Socio-Political Coordinates of Early-Modern Mechanics: A Preliminary Discussion

How does a cultural-political understanding of science integrate socio-economic treatments? How can a historiography that takes subjectivity into account avoid the pitfall of post-modern relativism? The history of mechanics is a paradigmatic field to use in answering these questions and, in fact, it has always been at the center of much political-epistemological skirmish. This chapter first recounts the main motives and features of early twentieth-century social accounts of science. Further, it deals with the issue of how the need for a non-reductionist treatment of intellectual history (neither economicist nor monocausal) calls for an integration of the economic context and the political element for a more appropriate understanding of scientific development.