ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Competing for Truth: Cold War Rivalry and the Methodological Values of Science

• In Event: Whose Values Count? Political Commitments, Marginal Voices, and the Construction of Scientific Legitimacy

English Abstract

This paper investigates how the Cold War reconfigured the methodological values of science by turning competition itself into a scientific virtue. Focusing on physics and space research between the 1940s and 1970s, it argues that rivalry –long seen as an external condition of geopolitics– was gradually internalized as an epistemic ideal within the practice of research. The “good scientist” of the Cold War era was expected not only to produce knowledge, but to do so against a rival, mirroring the ideological polarization of the age.

The early U.S.-Soviet race for satellite launches, the internal competition between American research laboratories under military patronage, and the parallel Soviet efforts to define scientific excellence through ideological contrast between the western bourgeoisie science and their own “true” science that confirms to the dogma of dialectic materialism, constitute concrete historical cases that reveal how notions of rivalry and confrontation migrated from political discourse into the methodological language of science. This migration of values shows how a political commitment could harden into a methodological standard.

My goal is to make a case that competition and conflict had ceased to be a mere social and political context for science and was becoming gradually internalized during the Cold War era as a criterion of its validity: a way to define truth through confrontation. Furthermore, I argue that Cold War physics and space research reveal a broader historical transformation in which methodological ideals absorbed the language of conflict –a legacy that continues to inform how scientific credibility and success are measured today. In this sense, the paper contributes to the session’s broader theme by revealing how the Cold War turned a political ideal into a criterion for scientific legitimacy, aligning its case with other historical configurations in which values governed method, authority, and evaluative norms.

Author

• Konstantinos Papathanasiou, National Kapodistrian University of Athens