Abstract

A Political Matter: Science and Ideology in the 21st Century. In the last two decades, history of science and science studies have been quite reluctant to adopt the notion of ideology when analyzing the dynamics of science. This may be an effect of the decreasing popularity of neo-marxist approaches within this disciplinary field; but it is also due to the fact that alternative approaches have been developed, for example Michel Foucault's notion of problematization, Roland Barthes' semiotic mythology, Bruno Latour's re-interpretation of the ontological difference between fact and fetish in science, or Donna Haraway's semi-fictional re-narrations of the techno-scientific world. This contribution undertakes to sketch the impact of two strands of 19th century immanentism on the authors named above, and on their use of concepts related to the notion of ideology, namely fetish, fetishism, myth and mythology respectively. It is argued that in some respect, Marx' concept of commodity fetishism is worth being re-examined, since it articulates a dialectical relation of ‘reality’ and ‘seeming’, and its impact on Barthes' mythology is deeper than it might appear at first glance