Hossein Jorjani
First publication: 2026 – 08 – 09
The English words science and scientific appear so familiar that a contemporary reader may assume their meanings remain approximately constant whenever they occur in an older philosophical or sociological text. This assumption is unsafe. Words translated as science have belonged to linguistic and intellectual settings in which they could encompass forms of systematic knowledge that contemporary English would ordinarily distinguish from the empirical natural sciences. The problem is therefore both historical and linguistic: familiar words may conceal substantial differences in the concepts they represent.
Hegel, Marx, and Engels wrote principally in German and used Wissenschaft and wissenschaftlich. Wissenschaft has a broader range than the dominant contemporary English meaning of science, and it retains that broader range in German. It can refer to a systematically organized and methodically pursued body of knowledge, including fields that English-speaking institutions commonly classify among the humanities. Historical scholarship, jurisprudence, theology, and philosophy may therefore be forms of Wissenschaft without being represented as experimental natural sciences.
This linguistic breadth does not mean that Wissenschaft simply denotes any organized collection of statements. Different authors imposed different requirements upon genuine knowledge, and the same author need not employ the term with precisely the same emphasis on every occasion. The linguistic range establishes possibilities of usage; the theoretical framework and immediate argument determine what qualifies as Wissenschaft in a particular context.
For Hegel, philosophy was capable of becoming Wissenschaft. This did not mean that philosophy should imitate experimental physics. Scientific form required systematic and necessary conceptual development. A proposition was not adequately known when asserted in isolation or supported merely by an external accumulation of observations. It had to be understood through its place within the development of the whole. The movement from one determination to another was supposed to arise from the content itself rather than from an arbitrary arrangement imposed by the investigator.
The titles Phenomenology of Spirit and Science of Logic must be understood within this conception. The “science” of logic is not an empirical investigation of how particular people happen to reason. It concerns the systematic comprehension of thought and its determinations. The Phenomenology similarly follows successive forms of consciousness and their claims to knowledge on a path toward systematic knowledge. Hegelian Wissenschaft can consequently include ontology, logic, epistemology, and philosophy within a systematic conceptual enterprise.
A contemporary English reader may find this usage difficult because the unqualified word science now strongly suggests empirical investigation: systematic observation, measurement where possible, testable hypotheses or models, and correction through confrontation with evidence. Hegelian Wissenschaft instead places greater weight upon systematic completeness, conceptual necessity, and the relation of each part to the whole. Translating Hegel’s Wissenschaft simply as science may therefore import associations he did not intend. Yet translating it harmlessly as scholarship may create the opposite distortion by concealing the much stronger claim Hegel made for the systematic and necessary character of philosophical knowledge.
Marx inherited the German vocabulary of Wissenschaft but used it within a substantially different intellectual project. In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels contrasted speculative philosophy with “real, positive science,” beginning from actual individuals, their activities, and the material conditions of their lives. Inquiry was to proceed from empirically accessible historical processes rather than treating concepts or consciousness as independently determining reality. In a subsequently cancelled manuscript passage, they could even speak of history as the one science, encompassing the histories of nature and humanity.
Here again, science did not mean natural science alone. Historical and social inquiry could qualify as Wissenschaft. Yet the term was now being used against philosophical constructions considered detached from material life. Genuine inquiry was expected to investigate actual processes of production, social relations, and historical development. Scientific status therefore involved an orientation toward materially and historically grounded investigation as well as systematic explanation.
Marx’s treatment of political economy supplies another context. In the Afterword to the second German edition of Capital, the distinction between genuine inquiry and apologetics is prominent. Political economy could claim scientific standing insofar as it critically investigated economic relations and sought to determine their actual character. Inquiry ceased to deserve that status when conclusions were accepted or rejected according to whether they were advantageous, dangerous, convenient, or inconvenient to particular social interests.
Marx did not, however, provide a single explicit definition governing every occurrence of science or scientific. Depending upon the context, the terms may refer to disciplined inquiry, materially grounded historical investigation, political economy as a theoretical field, or knowledge seeking to penetrate beyond the immediately apparent forms of social relations. Their meaning must therefore be reconstructed from the local argument rather than inferred solely from the occurrence of the word.
Engels gave the expression scientific socialism its most influential systematic formulation. In Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, earlier socialist theories were described as utopian because they constructed desirable social arrangements from reason, justice, or imagination without adequately explaining the historical conditions that had produced capitalism and class antagonism. Socialism supposedly became scientific through the materialist conception of history and Marx’s analysis of surplus value.
In this usage, scientific means more than orderly, scholarly, or empirically informed. It designates a socialism claiming explanatory knowledge of the historical and economic relations through which capitalism arose and operates, and of the processes from which possibilities of social transformation emerge. The contrast is therefore between socialism understood principally as a desirable social ideal and socialism claiming to explain its own historical conditions of possibility.
The expression scientific socialism can consequently mislead a contemporary English reader. It does not mean that socialism was established through controlled experiments comparable to those of chemistry or experimental physics. Engels was distinguishing a supposedly explanatory and historically grounded socialism from moral aspiration, speculative construction, and utopian design. Whether that explanatory theory satisfies contemporary standards of empirical science is a separate question and cannot be settled merely by the adjective scientific.
Gurvitch wrote in French, but his use of science also possessed a range wider than that most readily associated with contemporary English. He spoke of the science of history, the science of law, the particular social sciences, the master sciences, and a projected Science of Man. He could even refer to sociology and philosophy as “the two sciences.” In such contexts, science frequently denotes a systematically organized discipline or body of inquiry rather than an empirical science modeled upon physics.
Gurvitch’s classifications make the breadth of the term particularly visible. Some of his “particular social sciences” are described as primarily descriptive; others systematize models, signs, symbols, rules, or regular forms of conduct. He nevertheless calls them sciences even when assigning them relatively little explanatory power. Scientific status therefore cannot depend, in his usage, exclusively upon causal explanation, experimental testing, or predictive success.
At the same time, science does not function merely as a neutral synonym for intellectual activity in Gurvitch’s classifications. Sociology and history can be designated “master sciences” because they supposedly examine total social phenomena, while particular sciences investigate more restricted aspects of social reality. His terminology consequently performs architectural as well as descriptive work: disciplines are classified according to their presumed scope and function and positioned within a more comprehensive conception of social knowledge.
This creates two distinct problems. The first is terminological. Law, philosophy, history, sociology, and empirical natural science possess different objects, practices, and standards of justification. Calling all of them sciences because they are systematic may obscure their independent disciplinary identities. Law, for example, is not merely an incompletely developed empirical science; it also involves normative interpretation, institutional authority, adjudication, and practical reasoning. Philosophy likewise does not become an empirical science merely because it proceeds systematically.
The second problem is architectural. Once science becomes the highest encompassing category, relatively autonomous forms of inquiry can be integrated into a comprehensive Science of Man under the privileged position assigned to sociology and history. The terminology can therefore facilitate a form of disciplinary annexation: activities initially recognized as autonomous may be redescribed as partial contributions awaiting integration within a more comprehensive scientific structure. Whether such integration is justified cannot be decided merely by calling all the participating disciplines sciences.
Hegel, Marx, Engels, and Gurvitch thus employed science, Wissenschaft, or their equivalents broadly enough to include systematic forms of knowledge outside the natural sciences. This shared breadth should not obscure the very different standards by which they determined what qualified as genuine knowledge. For Hegel, Wissenschaft emphasizes systematic conceptual development and knowledge of the whole. For Marx, it frequently emphasizes materially grounded and critical investigation of actual historical relations. For Engels, especially in scientific socialism, it identifies a theory claiming explanatory grounding in historical and economic processes rather than merely proposing a desirable social order. For Gurvitch, science frequently identifies organized disciplines positioned within an architecture of social knowledge.
Contemporary English usage is itself not perfectly uniform. Expressions such as political science, social science, library science, and computer science preserve broader applications, and the boundaries of science remain philosophically contested. Nevertheless, in ordinary contemporary usage, the unqualified word science most readily evokes the empirical sciences and practices such as systematic observation, measurement where possible, testable hypotheses or models, and correction through empirical evidence. This contemporary association should not silently determine the interpretation of earlier or differently situated uses of the word.
Translation must therefore avoid two opposite errors. Translating every occurrence of Wissenschaft or science simply as science preserves the original terminology but may import contemporary English associations that the author did not intend. Replacing it everywhere with knowledge, scholarship, discipline, or inquiry avoids those associations but may erase the author’s stronger claim to systematic, authoritative, or necessary knowledge.
No single English equivalent can resolve the problem in every passage. Science may sometimes best be retained, accompanied where necessary by an explanation of its historical or linguistic breadth. Elsewhere, systematic knowledge, scholarship, discipline, inquiry, jurisprudence, or historical knowledge may communicate the intended function more accurately. When an author’s classification itself is under examination—as with Gurvitch’s “science of law” or “Science of Man”—retaining science may be necessary precisely because the breadth and authority claimed by the term form part of the argument being evaluated.
This terminological problem also reveals an ambiguity in apparently simple historical questions. To ask whether Hegel’s philosophy, Marx’s political economy, Engels’s socialism, or Gurvitch’s sociology was “scientific” may mean at least two different things. One may ask whether the work satisfied the author’s own conception of Wissenschaft or scientific knowledge. Alternatively, one may ask whether it satisfies contemporary criteria for empirical science. These are different questions, and they need not receive the same answer.
The history of science and Wissenschaft therefore supplies a broader methodological lesson. Familiar words do not guarantee continuity of concepts. Before deciding whether an earlier body of thought was genuinely scientific, one must first establish which concept of science is being applied: that of the author and intellectual setting under investigation, or that of the present-day investigator. Otherwise, a disagreement that appears to concern the scientific status of a theory may partly arise from applying the same word to different standards of knowledge.
Hossein Jorjani 