Imperialism and Peace, Science and Freedom

“There is an intimate connection between science and freedom, the individual freedom of the scientist being only a small corollary; freedom is the recognition of necessity; science is the cognition of necessity.” – states D. D. Kosambi, in his essay Imperialism and Peace, Science and Freedom.The essay is part of the collection titled Exasperating Essays which was brought out by People's Publishing House, New Delhi, in 1957. It was first published in the New York-based magazine Monthly Review in November 1952.In this 4,275-word essay, Kosambi, a mathematician and Marxist historian (born on July 31, 1907 in Goa, then under Portuguese rule), argues that ‘scientific freedom’ has always been determined by the interests of the ruling class of that era, and that the same applies for science of the modern era. The freedom that science needs most, he asserts, is the “…freedom from servitude to a particular class.”Kosambi notes that in 1949, he observed that American scientists and intellectuals were concerned about the diminishing freedom of the scientist to “…do what he liked while being paid by big business, war departments, or universities whose funds tended to come more and more from one or the other source.”