Scientists of the world, unite!

Radovan Richta's theory of scientific and technological revolution

Vitězslav Sommer

pp. 177-204

in: Elena Aronova, Simone Turchetti (eds), Science studies during the Cold War and beyond, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016

Abstrakt

This chapter opens with the discussion of the transformations of Czechoslovak social sciences in the 1950s and 1960s. Specific framework for the social sciences based on the Stalinist theory of knowledge emerged in the early 1950s, whereby social sciences were an inseparable part of the everyday revolutionary process and subsequent socialist construction. In the second half of the 1950s, de-Stalinization aimed its criticism in the name of 'scientification" at professional incompetence of social scientists and the overestimation of their propagandist role. Social sciences had to abandon simple propagandist activities in favor of more sophisticated scholarly analysis. The chapter then analyzes the conceptualization of science in Radovan Richta's theory of Scientific and Technological Revolution (STR). Philosopher and sociologist Radovan Richta (1924–1983) is well known as a main author of influential collective work Civilization at the Crossroads (1966), an ambitious attempt of Czechoslovak social scientists to explain future directions of social, political, and economic development in the post-industrial age. The chapter concludes with an assessment of Richta's studies of relationship between science and STR in the broader context of Czechoslovak intellectual history of the 1960s and 1970s and with regard to the period discussions about possibilities of modernization of the state socialist system.