A Turd in the Punchbowl: Initial Thoughts on Christoph Shuringa’s “A Social History of Analytic Philosophy,” Or, An Epigone Crashes the Party, #9–Edgar Zilsel.

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*Originally published in the 3:16am blog.

** “EJ Spode” is a pseudonym of Peter Ludlow.

A Turd in the Punchbowl: Initial Thoughts on Christoph Shuringa’s “A Social History of Analytic Philosophy,” Or, An Epigone Crashes the Party, #9

9. Edgar Zilsel

Edgar Zilsel

It baffles me that Schuringa shows almost no interest in Zilsel—he identifies him as a member of the Circle, relegating him to a few notes regarding his comings and goings and saying nothing about his work. The baffling thing is that Zilsel himself was an important social historian of science. His thesis about the sociology of science—“The Zilsel Thesis”—is laid out in his essay “The Sociological Roots of Modern Science” (1942) and related pieces collected in his book, The Social Origins of Modern Science.

The Zilsel Thesis deserves a mention here because it embodies everything the Vienna Circle was about. The basic idea was that modern science emerged via a fusion of artisans’ empirical skills plus scholars’ theoretical traditions in urban/capitalist social structure. So, to take one of his examples, Galileo’s achievements would not have been possible without the culture of instrument makers, the mechanical knowledge of artisans, and the blending of mathematics with practical craft. Surveyors, navigators, and instrument builders became mediators between scholars and trades. Of interest to the Circle was the idea that modern science is a kind of fusion between practical craft and scholarship. It was not one or the other. The two cannot be separated.

How does someone writing a social history of anything miss Zilsel? In any case, Zilsel was definitely part of the “Left Wing” of the Vienna Circle and was a key component in Red Vienna. He was an Austro-Marxist; he joined the Austrian Social Democratic Party in 1918, wrote for their house journal, Der Kampf, was briefly arrested after the 1934 Austrian civil war, and eventually, forced out of his teaching job. In 1939, he fled Europe for the United States and tried to cobble together some research jobs in California Universities. Destitute and struggling with everything that comes with being an émigré in the United States, he took his own life in 1944.

His interest in Austro-Marxism was not purely political; he fused it into his theoretical research. Zilsel explicitly endorsed historical materialism and saw Marxism as a crucial resource for philosophy. His strategy was to blend Marx/Engels with ideas from Boltzmann’s statistical mechanics to argue for empirical laws in history and society that could emerge from lots of random events at the individual level. This is sometimes called the Law of Large Numbers (LLN). Marxists have picked up the LLN as a way to discuss how “necessity” emerges from messy individual events—especially in economics, social statistics, and history. It serves as a kind of bridge between dialectical talk of “tendencies” and the hard math of probability. So Zilsel used LLN-style thinking to naturalize Marxist claims. The key idea is that social laws are no more mysterious than gas laws; both are emergent statistical regularities of huge ensembles.

Happily, Zilsel’s work is making a comeback. In 2017, Jérôme Lamy (historian and sociologist of science at CNRS) and Arnaud Saint-Martin (a member of La France insoumise [LFI]) started a journal on the sociology of science called “Zisel,” in honor of the work of Edgar Zilsel.Here are images of some issues of the journal:

In an article explaining their choice of name for the journal they noted that there may have been some attempt to erase Zilsel’s work from the record (Lamy and Saint-Martin, 2023). It was only rediscovered in the 1980s and is now seen as a precursor to science and technology studies (STS).

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