Tito’s Science: Socialist Science on the Market Trajectory

In 1948, during the turbulent period of the Cold War, an international crisis occurred during which the Federative People’s Republic of Yugoslavia (FPRY), under the leadership of Josip Broz Tito, left the USSR controlled Eastern bloc. Changes that occurred in the FPRY after the break with the Soviet Union have reflected on all social spheres, including the sphere of science. Prior to the split, Yugoslavian scientific authorities, adopting a Marxist-Leninist position, criticized capitalist science as idealist and reactionary. They insisted that the scientific practice and its results should be as close as possible to the concrete realities of the socialist society. The key concept summarizing this position was “partisanship” that saw science, as all other spheres of human activities, as a field of ideological struggle. The preferred model of scientific organization was almost identical to the one in the USSR: science was to follow the planned economy of a centralized state. After the break with the USSR, we detect opposite dynamics in Yugoslavia: process of the decentralization in the organization of science (and society) and the introduction of an “autonomous” science in the official political vocabulary. In this paper, I argue that the change towards a more liberal reading of scientific practice reflected the introduction of the limited market in FPRY that gradually developed following the break with USSR. I also suggest that this shift could help identify new general relationships between politics and science in the context of Yugoslavian science. And this could help us understand what the concepts of “partisanship” and “autonomy” of science really meant in practice