In this article, based on a talk given to the Brecht Forum, home to the New York Marxist School in January 2006, Cliff Conner discusses his recent book, A Peoples’ History of Science, published by Nation.

The book has two main purposes. The first has to do mostly with the past, and the second mostly with the present. With regard to the past, I’m trying to show that science was not created out of the minds of great individuals, but was always a collective endeavour, including large numbers of working people - people who worked with their hands as well as their minds. Traditional history of science is discussed in terms of individual geniuses like Galileo, Newton, Darwin, or Einstein. Not that what famous figures did was useless or uninteresting, but there is much, much more to the history of science than that. That, ‘much more’ - the collective contributions of many anonymous people - has traditionally been ignored.

Some are not anonymous; a few of their names have actually been preserved in the historical record. For example Onesimus, the African slave responsible for introducing the knowledge of smallpox prevention to North America early in the eighteenth century. His contribution represented a major leap forward in the science of epidemiology. But the knowledge he transmitted was produced by the experimentation of thousands of his African forebears, whose names are unknown to us. The same is true of Tupaia, a Polynesian navigator whose name was recorded in Captain Cook’s journals. Tupaia and a few others have to stand in for the many generations of Polynesian navigators whose knowledge of the Pacific enriched the sciences of oceanography, geography, and cartography.

Miners, Midwives, and ‘Low Mechanicks’

Rather than individual contributions to scientific knowledge, it might be better to think in terms of occupational categories. This is what the book’s subtitle implies: Miners, Midwives, and ‘Low Mechanicks. But there are hundreds of occupational groups that could be considered, so these three are only symbolic of a much larger number. ‘Low Mechanicks’, for example, was a catchall term used by the intellectual elite in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to disparage all artisans, or anybody who worked with their hands, for that matter.

Miners were a particularly important occupational group doing difficult, dirty, and dangerous work. But they made important collective contributions to the sciences. They were the first metallurgists, and metallurgy was a major wellspring of chemistry. As they dug through the layers of rocks, miners contributed a lot of information about the structure of the earth, which gave the initial impulse to the science of geology. And when miners discovered deeply buried fossilized plants and animals that is how paleontology began.

‘Midwives’ is to be understood not only as women who participated in the birthing process, but all of the female healers whose folk medicine was, for many centuries, generally more effective than the practices of the university-trained doctors.

Collective knowledge

With regard to the argument about the collective nature of knowledge production, I’m trying to show that it applies to two main stages in the history of science: first, in the origins of the very earliest scientific knowledge everywhere in the world; and second, in the origins of modern science most familiar to us today. If science is the knowledge of nature, it should not be surprising to find that it originated with the people closest to nature: those forced by the conditions of their lives to wrest the means of their survival from an encounter with nature on a daily basis.

The earliest contributions to science were made by prehistoric peoples, so the book includes a chapter on what hunter-gatherers came to know about nature. As for modern science, I show that the Scientific Revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was the work, primarily, of artisans: miners, blacksmiths, sailors, mechanics, carpenters, watch-makers, lens-grinders, and others like them.

One of the traditional heroes of the Scientific Revolution is Francis Bacon, frequently credited with creating the ideology of modern science. He was the most effective critic of the old science then dominant in the universities, the science that looked to Aristotle’s writings for all the answers. That old-fashioned kind of science was dead and lifeless, he argued and the only people really gaining new knowledge were the artisans, the craftsmen. If educated people wanted to learn anything new about nature, they should go to the workshops of artisans to learn it. Bacon was right, it was from the workshops of the artisans that the Scientific Revolution developed. But if that is so, how come the history books pay great attention to Francis Bacon and hardly any attention at all to the artisans he was talking about?

How capitalism has corrupted science

The second purpose of the book that has to do more with the present than the past, is the subject of the last two chapters, ‘The Union of Capital and Science’ and ‘The Scientific-Industrial Complex’. In these chapters, I discuss how the rise of capitalism has shaped the historical development of science, which has resulted in the paradoxical nature of science in today’s world. Modern science is often put on a pedestal and portrayed as the most solid form of knowledge and the most dependable means of acquiring knowledge, but at the same time, the pronouncements of scientists are frequently perceived as untrustworthy, because the scientists are seen as paid apologists for the interests of self-seeking corporations or government agencies of dubious honesty. So, the last two chapters of the book examine how capitalism has corrupted science and knowledge by turning them into commodities, so that today when you hear a scientific claim, you have to take into consideration who has bought the scientists – who is paying their salaries.

Science Wars

The phrase ‘science wars’ is used to describe a subcategory of the culture wars that are raging in the United States today. At the heart of the science wars is a dispute over whether science should be seen as a source of unchallengeable authority. In the past, ruling classes sought to base their legitimacy on religion; in the western world it took the form of the so-called ‘divine right of kings’. But those days are gone. Ruling groups may still appeal to religion, in the US today for example, but generally the secularization of modern society reached the point at least a century ago where they felt the need for an alternative source of unchallengeable authority. That role was filled by modern science. It served that purpose very well for a while, but in the last few decades, the authority of science has been increasingly challenged. And that is what the ‘science wars’ are all about. In this book, I join this ideological battle on the side of the challengers. To quote Richard Lewontin, the idealizers of science say: ‘When Science speaks, let no dog bark’. Well, I say, ‘let the dogs out’. By taking the spotlight off the traditional Great Heroes of Science and focusing instead on the social nature of knowledge production, I tried to show that modern science is not a product of unfathomable genius that transcends the puny powers of understanding of ordinary people like ourselves.

Marxism and history

The book is very much a product of Marxist scholarship. A large proportion of the sources I drew on were Marxist historians and scientists such as Edgar Zilsel and Boris Hessen, M. I. Finley, Christopher Hill, Harry Braverman, Richard Lewontin, Roy Porter, Richard Levins and the late Stephen Jay Gould. The very notion of ‘People’s History’ is of Marxist provenance. The first example of the genre was A People’s History of England, which was published in England in the 1930s by a Marxist historian named A. L. Morton.

To rediscover the scientific contributions of ordinary working people, is not simply to right a historical wrong to people who had been unjustly ignored by traditional historians. The traditional hero worship that raises Newton and Einstein to the skies and ignores almost everybody else is a reflection of an ideological commitment that shapes the way all of us perceive the world, so deeply ingrained in our psyches that we take it for granted. Richard Lewontin has written very eloquently about this; he identifies it as, ‘the priority of the individual over the collective’. The deep commitment to individualism, he says, ‘is simply a reflection of the ideologies of the bourgeois revolutions of the eighteenth century that placed the individual in the centre of everything’.

The opposite of individualism - collectivism - is obviously an important component of Marxist and socialist ideology. A healthy socialist ideology would not demand the negation of individualism, but would recognize a balance between the needs of individuals and the collective. My purpose in stressing the collective nature of scientific knowledge production was to take a step toward restoring the necessary balance between individualism and collectivism. Our current culture is afflicted with a cult of celebrity, whether that celebrity is a Michael Jackson or an Albert Einstein; I was trying to show that in the history of science we need to go in another direction

For further information go to: www.PeoplesHistoryofScience.com

Cliff Conner