A Science of Our Own: Marxism and Nature

Abstract

Before I learned to read, my grandfather, Abraham Sackman, read to me from Bad Bishop Brown's Science and History for Girls and Boys. The linking of science and history in the same book did not seem at all strange to us. For me, it was all part of an exciting finding-out about the way the world worked. My grandfather, more self-consciously, believed that a minimum education for a socialist worker must include cosmology, evolution, and history. And the Bad Bishop, enough of a Marxist to have been excommunicated from his Protestant church for heresy, combined science and history in one book because he saw them as one. For him human history was a continuation of natural history.

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