Negotiating theory and practice: The neutrality of science in Radical Science Journal

This article analyzes the Radical Science Journal ’s (RSJ) conception of scientific neutrality, showing how neutrality became a contested issue within the British radical science movement and a site of political struggle against capitalism. Complicating traditional readings that treat neutrality positions in the 1970s as uniform, it argues that the lack of consensus within the so-called non-neutrality camp reveals significant disagreements over what neutrality meant and the political commitments it entailed. Whereas much of the radical milieu emphasized ideological contexts or the misuses of science – most notably in the British Society for Social Responsibility in Science – RSJ advanced a view of science as a non-neutral, intrinsically social form of knowledge, demanding analysis of content and historicity. The journal called for a radical historiography capable of rethinking epistemology and Marxism’s politics of science. Using archival and published material, the article recovers internal tensions within RSJ between theoretical elaboration and activist priorities, including debates over labor struggles, as well as external criticism by Hilary and Steven Rose. It also explores RSJ’s ambivalent engagement with emerging sociology of scientific knowledge. More broadly, the article contributes to the historiography of radical science and the development of science studies in the 1970s.