Abstract
The radical political activism of the 1960s and 1970s became the starting point for an exploration of Marxist historical materialism as it could be applied to the history of biology. In particular Marxism helped to point out the relationship between the development and accumulation of capital following the great burst of industrial growth in the United States after 1865, and its expansion into agriculture. The “industrialization” of agriculture provided a stimulus for the development not only of agricultural technology but also Mendelian theory and its associated social theory, eugenics.
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Notes
Organized by Patrick Catt, whose dissertation at Indiana University discusses the radical science movement in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s.
Tom Bottomore, Laurence Harris, V.G. Kiernan, Ralph Miliband, eds., A Dictionary of Marxist Thought (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1983 ), p. 309.
Harry Magdoff, The Age of Imperialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1969); Paul M. Sweezy, The Theory of Capitalist Development: Principles of Marxian Political Economy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1942 ); Ernest Mandel, Marxist Economic Theory, translated by Brian Pearce ( New York: Monthly Review Press: 1968 ).
Arthur R. Jensen, “How Much Can We Boost I.Q. and Scholastic Achievement?” Harvard Education Review, 39 (1969), pp. 1–123.
Mark Haller, Eugenics: Hereditarian Attitudes in American Thought ( New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1963 ).
Garland E. Allen, “Evolution and History: History as Science and Science as History”, in History and Evolution, Matthew H. Nitecki and Doris Nitecki, eds. ( Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992 ), pp. 211–239.
See for example, Joseph Needhan, Science in History (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1971/1954) 4 vols; J.B.S. Haldane, “Preface” to Friedrich Engels, The Dialectics of Nature (New York, International Publishers, 1971/1940), pp. vii—xvi. Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1985 ).
Karl Marx, Capital (New York: International Publishers, 1967 ). See Volume III, Chapter 13.
See Levins and Lewontin, Dialectical Biologist(cit. note 7): esp. Chapters 1–3, 6 and 9.
Steven Rose, “The Rise of Neurogenetic Determinism”, Nature, 373 (1995), pp. 380–382.
Marx, Capital I (cit. n. 8), p. 362.
Boris Hessen, “The Economic Roots of Newton’s Principa”, in Science at the Crossroads(London: n.d. [1930–31]), pp. 151–176.
Edgar Zilsel, “The Sociological Roots of Science”,American Journal of Sociology, 47 (1941–42), pp. 544–560; G.N. Clark, Science and Social Welfare in the Age of Newton(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2nd ed., 1949); Robert K. Merton, “Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth Century England”, Osiris, 4 (1938), pp. 414–565.
For Britain, see Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics ( New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1985 ).
Barbara Kimmelman, “A Progressive Era Discipline: Genetics at American Agricultural Colleges and Experiment Stations, 1890–1920” (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania unpublished Ph.D. dissertation: 1987); Diane Paul and Barbara Kimmelman, “Mendel in America: Theory and Practice, 1900–1919”, in The American Development of Biology, Ron Rainger, Keith R. Benson and Jane Maienschein, eds. (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), pp. 281–309; Deborah Fitzgerald, The Business of Breeding.: Hybrid Corn in Illinois, 1890–1940 (Ithaca: New York, Cornell University Press, 1989); Jack R. Kloppenburg, First the Seed: The Political Economy of Plant Biotechnology, 1492–2000 (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1988); Jean-Pierre Berlan and R.C. Lewontin, “The Political Economy of Hybrid Corn”, Monthly Review, 38 (July—August, 1986), pp. 35–47; Paolo Palladino, “Wizards and Devotees: On the Mendelian Theory of Inheritance and the Professionalization of Agricultural Science in Great Britain and the United States, 1880–1930”, History of Science, 32 (1994), pp. 409–444; Paolo Palladino and Michael Worboys, “Science and Imperialism”, Isis, 84 (1993), pp. 91–102; Kathy J. Cook, “From Science to Practice or Practice to Science: Chickens and Eggs in Raymond Pearl’s Agricultural Breeding Research, 1907–1916”, Isis, 88 (1997), pp. 62–86; Kathy J. Cooke, “Twisting the Ladder of Science: Pure and Practical Goals in Twentieth-century Studies of Inheritance”, Endeavour, 22 (1998), pp. 12–16; Garland E. Allen, “Essay Review: History of Agriculture and the Study of Heredity — A New Horizon”, Journal of the History of Biology, 24 (Fall, 1991 ), pp. 529–536.
A more recent version of this analysis has been published as “The Reception of Mendelism in the United States, 1900–1930. ”Comptes Rendu, Academic des Sciences, Paris, Sciences de la Vie, 323 (2000): pp. 1081–1088.
Graham Adams, The Age of Industrial Violence (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966 ); see also Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order ( New York: Hill and Wang, 1967 ).
An excellent discussion of the economic side of “progressivism” is found in James Weinstein, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State, 1900–1918(Boston: Beacon Press, 1968). See also Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order (op. cit., n. 17).
Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 1975 ), I, p. 457.
Margaret W. Rossiter, The Emergence of Agricultural Science. Justus Liebig and the Americans, 1840–1880 (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1975); James Wilson, “The New Magazine has a Place”, The American Breeders ’ Magazine, 1 (1910), pp. 3–5.
Wilson, “The New Magazine has a Place” (cit. n. 19), pp. 4–5.
Wilson, Ibid.
Garland E. Allen, “The Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, 1910–1940. An Essay in Institutional history”, Osiris (New Series), 2 (1986), pp. 225–264.
E.M. East and Donald F. Jones, Inbreeding and Outbreeding ( Philadelphia: J.P. Lippincott, 1919 ).
Lewontin, Richard C. and Jean-Pierre Bertan, “Technology, Research, and the Penetration of Capital: the Case of U.S. Agriculture”, Monthly Review, 38 (1986), pp. 21–34. See also, Deborah Fitzgerald, The Business of Breeding: Hybrid Corn in Illinois, 1890–1940 ( Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990 ).
Allen, “The Eugenics Record Office” (cit. n. 23), pp. 257-258.
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Allen, G.E. (2001). Radical Politics and Marxism in the History of Science. In: Allen, G.E., MacLeod, R.M. (eds) Science, History and Social Activism. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 228. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2956-7_12
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