The prospect of a critique of scientific ideology (or a critique of ideological science) can seem inherently contradictory according to a doctrinaire interpretation of Marx’s conception of science and ideology. In the words of Canguilhem, “Science authenticates itself, [Marx] argued, by tearing the veil that is ideology’s only substance. Hence scientific ideology is a contradiction in terms.” If ideology, for Marx, was contrasted with true (Marxist) economic science, what could it mean to designate certain sciences as ideological?

How can one take account of the historicity of the sciences and critique their contingent, outmoded, and often indeed deluded and deluding forms while leaving room for that true scientificity that Marxism is meant to represent? Many of Althusser’s writings presented a confrontation with these questions, in part by building upon Bachelard’s concept of “epistemological break,” and his formulation of the science/ideology dichotomy informed the work of Georges Canguilhem, Michel Foucault, Dominique Lecourt, and remains influential in continental science studies, for example on the work of Hans-Jörg Rheinberger. This tradition also informed the work of certain Marxist scientists, such as dialectical biologists Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin. At the same time, Jacques Derrida, in his seminars of the 1970s (two of which have been published since his death), deconstructed this opposition by asking how the entire system oriented by the progress from ideology to science must be changed if models or metaphors cannot ultimately be replaced by true and literal concepts. 

We are interested both in papers that interpret and build upon this tradition by making use of its guiding concepts to intervene in present debates in Marxist theory, French theory, and science studies, as well as contributions that would think the limits of this framework and how subsequent developments of science and its economic and political contexts may ask us to reconfigure these concepts and the analyses this tradition put them to. To give just one example, both Althusser and Canguilhem turn to the genetics of their day as the primary representative of a true, nonideological science—a representation of genetics that is increasingly placed in question by biologists today, and which could well be understood as the fetishizing attribution of social and economic relations to things themselves. 

What does a Marxist critique of scientific theory and practice look like today? As Marx and Engels often pointed out, the concepts they left us with responded to the conditions in which they wrote, and would need to be renovated with every passing generation. It is in this spirit that we invite contributors to think with and against this tradition, reawakening its spirit of radical critique.