The controversies of the 1970s between dialectical and historical Marxists: the historical context

Abstract

In the 70s of the last century, in the fervor of the student and worker protest movements, a large group of young scientists and philosophers of science dedicated themselves to a reconstruction of the evolution of Science, its foundations and its structures in the course of development of capitalism by adopting Marx's approach to historical materialism, with the intention of linking scientific breakthroughs to the transformations of the composition of the capitalist classes and the structure of industrial production. To give historical concreteness to the disputes that followed, this article reconstructs summarily the political vicissitudes of the Italian ruling classes in the post-war period.