“What Light from the Ancient World?” Histories of Science and the Political Thought of Benjamin Farrington

Debates over planning in mid-twentieth-century Britain saw two ideological camps form in the British scientific community: the Social Relations of Science and the Society for Freedom in Science, arguing, respectively, for and against the state planning of science. This article examines the work of the classicist and Marxist historian Benjamin Farrington, contextualizing his histories of Greek and Roman science in these debates in order to understand his mobilization of the history of science to argue for scientific planning, the dual character of his histories as both a search for theoretical insight and a mode of public–political persuasion, and the reception of Farrington’s historical thought as a “humanistic” alternative to the ostensibly scientistic Marxism of allies such as J. D. Bernal. In doing so, this article both reorients attention to the role of histories in these political debates, and theorizes such histories as a deliberate mode of political argument and legitimation.