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The Forgotten Knowledge: Yugoslav Communists and the Epistemology of Natural Sciences, 1930-1950

The Communist Party of Yugoslavia identified, engaged, and “sanitized” unorthodox comprehensions of the Marxist philosophy of science in the periods immediately before and following the Second World War in similar yet different ways. Prior to 1941, party members and sympathizers lead a fierce battle for ideological purity, especially in physics and psychology. The postwar period, when the party came to power, saw an unprecedented proliferation of works on “Soviet science” under direct patronage of the state on an impressive scale. Rather than the few existing professional scientific journals, it were popular scientific journals such as Priroda and pamphlets published by the particularly active Croatian Society of Natural Sciences that covered a variety of scientific topics, including the most politically sensitive issues of the time. These publications pushed for the introduction of a Soviet science model to Yugoslavia. In contrast to the late interwar period, the notions of “antifascist, ” “progressive, ” and “socialist” science – rather than elaborations of dialectical materialism – became central to this enterprise, which, among other things, calls for rethinking of the relationship between the ideological and political pressure during early socialist Yugoslavia. The “Stalinist phase” in the history of the Yugoslav communist party has been portrayed as a time of ubiquitous and passionate ideologization. The analysis of popular scientific publications, however, suggests that the natural sciences, which were directly engaged in the political-ideological perturbations of the late Stalinist Soviet Union, came under surprisingly selective ideological scrutiny by the Yugoslav communists. This was partly due to the fact that many participants of the prewar scientific-philosophical debate had perished in the war and that the party, now governing the war-torn country, had more pressing issues to deal with. Science was believed to be critical for securing the revolution in Yugoslavia after 1945. Drawing from both the Soviet example and Yugoslav experience in the politically pertinent philosophy of science, this was no longer an internal issue of the Communist party but a massive re-educational campaign that aiming at large segments of the population, even if occasionally at the cost of orthodoxy in the Marxist philosophy of science.

Yugoslavia ; Communism ; Communist Party of Yugoslavia ; dialectical materialism ; Marxism ; natural sciences ; philosophy of science

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