Boris Gessen

Boris Hessen: The Physicist Who Explained Newton With Economics

In June 1931, a Soviet physicist stood before a hall of Western historians at the Second International Congress of the History of Science in London and argued that Isaac Newton's *Principia Mathematica* — the founding text of modern physics — could not be understood apart from the mercantile shipping routes, mining technology, and military engineering of seventeenth-century England. Five years later, the Soviet state that had sent him to deliver that argument had him shot in a Moscow prison yard as a counter-revolutionary. Boris Hessen's paper on Newton went on to reshape an entire academic discipline; Hessen himself was erased from it for two decades.

From Elisavetgrad to the Front

Hessen was born on August 16, 1893, in Elisavetgrad, then part of the Russian Empire and now Kropyvnytskyi, Ukraine, into a Jewish family. He studied physics and the natural sciences at the University of Edinburgh from 1913 to 1914, alongside the future Soviet physicist Igor Tamm, before continuing his studies at St. Petersburg University from 1914 to 1917. The Russian Revolution and Civil War interrupted his scientific training: he enlisted in the Red Army, joined the Communist Party in 1919, and served on the Revolutionary Military Council from 1919 to 1921, work that placed him inside the new regime's political and military apparatus at a formative moment. He continued his education at Party schools even while serving, and eventually completed a further degree at the Institute of Red Professors in Moscow in 1928 — the Soviet institution built specifically to train a new generation of Marxist scholars and administrators for the sciences and humanities.

A Career Built Inside Soviet Physics

By 1931 Hessen had become a physics professor and department chair at Moscow State University. He was elected to the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1933 and, from 1934 to 1936, served as deputy director of the Physics Institute in Moscow — a senior position that placed him near the top of Soviet physical science administration at the height of the discipline's expansion. Alongside his institutional role, Hessen worked as a serious defender of modern theoretical physics within Marxist philosophy, publishing extensively on relativity theory, probability, and statistical mechanics at a time when Soviet ideologues were attacking Einstein's physics as bourgeois idealism incompatible with dialectical materialism — a politically dangerous debate in which Hessen took the side of defending relativity on Marxist terms rather than rejecting it.

The Newton Paper

It was in that charged political atmosphere that Hessen traveled to London in 1931 as part of a Soviet delegation led by Nikolai Bukharin to the Second International Congress of the History of Science. His paper, "The Social and Economic Roots of Newton's Principia," argued that the specific scientific problems Newton chose to solve, and the concepts he used to solve them, were shaped directly by the practical technical demands of his era: navigation and shipbuilding, mining and metallurgy, artillery and fortification, the material concerns of an emerging mercantile and early-capitalist England. The argument was a direct challenge to the then-dominant idea that scientific ideas develop through an internal, self-contained logic detached from economic and social conditions. Later historians of science have called it one of the most famous papers ever delivered at a history of science conference, and it is now widely credited as a founding document of the externalist tradition in the history and sociology of science — the approach that insists scientific knowledge must be explained partly by the social and material conditions surrounding its production, an approach that would later shape the work of scholars as influential as J. D. Bernal and, through subsequent debate and reaction, much of the mid-twentieth-century sociology of science.

A Paper Written Under Pressure

Later scholarship on Hessen, notably Loren Graham's analysis of his career, has argued that the Newton paper was not a purely disinterested academic exercise but a document crafted under direct political pressure: Hessen was defending his own position within Soviet physics, using the Newton case to bolster an externalist, materialist account of science that could, by extension, be turned to defend Einstein's relativity theory against ideological attack at home. Read this way, one of the founding texts of the social history of science was also an act of professional and physical self-preservation by a scientist who knew his political ground was unstable.

Arrest and Execution

That ground gave way. The NKVD arrested Hessen on August 22, 1936, on charges of counter-revolutionary terrorism during the escalating first wave of Stalin's Great Purge. He was tried in secret, found guilty, and executed by shooting on December 20, 1936, in Moscow, and buried in a common grave at Donskoye Cemetery. In 1938 he was formally expelled from the Academy of Sciences he had joined only five years earlier. The state rehabilitated him on April 21, 1956, during the post-Stalin thaw, and reinstated him to the Academy of Sciences on March 5, 1957 — more than twenty years after his death, and by then an academic and moral correction that could do nothing for the man himself.

Why Boris Is Called a Genius

The case for Hessen's genius is unusually concrete: a single conference paper, written by a working physicist rather than a professional historian, effectively founded a still-active school of thought in the history and sociology of science, one that argues scientific knowledge cannot be fully understood in isolation from the economic and technical needs of its era. That the paper's method has been absorbed into mainstream history of science — cited, contested, and built upon for nearly a century — is a rare outcome for any single scholarly intervention, let alone one delivered by an outsider to the field addressing an audience of specialists. The honest counter-case, laid out by Graham's retrospective research, is that the paper's argument was shaped as much by Hessen's immediate political survival needs as by disinterested historical insight, and that its reception split sharply along ideological lines from the start — embraced by Marxist historians of science and figures like Bernal, rejected by others including scholars associated with the British Society for Freedom in Science and prominent figures at Harvard, a divide that persisted for decades and that later historians still have to navigate when assessing the paper's scholarly merit apart from its political origins.

Legacy

Hessen's Newton paper is now a fixture of graduate training in the history of science, read as the opening argument in a debate about internalist versus externalist explanations of scientific change that the field has never fully resolved. His own life closed that debate in the starkest terms available to a Stalinist state: the physicist who argued that ideas cannot be separated from the material conditions that produce them was destroyed by the material conditions of Soviet political terror before he turned forty-four.

Achievements

• Held posts at Lomonosov Moscow State University
• Fields: philosophy, history of science and physics