Boris Hessen was born to a Jewish family in
Elisavetgrad, in the
Kherson Governorate of the
Russian Empire (now
Kropyvnytskyi,
Ukraine). He studied
physics and
natural sciences at the
University of Edinburgh (1913–1914) together with his
gymnasium school friend
Igor Tamm. He then went to study at the
St. Petersburg University (1914–1917). He enlisted in the
Red Army in the
Russian Civil War, joined the
Communist Party in 1919 and became a member of the
Revolutionary Military Council (1919–1921) and worked at the
Party School. He also continued his physics studies at various places eventually graduating from the
Institute of Red Professors in
Moscow in 1928. In this year he was criticised by
Alexander Maximov, who criticised him for being a "
Machist" and "
right deviationist". After working in the institute for two more years, he became a physics professor and the chair of the physics department at the
Moscow State University in 1931. In 1933 he was elected a member of the
Russian Academy of Sciences.
International Congress of the History of Science In 1931, as part of a
Soviet delegation led by
N.I. Bukharin, Hessen delivered the paper ''"The Socio-Economic Roots of Newton's Principia"'' at the
Second International Congress of the
History of Science in
London. This work became foundational in the
history of science and led to modern studies of scientific revolutions and
sociology of science. Hessen asserted that
Isaac Newton's most famous work was created to cater to the goals and desires of 17th century industry and
economy. Hessen asserted that Newton's work was inspired by his economic status and context, that the
Principia was the solution of technical problems of the
bourgeoisie. At that time in the Soviet Union, the work of
Albert Einstein was under attack by
Communist Party philosophers; being supposedly motivated by bourgeois values, it was
"bourgeois science", and should henceforth be banned. (In many ways this attack was similar to the
Deutsche Physik movement in Germany which occurred only a few years later.) Hessen's paper was a lobbying tactic: Party philosophers would not challenge the accuracy of Newton's theories, and to show them as being motivated by bourgeois concerns would, in Hessen's eyes, show that scientific validity could exist whatever the motivations were for undertaking it. However, there is little evidence that his paper had any effect in the internal Soviet philosophical battles over Einstein's work. Despite its lack of impact in his home country, Hessen's thesis had a wide effect in Western history of science. Hessen's work has been dismissed as "vulgar
Marxism". However, its focus on the relationship between society and science was, in its time, seen as novel and inspiring. It was a challenge to the notion that the history of science was the history of individual
genius in action, the dominant view at least since
William Whewell's
History of the Inductive Sciences in 1837. Few contemporary Western readers of Hessen took his paper at face value. His rigid connection between economy and
knowledge was not accepted by a majority of historians. However, his assertion that a connection existed between the growth of knowledge and the art of war, and that
ballistics played a central part of physics and Newton's world, was viewed with keen interest. In the shadow of the first war to employ
chemical weapons, and as the war machines were again gearing up in preparation for another world war, the role between science,
technology, and warfare was becoming more interesting to scholars and scientists. Previous views of science as separate from the mundane or vulgar aspects of practical life — the disembodiment of the scientific mind from its context — were becoming less attractive than a view that science and scientists were increasingly embedded in the world in which they worked.
Last years, death and rehabilitation From 1934 to 1936 Hessen was a deputy director of the
Physics Institute in Moscow headed by
S.I. Vavilov. On 22 August 1936 Hessen was arrested by the
NKVD on charges of participation in a counter-revolutionary terrorist organization and preparation of terrorist acts. He was secretly tried for
terrorism by a military tribunal together with his
gymnasium school teacher Arkadij O. Apirin, who had been arrested two months earlier. They were found guilty on 20 December 1936 and were
executed by shooting the same day. Hessen was buried in Moscow at the Donskoye Cemetery in a common grave. Hessen was posthumously expelled from the
Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union by the General Assembly on April 29, 1938. On 21 April 1956, both Apirin and Hessen were
rehabilitated (posthumously exonerated) by decision of the All-Russian Military Commission. Hessen was posthumously reinstated by the General Assembly of the Academy of Sciences on March 5, 1957 ==Writings==