Epilogue: Soviet psychology and its utopias: historical reflections for current science

Introduction

Pasts are not inert, as they provide us with perspectives to problematize both present and future. In the case of sciences, since the XIXth Century, they became unavoidable agents in the discussions of our present and possible futures. This is so, not because of a corporate zeal, but because scientists are related to governmental agendas, politics are inseparable from the roles assigned to scientists, by themselves or third-party agents. Therefore, if scientists would not be reduced to a mere instrument of the powers that be, they need to build up a conscious political thinking to navigate the public arenas of their conjunctures. From such a perspective, some historical outlines are here presented to guide a reflection on the present and future, a task enforced by the lack of promising perspectives in the current situation of world politics.

Typically, scientists are characterized, by themselves and by lay people, as experts or technicians, when they should be considered as public figures in the full sense. As Pinault (2003) highlighted, the reduction of scientists to “experts” blurs the fundamental role scientific thinking had in the imaginaries, politics, economy and culture of the last centuries, that is, the impact of science in the definition of institutions, power disputes and relevant problems, both in their local communities and distant times and geographies. As Livesey (2006) points out, two opposing perspectives usually add up to this mischaracterization: On the one hand, the members of scientific disciplines tend to consider the knowledge production as an individual endeavor, and thus exaggerate their capacities as individuals or their intellectual autonomy, following the “genius” model of desired identity. On the other hand, science, technology and society studies tend to minimize the capabilities and agendas of scientists as individuals or specific groups in order to integrate — sometimes subsume — them to broader cultural, political and economical processes. These opposing views hinder the possibilities of thinking scientific agency: or it is assumed without being thematized, or it is disregarded.

What is at stake here is how scientists, psychologists in particular, are thought, by themselves and others, of as intellectuals to intervene in the public sphere, yet not as mere specialized science communicators or guardians of professional interests, but as actors in the disputes for social imaginaries and future horizons. Actually, such a position would not be new; Charle (1990) has pointed out that the role of the contemporary intellectual, typically awarded to writer and essayist Emile Zola, has been directly preceded by Louis Pasteur and Claude Bernard, key figures in the legitimation of medicine as a socially relevant scientific practice, and to Hip-polyte Taine and Ernest Kenan, who used scientific thinking to address philosophy, history and literature. One could even trace the articulation of scientific and political thinking back to the physiocrats of XVIII century (Dostaler, 2008). Nevertheless, scientists’ incursion in public politics has not been, and it is still not, direct, effortless and even necessarily positive, especially when it is about disputing a status quo to obtain a more inclusive and equitable future. Thus, a critical and historical examination of such interventions is required, which here will be exemplified with the experience of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), a rich conjuncture to examine the possible and actual ties between science and politics in a more recent history.

A regular feature in leftist politics is to produce visions of a future social organization to guide activism. XIXth and XXth century communism was exemplary in that gesture, with the peculiarity that tried to distinguish itself from other socialist trends by means of a scientific analysis of social and economic reality. Notably, Friedrich Engels (1878/1960) proposed a “scientific socialism”, a political praxis based on systematic inquiry of social order, as opposed to “utopian socialism”, which voluntarism would be inadequate to understand oppression mechanics and so give proper direction to activists. From this rationalist basis, communism, especially in the USSR, built a series of narratives oriented towards the unfolding of human potencies once it’s freed from its economic and social yokes. Such narratives had a profound effect in the rhetoric and imaginary of political and military, authorities, civil activists, artists and scientists (Stites, 1988), and shaped a future horizon that could be justifiably considered as a utopia, not in the pejorative sense as a fantastic imagination detached from reality, but in its propositive sense, as a believable and desirable horizon of expectation that organizes and articulates the projects and practices of several social sectors towards a mediate future (Jameson, 2007). In the case of sciences, utopias are not just imaginaries of the upcoming times, but an inherent vector in the organization of research agendas and goal assessment. Recent research on the history of futures, predictions and projections, especially in social sciences (Andersson & Kindzeviciute, 2012, 2015), shows that those sciences aimed for mid and long-term effects on global politics and techno-economic management. That kind of study focuses on scientific knowledge geared towards the planification and control of future social scenarios, power effects, and the agency of institutions and actors in policy making. Military strategy, energy and natural resources exploitation, and macroeconomic management show the deep intertwining between science and political power in the XXth Century. Though these studies try to differentiate form the analysis of unrealistic utopias, and emphasize how certain actors defined future as “a field of action, intervention, management and protest” (Andersson & Kindzeviciute, 2015, p. 11), they also acknowledge that the distinction between scientific planification and utopia is not always unambiguous. What is of interest here is to highlight the links between utopias, as the unfolding of possible horizons, and future oriented science, in the specific sense of Andersson and Kindzeviciute.

The principles of scientific socialism promoted by Soviet psychologists can be synthesized as a socio-political utopia resulting from scientific and technical advances, as the social life can and must be rationally planned for the emergence of the “New Man”. The analysis of this idearuin, even though it is now deactivated, is useful for a reflection on how current scientific thinking can participate in public debates, avoiding both political ingenuity derived from futures dislocated from our conjunctures, and technical pragmatisms that hamper the understanding of the aims and consequences of science activities.