Multiple Social Temporalities of the Scientific Revolution: a Bourdieusian Perspective

The aim of this essay is to show how the application of Pierre Bourdieu’s social theory can be a useful tool to politicize historical epistemology. To do this I will analyze how Bourdieu’s methodological tools allow us to think about the relationships between multiple social temporalities and history. My objective is to apply this reflection to the historiographical debate on the Scientific Revolution. In fact, the category of Scientific Revolution has been recently put into crisis by the emergence of post-modernism and by the so-called “cultural turn” in the history of science. In the first part I show how the so-called Scientific Revolution has been an ideological battlefield by illustrating the main points of contention between the Continuists/Discontinuists; Internalism/ Externalism; The Whig history/Presentism approaches, and finally deconstructing the narratives centered on European Exceptionalism. In the second part I will illustrate the fundamental lines of the historical sociology of science proposed by Pierre Bourdieu. I focus in particular on bringing out how the synchrony and diachrony between multiple social temporalities could be used as a tool to overcome the polarizations of the debate around the Scientific Revolution. I will then conclude the text by illustrating a possible case study that could be investigated through this theoretical framework.