Circulation, Transfers, Isolation (Reaction‪)‬

How does knowledge circulate and information spread? Should we think of science as universal and global or as national? These issues lie at the heart of the debates over science and colonialism, over the nature and character of the social sciences in general, and over their place in the worlds of culture, politics, and society. (1) We have come a long way from the sort of intellectual history that is content to treat the influences and dynamics of ideas in isolation. Instead, we now tend to integrate the circulation of the social sciences into its wider political context and pay attention to the carriers of the circulation of knowledge, concepts, and methods. (2) The discussion becomes more specific and interesting when we apply this approach to the history of the social sciences in the Russian empire and the Soviet Union. The country started out as a colonial empire--indeed, one that outlasted all its rivals--yet after 1917 it tried to graft the logic of nationality onto its colonial heritage by proclaiming the various Soviet peoples' right to their own national science even as it affirmed the fundamental universality of ideas. In a history profoundly affected by politics, the relationship between national and international science in Russia was the subject of frequent official dictates (both prohibitions and mandates) even while it was also driven by the major currents of thought that shaped the country's scientific and intellectual communities.