ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book sets out the broad outlines of the fundamental epistemological and theoretical assumptions belying our general approach to the history of the social sciences and Marxism. It explores the relevance of the problematic of the history of the sciences to the history of the social sciences and Marxism. The book examines the sources, formation, and development of the concept of the Asiatic mode of production in the works of Marx and Engels. The new historiography of the sciences emerged in the interstitial space between history, epistemology, and the sciences. The controversy between internalists and externalists centred upon the problem of the so-called scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The opposition between continuism and discontinuism refers to the vexed question of whether there is a continuous development of knowledge from common sense to scientific knowledge.
