Boris Mikhailovich Hessen

Though best known as a historian of science, Hessen devoted half his working life to defending relativity and quantum mechanics within the framework of Soviet philosophy. His 1928 book The Basic Ideas of the Theory of Relativity was both an accessible introduction to Einstein and a brief for the theory against charges of 'bourgeois idealism.' In a long preface to the Russian translation of Arthur Haas's Matter Waves and Quantum Mechanics (1930), he went further, arguing that the probabilistic character of quantum mechanics did not contradict dialectical materialism's concept of causality but rather represented a higher form of causality that had overcome mechanistic determinism.

This was not abstract philosophy but an existential struggle. Moscow University physicist Arkady Timiryazev and philosopher Aleksandr Maksimov denounced relativity and quantum mechanics as 'reactionary science in the service of imperialism' and demanded a return to a Newtonian worldview. Hessen represented Soviet theoretical physicists, above all his close friend Igor Tamm, in resisting these attacks, striving to persuade both colleagues and Party authorities that the new physics was not merely compatible with dialectical materialism but mutually enriching. In 1931 his outdated article on 'ether' in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia drew a famous mocking letter from a group of young Leningrad theorists, Landau, Gamow, Bronstein, Ivanenko and others, who illustrated their note with bottles labeled 'Ether' and 'Phlogiston.' They treated Hessen as a relic, yet he was the more consistent defender of the new physics in the Soviet Union. By the mid-1930s this philosophical front had acquired lethal political stakes, and Hessen himself would not escape them.

In June 1931, at the Second International Congress of the History of Science held at London's Science Museum, Hessen, a member of the Soviet delegation led by Nikolai Bukharin, delivered 'The Socio-Economic Roots of Newton's Principia.' The paper changed the course of the history of science.

Hessen's thesis was clear and provocative. Newton's mechanics was not the isolated product of pure genius but a response to the technical demands of 17th-century English commercial capitalism: ephemerides for ocean navigation, pumps for mine drainage, ballistics for artillery, hydrodynamics for canal construction. Tracing the physical themes of the Principia one by one to contemporary technical problems, Hessen argued that the content of science itself is rooted in the material conditions of production. This was a direct challenge to the tradition, dominant since Whewell, of treating the history of science as a genealogy of great individuals.

The lecture deeply influenced a generation of younger scholars including Joseph Needham, J.D. Bernal, and Robert K. Merton, and became the founding moment of the 'externalist' tradition in the sociology of science, the approach that explains scientific content through its socio-economic context. Hessen embedded a further strategic argument in the paper: if Newtonian physics, born of bourgeois conditions, was indisputably valid science, then relativity and quantum mechanics could not be dismissed merely as 'bourgeois science.' More than eighty years after his death, the paper remains an indispensable classic in debates over the methodology of the history of science.