ABSTRACT
The sociology of science, once rare and marginal, has become bulky and central. Boris Hessen's paper was enormously influential. It helped shape the Western Marxist sociology of science which flourished between the mid- 1930s and the mid-1960s. The main effect of Marxism on the sociology of science has been indirect: Marx is one of the three most important influences on the work of Robert K. Merton and his school—the other two being Max Weber and Emile Durkheim. By contrast, the new sociology of science, particularly the "strong programme", claims that all knowledge is shaped by society and moreover is somehow about society, that is, that it has a social content—whence ultimately there would be no content/context distinction. The chapter looks at externalism and at the way the new sociology of science handles the micro-macro problem. Radical externalism is the thesis that all knowledge is social in content as well as in origin.
