Boris Hessen (1893‒1936), “The Social and Economic Roots of Newton’s Principia” and the Paradoxical History of the Historiography of Science

The article comments on the famous paper by Boris Hessen “The Social and Economic Roots of Newton’s Principia” presented at the Second International Congress on the History of Science and Technology in London in 1931.
The comments are made in the light of considerations on the methodology of the historiography of science, including the author’s ideas of research hermeneutics and the research hermeneutics of the historiography of science, the biography of Boris Hessen, the history of scientific historiography, the history of science and the history of science-of-science.
The article synthetically presents Hessen’s research hermeneutics and points to its fundamental disadvantages. It describes the reception of Hessen’s paper in the West: both the more widely known positive reception (of Bernalists and their successors, including supporters of Marxist studies of science and the social history of science), and the much less known negative reception (members of the (British) Society for Freedom in Science, members of the Harvard group of J. B. Conant of General Education in Science).
The article also presents the changing fate of the reception of Hessen’s thoughts in the USSR and Russia in the years 1930–2020.
Additionally, it indicates various historiographic myths related to “Boris Hessen”, including the myth that the Polish science-of-science (Polish: naukoznawstwo) emerged later or at the same time as Russian science-of-science (Russian: науковедение, naukovedenie).
The defectiveness of Hessen’s research hermeneutics on the one hand, and on the other hand the reception of his views in the West and in the USSR and Russia from the 1930s to the 2020s, including the various historiographic myths related to Hessen, show how paradoxical the history of the historiography of science can be, and demonstrate the need to cultivate the skills of critical thinking among researchers interpreting science (i.e. historians of science, philosophers of science, sociologists of scientific knowledge, etc.).