Roots & Branches. Boris Hessen’s Marxist Science Historiography
An Introduction to a Marxist Science Historiography
Preamble
This blog post presents a reworked version of an oral presentation originally delivered during the Spring 2025 reading group sessions on “The Science of Society in Critical Theory,” focusing on Boris Hessen’s seminal analysis of Newton’s Principia. While the core argument and structure remain faithful to the original presentation, this written adaptation includes the following changes: extensive citations of key claims, footnotes providing additional context and clarification, and a refinement of theoretical points to ensure stronger fidelity to Hessen’s original work. I hope you find in this blog post both a reconstruction of why Hessen’s intervention was so electrifying to science historiography and an appreciation of his enduring significance as a theoretical bridge connecting diverse strands of Marxist historical analysis.
Hessen Reconstruction
What is the relationship of science and technology to human history, and how have Marxists conceptualized this problematic within historical materialism? The work of Boris Hessen represents one of the most sophisticated attempts to apply a materialist analysis to the history of science—specifically, how the economic needs of early capitalism influenced what we now think of as modern science and the Scientific Revolution. In this blog, I explore how Hessen pursues his analysis in his seminal essay “The Social and Economic Roots of Newton’s Principia” (henceforth referred to as “Newton’s Roots”).
While Hessen did not develop the first Marxist analysis of science,
In the same vein, Henryk Grossman makes the connection between science and capitalist society explicit in his work with the Institute of Social Research (Institut für Sozialforschung, or IfS)—several of Grossmann’s articles were published in the IfS’s journal Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung (ZfS). Grossmann was in fact one of the first defenders of Hessen’s work against critics such as George. N. Clark, Richard S. Westfall, etc. as these critics fundamentally misunderstood Hessen’s theses, and, by extension, Grossmann’s own formulation of the relation between science and capitalist society. While both reached similar conclusions independently, and Grossmann’s work is introduced at points, I focus on Hessen’s formulation here.
To do justice to Hessen’s analysis of Newton, it is important to apply Hessen’s own considerations toward Newton to himself. What was the context of this intervention? What were the social and economic roots of this text? And what can this context reveal about the text? To answer these questions, I first provide a brief biography of Hessen up to his Newton text. I then examine the core arguments of the Hessen-Grossmann thesis, before finally exploring what Hessen’s materialist approach to science historiography might mean for both theory and practice today.
A Brief Biography of Boris Hessen
Boris Hessen was born in 1893 to a middle-class Jewish family in Elisavetgrad (now in Ukraine), then part of the Russian Empire. His intellectual journey began early; we have evidence of his involvement in local Marxist movements during his gymnasium years, showing how science (here, seen equally as education) and politics were never separate for Hessen. Between 1913 and 1914, Hessen and his gymnasium friend Igor Tamm (who would later win the Nobel Prize in Physics) studied physics and natural science at the University of Edinburgh. There, Hessen worked under Edmund T. Whittaker, a mathematician and physicist specializing in astronomy and numerical methods. It is from his teacher that Hessen inherited an interest in the history of physics. Whittaker was known in academia equally as a scientist and as a historian of science. While studying under Whittaker, Hessen cultivated his sense that scientific and historical analysis must be integrated. This would become a neat historical motif as later Marxist scientists, such as Richard Lewontin, also match this historical pattern.
Returning to Russia in 1914, Hessen continued his studies in physics, mathematics, and statistics at St. Petersburg University. Then came the Russian Revolution and Civil War—a period that transformed both Russia and Hessen himself. He enlisted in the Red Army, joined the Communist Party in 1919, and served on the Revolutionary Military Council from 1919 to 1921. After the civil war, Hessen worked at the Party School while continuing his physics studies at various institutions, eventually graduating from the Institute of Red Professors in Moscow in 1928.
Hessen’s dual position as both a physicist and a party intellectual placed him at the intersection of science and politics during a period of intense ideological battle in Soviet academia. This intersection became increasingly dangerous for Hessen. He faced severe accusations of being a “Machist” (a follower of Ernst Mach’s positivist philosophy) and a “right deviationist”—both potentially being connected to his Menshevik past.
Hessen presented “The Social and Economic Roots of Newton’s Principia” in 1931 at the Second International Congress of the History of Science in London as a member of the Soviet delegation led by Nikolai Bukharin. Hessen’s report is often considered a landmark in the historiography of science, with eminent figures such as J.D. Bernal and J.G. Crowther supporting Hessen. At the same time, however, Hessen’s sympathizers were outnumbered by detractors such as G.N. Clark, A.R. Hall, and R.S. Westfall, who made it their mission to critique Hessen’s work.
The importance of Hessen’s report still reverberates in the fields of STS (science and technology studies) and the history of science, where Hessen is taken to be an exemplar of an externalist account of science history.
For Marxist science scholars, Hessen’s text has another valence. Loren Graham and others, for example, understood this text as a lobbying tactic by Hessen: party philosophers would not challenge the validity of Newton’s theories, and showing that these theories were motivated by bourgeois concerns, in Hessen’s eyes, would show that scientific ‘accuracy’ could exist whatever the motivations were for undertaking it.
Hessen returned to the USSR after setting the discipline of science history ablaze in the first world with his Newton presentation. Between 1934 and 1936, while continuing his scientific and history of science work, Hessen secured his last position as deputy director of the Physics Institute in Moscow. This position did not do him any favors. At this point, with the paranoia of ‘anti-Soviet’ conspiracy at fever pitch and his reputation still suspect, this new position of influence only reinforced the intensity of his potential dubiety. Like many “dissident” Soviet thinkers and philosophers, he fell victim to the Stalinist purges.
The Hessen-Grossmann Thesis Applied to Newton
Hessen’s analysis of Newton in “Newton’s Roots” represents a broader framework that scholars gloss as the Hessen-Grossman thesis. This thesis—its description as such suggesting an intimate connection with Grossman’s work—offers a materialist framework for understanding techno-scientific development through three interconnected claims:
First, technology opens up horizons for science. Scientific inquiry does not emerge in a vacuum, but is enabled by existing technological practices.
Second, technology simultaneously acts as a constraint/limit on science. Scientists can only conceptualize and investigate phenomena that materially manifest in existing technological practices.
Third, the interaction between science and technology in society generates a world-picture (Grossman) or image of nature (Hessen)—essentially, the dominant ideology or conception of nature in a given historical period.
Hessen’s analysis of Newton elaborates how the Hessen-Grossmann thesis explains techno-scientific development. For claims 1 and 2, Hessen argues that like any other form of labor, scientific labor is socially determined at its core. In turn, one of the key aspects of this social determination is the existence of particular, concrete technologies prior to the scientific process, technologies that Hessen argued expressed existing material practices—that is, the forces and relations of production. Scientists study these technologies to produce theories, models, and concepts. Conversely, science itself supplies new technological possibilities or means, creating what might be called a virtuous cycle of development.
In Newton’s case, Hessen demonstrates how scientific labor is socially determined by showcasing how the practical mechanics of early capitalism furnished the content for Newton’s theories. Consider his examples from the text. Maritime trade created demand for better ships and navigation, pushing forward developments in fluid dynamics and astronomy. Military needs drove innovations in ballistics and fortification design. Industrial challenges in mining and warfare required mechanical solutions spanning from basic machinery to advanced materials research. Hessen argues that all these practical concerns—excluding mining and metallurgy, which he classifies as chemistry problems—afforded, if not motivated or necessitated, the emergence of theoretical mechanics as a new science that could synthesize these diverse practical applications. In short, the means of production (tools, machines, etc.) supply and bound scientific labor’s developmental trajectory.
Crucially, Hessen connects these technological needs to the rising bourgeois class:
“Step by step, science flourished along with the bourgeoisie. In order to develop its industry, the bourgeoisie required a science that would investigate the properties of material bodies and the manifestations of the forces of nature. Hitherto science had been the humble servant of the church and had not been allowed to go beyond the limits set by the church. The bourgeoisie had need of science, and science rebelled against the church together with the bourgeoisie […]”
Boris Hessen. “The Social and Economic Roots of Newton’s Principia,” in *The Social and Economic Roots of the Scientific Revolution*, (Dordrecht: Springer, 2009), 56\.
“Similarly, the division of labor within the various branches of industry was first put into practice in the army. This, in condensed form, is the entire history of the bourgeois system […]”
Hessen, “Newton’s Roots,” 49\.
Just as revealing as what Newton addressed is what he failed to address. Hessen points out that Newtonian natural philosophy omitted problems in thermodynamics and electrodynamics, fields that would later be crucial to understanding the conservation of energy implied in Newton’s own theory. Such an omission can be explained: the invention of the steam engine, understood by Hessen as embodied material practice, had not yet occurred! The ‘material conditions’ for theorizing such sciences simply did not exist in Newton’s time. As Hessen explains:
“It was not the development of the motor and the invention of the steam engine that created the industrial revolution of the 18th century, but on the contrary the steam engine gained such enormous importance precisely because the division of labour that was emerging in manufacture and its increasing productivity made the invention of a machine-driven tool both possible and necessary, and the steam engine, which had been born in the mining industry, found a field awaiting its application as a motive power.”
Hessen, “Newton’s Roots,” 78\.
One note here. According to Hessen, there was a further development in the social world between Newton’s time and the development of thermodynamics—that being economics—in the transition from merchant capital to industrial or manufacturing capital. These social developments posed new technical issues, which in turn generated new scientific problems.
Following Hessen, we see a pattern here. What makes the Hessen-Grossmann framework so powerful is its historical specificity. Technology becomes an ‘enabling constraint’ for science: such a constraint simultaneously makes specific scientific inquiries possible, while limiting others, but only during specific historical periods tied to particular social formations. The concept enabling constraints epitomizes claims 1 and 2 of the Hessen-Grossmann thesis. We can understand the mechanisms of these enabling constraints through the following process:
First, economic forces specify social and practical needs.
Second, technological means realize these economically specified needs.
Third, science examines existing technology and conceptualizes it.
Finally, science changes the structure of technological realization, which in turn alters the economic specification of needs.
This creates a dialectical relationship that Freudenthal and McLaughlin aptly describe:
“The need or desire to expand commerce, ascertained by Hessen, is not of itself a need to improve shipping… The decision to improve shipping for the purpose of expanding commerce […] presupposes the consideration of possible concrete projects characterized by the means for their realization.”
Freudenthal and McLaughlin, *“*Marxist Historiography of Science,” 6\.
In other words, economic needs do not automatically translate into technological problems—any such translation itself requires existing scientific and technological practices. As Merton notes, “[e]conomic and military needs may be satisfied by other than technologic means. But given the routine of fulfilling these wants by technologic invention […] it may be said that, in a limited sense, necessity is the (foster) mother of invention.”
One should caution against a potentially vulgar interpretation of the thesis, wherein the purpose of scientific inquiry in general is facilitating economic development by improving technology. The claim, instead, isn’t about this “mechanism” (economic need -> tech -> science), but rather on the conceptualization of how such a social mechanism became a dominant strategy and tactic in the production and reproduction of modern social life.
For both Hessen and Grossmann, the dominance of scientific inquiry as a social mechanism stems from a real separation between conception and execution, which was underway as a historical process via the introduction of machinery and mechanization across various sectors and industries. A reductionist strategy of abstraction, a “world-picture” or ideology, instrumentalizes two poles of commodity-producing labor/labor-power—the qualitative (skills and judgments) and the quantitative (the precise rules and protocols)—such that people are indeed reduced to being cogs in a machine via strict quantitative parameters. In turn, these very parameters incentivize these human cogs being replaced by actual machines due to the unique nature of social domination under capitalism: value enacted by the market. Mechanical labor homogenizes labor to be equal qualitatively and only differ quantitatively, and this difference is prescribed with measurement. In other words, labor becomes modulated as a social mechanism; the potential autonomy of labor is reduced to being a signal-to-noise ratio in the valorization of capital.
However, the content of science isn’t just bound by the socioeconomic and technological conditions on their own. Another factor in scientific concept-formation and practice is the ideological horizon determined by the various historical moments in class warfare. Hessen is particularly illustrative here, distinguishing between Newton and Descartes’ mechanical worldviews and showing that these differences arose from their ideological struggles and commitments. Thus, to properly reconstruct Newtonian theory, one must place him as representative and nexus of many social forces, which reciprocally determine each other. Newton was a member and partisan of the ascending bourgeois class of the English revolutions, a protestant, and a contemporary and a friend of philosophers and scientists (Locke, Bentley, Leibniz, etc.). Yet, the revolutionary transformation of society involved many diverse people and class representatives from Thomas Hobbes to the Leveller Richard Overton who all affected the content of Newtonian natural philosophy and his metaphysical and theological beliefs. Newton’s interweaving of religious elements with the principle of mechanical causation (the intertwined ideal and material elements) wasn’t just a deficiency in his personal conception, but a trace of, or reflective of, ideological battles of the time. Indeed for Hessen, the dialectic between individuals and collectives is key in determining the political form in which the ideological content of science manifests. Newton as an individual scientist only makes sense in a broader socioeconomic context, yet Newtonian mechanics was a singular achievement in the history of science. This as our text repeatedly demonstrated is not because of a genius idea or individual, but a determinate social individual. Put simply, Newton was an articulator and articulation of a particular socioeconomic condition, 17th-century London.
These various ‘political forms’ in which ideological content manifests can be seen concretely in Hessen’s comparison of Newton and Descartes. Like Newton, Descartes was a man of all seasons—an esteemed mathematician, philosopher, and humanist operating outside the university milieu still dominated by Aristotelian physics and Thomism. Alongside figures like Hobbes, Bacon, and Boyle, Descartes represented the ‘new science’ positioned against both scholastic dogma and Church authority.
These contrasting approaches illuminates what Hessen means when he treats ideology. For him, ideology is to be taken etymologically as a ‘science of ideas,’ which are always embedded in material practices constituting social reality. The different scientific positions Newton and Descartes adopted were refractions of the broader struggles between feudal and capitalist institutions. Newton’s theological compromises reflected the complex negotiations between diverse figures—from Hobbes to the Levellers—that shaped his intellectual milieu, while Descartes’ more consistent materialism refracted a different configuration of these same underlying social conflicts. Both individual commitment and collective historical forces combined to determine which ‘political form’ the ideological content of their science would take. Taken as a whole, the Hessen-Grossman thesis asserts that technology is the enabling constraint behind modern science, and that scientific and technological means generate a world-picture or image of nature, which, in the last analysis, is a product of class struggle.
The final section of “Newton’s Principia” is unfortunately the weakest part of Hessen’s text. Hessen reverts to bourgeois reductionism in his discussion of the Luddites, and he fails to notice that his own analysis resonates with their own,
Conclusions
What is the relationship of science and technology to human history? As I have argued, I believe that the Hessen-Grossmann materialist framework for science historiography offers a sophisticated and historically localized answer to this question—one which merits serious reconsideration today. Though the consequences and implications of this framework are immense, I highlight a few promising threads.
There is no “neutral” technoscientific rationality. Science and technology emerged, persisted, and developed due to specific historical configurations—their current mystified appearance is a product of capitalist society. This has direct implications for revolutionary politics. “Appropriating the means of production” means more than simply taking over existing machinery. It requires transforming the social form of scientific and technical labor itself. The naive understanding that we can just seize capitalist machinery without addressing the class relations inherent in their design and deployment, espoused especially by ecomodernists, is misguided.
Given the “enabling constraint” thesis and the “ideology” thesis, any philosophical account of capitalist society must explain how material practices transition from one set of scientific and technological labor means to another. For a negative example, consider Moishe Postone’s analysis of capitalist temporality, which does not have such an account even though he scaffolds a potential one.
The Hessen-Grossmann framework allows us to develop a singular yet internally diverse history of science—one that sees the history of science as a part of the material history of planet Earth or the earth system. The Haber-Bosch process exemplifies this approach: ammonia synthesis emerged from Germany’s dependence on Chilean caliche (nitrate) for both feeding populations through fertilizers and sustaining its military through explosives during WWI. When British naval blockades severed these supply chains, triggering the war’s first naval engagement off Chile’s Pacific coast, this dual dependency transformed from regular ‘economic’ trade into existential crisis or a real practical challenge. The scaling-up of Haber and Bosch’s laboratory process into industrial production crystallized how bourgeois science-industry integration serves the contradictory imperatives of social reproduction and destruction. This transformation reveals the barbarism inherent in capitalist scientific development. Chile’s control of nitrate deposits, seized through the War of the Pacific and organized under the Anglo-Chilean Nitrate & Railway Company, created an extractive economy that devastated entire ecosystems. Today, Tocopilla Province bears witness to this violence: hundreds of abandoned mining towns and endless piles of overburden earth scarring the landscape. The Haber-Bosch “solution” merely shifted this ecological destruction from extraction to industrial synthesis, while nitrate’s dual use in fertilizers and explosives embodies the productive-destructive unity of capitalist technoscience.
As indicated briefly in the introduction, these implications were not lost for science historians. Broadly speaking, Hessen’s reception followed several trajectories. European ‘socialist’ historians labeled him as a crude economic reductionist, while ironically adopting the “externalist” approach to science history he helped inaugurate. Positivists, Stalinists, and vulgar anti-Stalinists alike mischaracterized him as an “internalist,” claiming his 1931 presentation was an anomaly in his oeuvre, whereas his previous work mainly took itself to caring about science’s internal conceptual development. More recently, social constructivists in sociology of science have advanced what Steven Shapin famously articulated: “There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it.”
As I hope my presentation made clear, I think that Hessen was neither an internalist nor an externalist. I follow others like Sean Winkler and Pietro Daniel Omodeo who also argue such, as both internalists and externalists share the conviction that the core of modern science was the advance of the physical-mathematical disciplines. For Hessen, this misses the real emergence of these disciplines in practical activity, where problems of knowledge are inseparable from problems of social order. Even for proponents of the cultural turn, Hessen remains a trailblazer with his ideology thesis. As Omodeo observes:
“But, at a deeper level, the Scientific Revolution itself was the expression of an ideology, namely the Eurocentrism that it implicitly justified. Such ideology is not mere mystification — an intentional lie to be dispelled and corrected. Rather, it is a conception that constitutes political action. It reflects on society, justifying and redirecting it. Hence, the Scientific Revolution cannot be treated as a mere problem of historiography and epistemology to be revised and eventually substituted by a ‘correct’ narrative (or abandoned for no narrative at all) once a hypothetical agreement among the academic community of historians of science (perhaps ‘historians of knowledge’) has been reached. Rather, the Scientific Revolution should be understood as the cultural expression of specific relations of power and a specific historical arrangement of society at a global level. Its geo-historical coordinates correspond to European colonial expansion and the establishment of Europe-centered forms of global dominion. It is by no means accidental that the dawn of the Scientific Revolution coincided with the definitive end of European centrality in geo-politics and the establishment of a US-centric globalization.”
Pietro Daniel Omodeo, “Boris Hessen’s Philosophy of the Scientific Revolution,” in Omodeo and Winkler, *History of Physics*, 174.
Hessen’s enduring insight is that science, politics, and society cannot be delinked. Science was not a disinterested intellectual pursuit of the truth outside of worldly concerns, but one of corporeal organization and the co-evolution of the natural and social worlds. By investigating the forms of life that shape scientific practice, historiography transcends mere narrative to become functional in the metabolism between society and nature. For Hessen, socialist science must simultaneously keep pace with advanced capitalist science while being its harshest critic. It accomplishes this by refusing to separate scientific practice from scientific history. In the absence of such an integrated approach, the realization of an emancipated historical form of science cannot manifest, and the relationship of the content of science to its expressions (technology, research activity, education, etc.) will be mystified.
Similar to what Marx wrote in the 1844 Manuscripts, “Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.”