The World Federation of Scientific Workers (WFScW) and UNESCO share roots in the Social Relations of Science (SRS) movements and in the Franco-British scientific relations which developed in the 1930s. In this historical context (the Great Depression, the rise of Fascism and the Nazi use of science, the social and intellectual fascination for the USSR), a new model of scientific internationalism emerged, where science and politics mixed. Many progressive scientists were involved in the war efforts against Nazism, and tried to (...) prolong their international commitments into peacetime. They contributed to the establishment of the WFScW and of UNESCO in 1945–1946. Neither the WFScW nor UNESCO succeeded in achieving their initial aims. Another world emerged from the immediate post-war years, but it was not the world fancied by the progressive scientists from the mould of scientific internationalism. The aim of this article is to follow the path from the Franco-British networks towards the establishment of the WFScW and UNESCO; from an ideological scientific internationalism towards practical projects. It is to understand how these two bodies came to embody two different scientific internationalisms during the Cold War. (shrink)

Since the mid-twentieth century, the ‘Scientific Revolution’ has arguably occupied centre stage in most Westerners’, and many non-Westerners’, conceptions of science history. Yet among history of science specialists that position has been profoundly contested. Most radically, historians Andrew Cunningham and Perry Williams in 1993 proposed to demolish the prevailing ‘big picture’ which posited that the Scientific Revolution marked the origin of modern science. They proposed a new big picture in which science is seen as a distinctly modern, western phenomenon rather (...) than a human universal, that it was invented in the Age of Revolutions 1760–1848, and that science be de-centred within the new big picture: treated as just one of many forms of human knowledge-seeking activity. Their paper is one of the most highly cited in the history of science field, and has the potential to transform the way that science educators, science communicators, science policy-makers and scientists view science. Yet the paper and historians’ scholarly response to it are not well-known outside the history discipline. Here I attempt to bridge that disciplinary gap with a review of scholarly papers published 1994–2014 that cited Cunningham and Williams or otherwise discussed the Scientific Revolution, to gauge the extent of support for the old and new big pictures. I find that the old big picture is disintegrating and lacks active defenders, while many scholars support aspects of the new big picture. I discuss the significance of this for scholars in ‘applied’ fields of science studies such as education, communication and policy. (shrink)

Besides his activities as a theoretical physicist, the Belgian Léon Rosenfeld cultivated and showed a lively concern for history of science since his student years. This paper is a study of his publications, correspondence and other endeavours in history of science, mainly during the early Cold War period, in order to explore his essentially Marxist views on science and society and how they differed from those of other Marxists scholars, most notably John D. Bernal and Boris Hessen.