markedly firebrandish, is a valuable clue to understanding the relationship between theory and rhetoric in Farrington’s works—helping explain first his insistence on a sound, Marxist theory of history from which practical insights can be drawn, and second his normative conception of the intellectual as one who must step into a larger political movement if their scholarship is to guide practice. Mommsen, argues Farrington, was an anachronistic historian: finding in the Italy of 200 BC a “‘a pure capitalist system’, ‘a developed system of capital’. His anger with it is refreshing but hardly compensates for the anachronism.”Footnote 117 Mommsen used history to inspire the sentiment of his readers, to incite anger at the injustices inflicted on the lower classes: sympathizing with the slaves of Rome, he “confuses them under the common appellation of proletariat,” and provides no concept of the specificity of economic systems, the different sets of class positions within them, and the differing prospects for political practice that emerge from this.Footnote 118 In his zeal for emotionally efficacious propaganda, Mommsen’s histories sacrificed practically efficacious scientific understanding: he “may relieve our hearts but he does not instruct our heads when he tells us, with regard to ancient Roman society, that ‘the whole system was pervaded by the utter unscrupulousness characteristic of the power of capital.’”Footnote 119 For one “serious about the science of history”—as Farrington holds that revolutionaries should be—such a mistake dooms one’s histories to practical impotence: “a history that confounds in a common terminology civilizations separated from one another by two thousand years and a revolution in the mode of production is not the sort of science on which successful action can be based. It was Marx, immersed in the actual struggle, who made the essential advance in theory.”Footnote 120 It is not enough, then, for scholarship to evoke causality—it must demonstrate it. Mommsen’s second failure, for Farrington, was his detachment from a mass movement. Mommsen’s disillusionment with the failures of the revolutions of 1848 led him to lack respect for the German public, by his own admission, and withdraw from practical politics. In his Testament, published forty-five years posthumously, Mommsen confesses his disappointment at the German nation—their “rank-and-file service and political fetichism”Footnote 121—for Farrington, “a failure resulting from too tame a surrender to circumstances.”Footnote 122 Without a connection to a mass political movement, Mommsen lacked the realization that his histories could be used to guide practice, rather than merely incite sentiment. Without this attempt at causal history in mind, “Mommsen tried to fight the battle of 1848 in the pages of his History of Rome”:Footnote 123
He did not fight the class-struggle of his own day in the political arena, but he could not lay its angry ghost which haunted him in his study. So he sought out the capitalist enemy in the history of pagan Rome and gave him a sound trouncing in his vigorous pages a couple of millennia before he appeared on the historical stage.Footnote 124
This analysis of the failures of Mommsen’s mode of practicing history is illuminating for understanding the tension between the scientific and the rhetorical in Farrington’s own histories. Marx, for Farrington, committed himself firmly to an existing political movement, working to educate and guide that movement—writing “not for the decaying feudal order, which would perfectly well do with the old style of history, but for the new rising proletarian class for whose service a deeper and truer kind of history was required.”Footnote 125 Marx’s scholarship was not devoid of rhetorical appeal, but neither was it exhaustively this—it “burns with a scorn for the Germany of his day which is no less fierce than that of Mommsen, but much more fruitful”Footnote 126 in that it was deliberately, self-consciously scientific—indeed, “the historical science on which [the action of the lower classes] is based”Footnote 127 proclaims “the partnership of philosophy with the proletariat.”Footnote 128 To the extent that the Farrington of 1972—a humanistic, private doubter of scientistic Bernalism—and the Farrington of 1942—a proponent and historical vindicator of Bernalism—existed simultaneously, this entanglement of theoretical verity and practical commitment may be insightful. It is probable that whatever private doubts Farrington held, his decision to defend the Bernalist camp against less orthodox critics such as Rosenfeld may have been based on the conviction that making sacrifices in historical nuance and complexity—from which practical sacrifices may not need to be made—would be an appropriate price to pay to avoid ostracizing himself from the scientific left, and thus avoid the risk of becoming as divorced as Mommsen from the seemingly most hopeful current for promoting the cause of scientific socialism.
Whatever doubts the Farrington of the 1930s–1950s had about what Werskey calls “‘scientized’ Soviet Marxism,” he seems to have judged them best set aside to work with a movement that presented itself as the best hope for a communist who saw an urgent need to use science for social well-being.Footnote 129 Farrington may likely have made the calculation that, seeing such urgency in the socialist use of science, it was better to be within the scientific left, representing a historically trained and relatively humanistic complement to the thought of the scientists, than to be an anti-scientistic critic of the scientific left, and thus an outsider to those setting the agenda for a Marxist politics of science: the professional scientists, comprising the core of the movement, would ultimately still be the ones with whom he must collaborate.
Conclusion
To read Farrington today is to usefully enrich our understanding of the political thought of mid-century science and Marxism in several ways. As Werskey in particular has acknowledged, existing scholarship on the Social Relations of Science and the Society for Freedom in Science, coming mainly from the history and philosophy of science, has paid relatively little attention to the role that histories of science played in formulating, articulating, and propagandizing for the politics of the differing ideological camps. Where scholars have studied the histories written by these figures, they have, while acknowledging the political context of their writing, tended to focus on the role they played in the development of the history of science as an academic discipline—as a historical-materialist, externalist trend in science’s historiography through which the debate between internalists and externalists would be played out and ossify over the following decades.Footnote 130 Treating these histories as political thought is to argue for the inseparability of “histories” and “politics” in understanding the thought of this moment. This is to say that histories were used to find political answers and to legitimate political positions, and that they shaped the political imaginations of scientific intellectuals, providing a resource for conceptions of their practice, community, and function around which competing normative visions of these could be articulated and fought over.
Studying Farrington in this manner can, accordingly, demonstrate the variety of the uses to which histories of science were put in these debates, and the many modalities of political argumentation at which these histories worked. I offer a brief and non-exhaustive typology of modes here. At the most concrete level, history is used as a repository of causal insights—claims, abstracted from the richness of historical data, as to the impact of social relations on science—the claim, for example, that scientific potential will go squandered if political-economic institutions do not direct it towards welfare. These causal insights feed over into the justification of political demands. The claim to have made successful theoretical generalizations from science’s history lends itself to the argument that these generalizations recommend one political choice over another: for example, to the notion that science requires state-mediated direction, rather than the free play of market forces, in order to fully actualize its capacities for social improvement. At a more abstract level, these histories also do the work of lineage construction: negotiating and reframing the significance of particular characters and episodes in science’s history, both to provide heroic and emulatory models of how the scientist ought to act in society, and to construct an intellectual heritage for one’s own ideological position. We see this work in Farrington’s reappropriation of Epicurus, of Lucretius, and of Bacon—constructing, against ideological opponents who were keen to deny the Social Relations of Science a true historical lineage, a deep and substantive past of materialist, instrumentalist, and socially emancipatory science to buttress and legitimate their own philosophy.Footnote 131 These histories, further, work to craft grand-historical narratives as to science’s moral character across world history. Science has an essential function which, under the right conditions, will shine forth: it is the control of nature in order to master nature and remedy social ills. If science is ambivalent in practice—applied towards warfare or the maintenance of hierarchy—then this is a mutable, tractable problem, rather than one inherent to the form of its knowledge; under the right politics, it will be made to serve its true historical role.
At the most abstract level, such histories finally work as forms of ideological legitimation for the politics encoded in them. To call Farrington’s histories “political thought” in the sense outlined in my introduction—as a language through which scientific intellectuals draw narratives from the past of their discipline, and use these to persuade and convince—is to place them in a broader tradition of Marxist history writing which makes use of the claim to be treating history scientifically.Footnote 132 The claim that a “scientific” history of science vindicates a particular, Marxist politics of science is a powerful rhetorical maneuver. Its force is not just in the claim to have extracted individual causal lessons from the data of history, but also that history, treated as a science, shows that their particular concept and function of science is latent in history, and that their politics now recognize this and apply it self-consciously. Its implication is thus that if the opponents of planned science reach different conclusions regarding the practical lessons to be drawn from history, it is because they are treating history falsely—as the leaps and bounds of scientific genius; as a humanistic, individualist discipline; as the study of pure thought, detached from time and space—rather than as the collective and practical triumph of human labor over the natural world, firmly anchored in culture and class politics. The claim to be doing “scientific” history here functions as the claim that history, correctly interpreted, compels certain politics as an inescapable unity of theory and practice. Farrington’s Marxism casts the history of science as central to the total process of history, and planned science, then, as the latent meaning of this history: its world-historical function, the amelioration of human want, made complete through rational direction. As he closes his Greek Science, “In the light of these conceptions the history of science assumes a new importance. It becomes, not the history of one among several branches of human knowledge, but the essential clue to the process by which man achieves his self-transformation from the animal to the human kingdom.”Footnote 133
Acknowledgments
My initial chance to contribute to bringing Benjamin Farrington’s histories back into the light of day was at the Cambridge Classical Reception Seminar in June 2023, and I am very grateful to Jessica Glueck and Frances Myatt for having me to speak. Many thanks to Duncan Kelly, Alex White, and Kathryn Line for their critique and commentary on earlier versions of this manuscript, and to Christopher Stray, Peter Rees, and Nick Jardine for our discussions of Farrington’s life and work. Finally, to Jane Straker, née Farrington, for two invaluable phone calls in August of 2023: it was my privilege to talk with you, and I hope that I have done some credit to the historical memory of your father and his work. This article was developed, in part, from the fourth chapter of the author’s doctoral thesis, “The Political Thought of the Social Relations of Science Movement, c.1931–1956,” submitted for examination in the Faculty of History, University of Cambridge, in August 2025.
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