The CTWG Marxist science subcommittee returns! In this episode, we discuss Pietro Daniel Omodeo’s Political Epistemology, which develops the Berlin school of historical epistemology (discussed in episode 19!). We examine Omodeo’s enlarged conception of ideology as the dialectic of identity and position as applied to science studies broadly construed, what political epistemology even is, and how action, understood as the unity of praxis and poiesis, mediates history, the middle term between the polis and episteme.

Episode reading:

  • Pietro Daniel Omodeo. Political Epistemology: The Problem of Ideology in Science Studies. Springer, 2019.

Recommend readings:

  • Lukas Meisner and Pietro Daniel Omodeo. “Beyond Facticity and Post-Truth: Towards a Marxist Political Epistemology.” Historical Materialism 33, no. 1 (2025): 88–118.
  • Helen Eleonora. “On the Falsity of Prevailing Ideas: The Concept of Ideology in Early Critical Theory.” Margin Notes 1 (2024), 84–126.
  • Wolfgang Lefèvre. Theory of Nature and Mode of Production: The Genesis of Modern Science in Materialist Perspective. Political Epistemology. Springer Nature Switzerland, 2025.
  • Jürgen Renn. The Evolution of Knowledge: Rethinking Science for the Anthropocene. Princeton University Press, 2020.
  • Peter Osborne. “The Planet as Political Subject?” New Left Review, no. 145 (March 2024): 103–16.
  • For a good constructive critique of Boris Hessen, see: Ioannis Trisokkas. “Boris Hessen and Newton’s God.” Society and Politics 13, no. 1 (2019): 64–86.

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