Crises and the history of science: a materialist rehabilitation

Over the past four decades, historians of science have come to discard crisis as a guiding heuristic in ‘big picture’ narratives of scientific change. In this article, we argue that it can be rehabilitated without reintroducing the conceptual drawbacks of earlier historiographies. We suggest that analysing material crises as distinct episodes of knowledge-in-the-making focuses attention on the mangling of science and social order. We distinguish material crises from Kuhnian intellectual crises; the analysis of material crises begins with the interactive dynamics of actor practices and performances, emergent within concrete social orders, rather than from technical breakdowns within isolable theoretical paradigms. Drawing on Reinhart Koselleck’s account of crisis, we characterize such events as patterned shifts in the tempo of actor behaviours, which are brought about by real-time processes of realization. In addition to the familiar, contemporary cases of climate change and COVID-19, we sketch out how three historical crises transformed knowledge production in disparate ways: the Ming-Qing transition in late imperial China; crises of labour precarity in seventeenth-century Istanbul; and the 1960 Sharpeville massacre in South Africa