Cultural Hegemony in a Scientific World. Gramscian Concepts for the History of Science

Massimiliano Badino and Pietro Daniel Omodeo (eds)

This volume in political epistemology offers a comprehensive discussion of the multiple applicability of Gramscian concepts and categories to the historical, sociological, and cultural analysis of science. The authors argue that the perspective of hegemony and subalternity allows us critically to assess the political directedness of scientific practices as well as to reflect on the ideological status of disciplines that deal with science at a meta-level – historical, socio-historical, and epistemological.

Contributors include: Massimiliano Badino, Javier Balsa, Lino Camprubí, Ana Carneiro, Luís Miguel Carolino, Riccardo Ciavolella, Roger Cooter, Alina-Sandra Cucu, Maria Paula Diogo, Isabel Jiménez Lucena, Annelies Lannoy, Jorge Molero Mesa, Agustí Nieto-Galan, Pietro Daniel Omodeo, Matteo Realdi, Jaume Sastre-Juan, Arne Schirrmacher, Ana Simões, Carlos Tabernero Holgado, and Carlos Ziller Camenietzki.

Biographical Note

Pietro Daniel Omodeo is Professor of Historical Epistemology at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy; Principal Investigator of the ERC project EarlyModernCosmology (Horizon 2020, GA 725883) and the FARE project EarlyGeoPraxis (grant of the Italian Ministry of University and Research). He is the author of Political Epistemology: The Problem of Ideology in Science Studies (Springer, 2019).

Massimiliano Badino is Associate Professor of Philosophy of Science at the University of Verona. He was recipient of a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Global Fellowship (FP7, 2014–2017). He wrote extensively on the early history of statistical mechanics and quantum physics. His research interests include history and philosophy of contemporary physics as well as the intersection between ethics, politics, and epistemology.

Readership

Scholars and graduate students interested in Science Studies, Philosophy, Political and Cultural Studies, Political Epistemology, and contemporary perspectives on science.

Table of Contents

For Gramsci: Hegemony in the History and Philosophy of Science
Massimiliano Badino and Pietro Daniel Omodeo

Part 1 State of the Art

Past and Present: Revisiting ‘Gramscianism’
Agustí Nieto-Galan

Part 2 Disciplinary Struggles

The Concept of Hegemony in Discourse Analysis
Javier Balsa

Hegemony and Political Subject in Anthropology
Riccardo Ciavolella

The Common Cult of the Historical Truth: The Formation of History of Religions in France and the Role of the Socio-cultural Elites
Annelies Lannoy

Part 3 Science and Religion

Jesuit Science and Cultural Hegemony: A Political Historiographical Critique
Pietro Daniel Omodeo

‘O pobre intelectual’: Manuel G.G. Lourosa, the Astronomy and the Political Restoration of Portugal in the Seventeenth Century
Luís Miguel Carolino and Carlos Ziller Camenietzki

Cosmology, Religion, and Cultural Hegemony: The Scientific Apostolate of Antoni Romañá in Early Francoist Spain
Matteo Realdi

Part 4 Organic Intellectuals

Using Gramsci’s Dialogical Approach: The Struggle for Meaning in Q&A Sections of the Spanish Press in the First Third of the Twentieth Century
Isabel Jiménez Lucena, Jorge Molero Mesa and Carlos Tabernero Holgado

The Scientific Intellectual, a Hostile Milieu, or a Cultural Dispositif? Revisiting the Historiography of Interwar German Physics and How It Explains Scientific Culture
Arne Schirrmacher

10 Engineering as Cultural Hegemony: A Gramscian Interpretation of Francoism
Lino Camprubí

11 Political Entanglements and Scientific Hegemony: Rectors-Scientists at the University of Lisbon Under the First Republic and the Dictatorship (1911–74)
Ana Simões, Ana Carneiro and Maria Paula Diogo

Part 5 Cold War Science

12 Philanthropy, Mass Media, and Cultural Hegemony: The Rockefeller Foundation and the Politics of Science Popularisation in the 1930s
Jaume Sastre-Juan

13 Why Hegemony Was Not Born in the Factory: Twentieth-Century Sciences of Labour from a Gramscian Angle
Alina-Sandra Cucu

Part 6 Past and Future

14 The Importance of Gramsci Today: The ‘New Lorians’ and the Biological Reduction of History
Roger Cooter

References
Index