Thought Collectives, Fascism, and Truth*: Ludwik Fleck and My Father in Buchenwald, April 11, 1945
- Autores: Sharon R. Kaufman
- Localización: Current anthropology: A world journal of the sciences of man, ISSN 0011-3204, Nº. 4, 2024, págs. 748-763
- Idioma: inglés
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Resumen
Polish physician and sociologist of science Ludwik Fleck was a prisoner in Buchenwald on April 11, 1945, the day my father, a US army physician, arrived there with the liberating troops. My father was exposed to Nazi brutality as a young Jew living in Vienna in the 1920s. Fleck was from Lvov, an epicenter of Nazi persecution. For both, a paramount question was what kind of medicine could be practiced in a world of deliberate extermination. Did they meet? My father’s late-life memoir notes that “the inmates who were physicians immediately proceeded to make use of their skills to help their fellow inmates.” That piqued my interest in how Fleck’s socioscientific insights, described in Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, emerged from his prewar experience of Nazi terror, when his scientific work, sociological-philosophical background, and observations of the prevailing fascism coalesced. This shaped his awareness of how collective thinking—by a nation, race, party, or class—produces facts and how politics and prejudice get entangled in scientific work. This essay explores Fleck’s legacy and how both physicians offered resistance and reprisal to fascism, compelling concerns in view of today’s increasing tolerance for fascism, racism, antisemitism, and “alternative” truths.
