The social and political roots of the institutionalization of the history of physics in Italy

This article reconstructs the socio-political preconditions behind the emergence of Italian physicists' interest in the history of physics. I focus on the most important events in the field of Italian physics during the 10 years preceding the first two editions of the 1981 Pavia conference on the history of physics. In particular, I draw a line of continuity between the summer schools of Varenna in 1970 and 1972, the conference organized by SIF “Science in a Capitalist Society,” the birth of radical science movements in Italy, and the querelles that occurred between Italian historians and philosophers of science such as Ludovico Geymonat and Paolo Rossi, with a new generation of physicists interested in the historical, social, and political dimensions of their discipline.

These preconditions seem to be the essential reasons through which the “history of physics” was institutionalized as an autonomous discipline in Italy, as opposed to the history of science practiced in the departments of philosophy and human sciences. [Publisher's text]