Authors

Fabian Link¹;  ¹ Universität Wuppertal, Germany

Discussion

This paper explores Joseph Needham’s (1900-95) and J.D. Bernal’s (1901-71) activities in building bridges between Great Britain and China (Needham) and the Soviet Union (Bernal). Both were Cambridge based renowned scientists and convinced socialists with idiosyncratic outlooks – Needham merged Catholicism with socialism whereas Bernal was a communist and supporter of Stalin. In the diplomatic service of the Royal Society and the British wartime government Needham travelled to China in 1943 and established the Sino-Western Science and Co-operation Office. He became a historian of Chinese science and civilization. Bernal, as Needham, was much impressed by the Soviet delegation’s presentation of a dialectic-materialist history of science on the 1931 Second Congress of the History of Science and Technology in London and regularly visited the Soviet Union thereafter. After World War II, Needham engaged together with Julian Huxley in creating the UNESCO, in which he directed the Natural Sciences Section and continued his science diplomacy until 1948. Bernal supported the UNESCO and its mission of science cooperation, but concentrated more intimately on the Soviet Union through his work for the World Peace Council and the World Federation of Scientific Workers where he met with the Soviet scientific elite. In 1953, he received the highest award of the Soviet Union, the Stalin Peace Prize. I argue in this paper that Needham’s and Bernal’s turn to the history of science has to be connected to their left-wing science diplomacy, that the history of science as meta-perspective reflecting the function of science in society, its universality and social responsibility served as discursive platform for cultural exchange between Great Britain and China and the Soviet Union. While Needham’s works demonstrated that science was not a European invention, Bernal’s books influenced the New Left in thinking that the coming social revolution will be one based on scientific and technological advancement.