ABSTRACT
Anton Pannekoek was a remarkable man. As a renowned astronomer and equally influential socialist theoretician he set his mark in many ways. As soon as socialism was labelled ‘scientific’ at the end of the nineteenth century, academics such as Pannekoek started exploring how and why socialism was scientific. In other words, what exactly was scientific socialism? How were science, ideology, and politics related? Pannekoek’s particular ideas on scientific socialism were soon contested. His contemporary Willem Bonger can be seen as an interesting counterpart. This article explores Bonger’s ideas on socialism as ‘applied science’, thereby placing Pannekoek’s ideas in perspective and demonstrating that there were differing conceptions of the role of science in socialist politics and how, as a science, socialism needed to be practised.
