Virtues as a Lens: Exploring Science, Scholarship, and Politics under Soviet Domination
Why Virtues?
The concept of “virtue” has a long and controversial history. Aristotle supposed that virtue could make an individual know what is a “good thing to do.” Machiavelli highlighted the masculine connotations of the Latin virtus (lit. manliness) and claimed that adopting the “virtù (Italian for virtue)” was a precondition for a “good prince” to be ready to “do evil when necessary.”
Robespierre wrote that “virtue and terror are the driving force of revolution: virtue, without which the terror is disastrous; terror, without which the virtue is powerless.” Usage and context of references to “virtue” have been so diverse that it seems difficult to find a common denominator for them. Nevertheless, one can still recognize certain patterns in various discourses of virtue. In most cases, it constitutes a positive character trait that ought to be cultivated and is understood as a precondition of being “good” in accordance with certain normative systems. At the same time, virtues are paradoxically meant to make individuals autonomous, i.e., capable of acting “rightly” without a direct instruction from above. Over the centuries, this combination of paternalist and “emancipatory” aspects has been central to the debates among theorists of virtue.
In my brief essay, I do not intend to develop a theory of virtue. My objective is much more modest. I would like to reflect on how to use virtues as a lens in historical research, i.e., to look at historical sources with the following question in mind: what virtues underpin scholarly and political discourses and practices? In this regard, my approach will build on the established scholarship of virtue and, at the same time, significantly depart from it.
Besides in the field of ethics, virtue has been also used for examining intellectual practices. Praising “intellectual virtues” and condemning “intellectual vices” became the core issue of philosophy and, later, an important analytical tool of the history of ideas. The concept of “epistemic virtues” provided scholars with an instrument for analyzing not only ideas but also the social and political conventions that made these ideas possible.1 In this sense, the concept of virtue was adopted by the history of science and became part of a bigger project of historicizing the “moral economy” of scientific practice.2 One of the most typical examples of a “scientific virtue” studied by historians is objectivity. Scholars have shown the historical point at which “being objective” started to mean being a “good” scholar or scientist. Integrating this virtue into one’s ethos became a precondition for being taken seriously by colleagues.3
But what exactly does it mean to be “objective”? Do all people who claim to be “objective” say the same things, and are their ways of practicing science identical? Obviously not. This raises the question of how to use the concept of virtue for conducting historical research, especially if we intend to explore academic practices in a broader political and social context. Virtue is an idealist concept and always implies an imperative that prescribes how things should be rather than how they are. Historians can analyze discourses about virtues and the practices of their cultivation. Meanwhile, public expression of these virtues can be highly diverse, and the spectrum of this difference can be very broad. This makes using virtue as an analytical tool in historical research a complex task but neither a futile nor useless one.
Virtues as a Tool in Historical Research on “Sovietization”
In contrast to the established scholarship of epistemic and scientific virtues, I assume that the concept of virtue can be helpful not only for analyzing the modes of cognition and producing knowledge in narrow fields of “intellectual work” but can also open up new opportunities for praxeological research on interactions between political and scholarly domains. In this essay, I will use the spread of the dominance of the Soviet Union in Central and Eastern Europe after the Second World War as an example to briefly illustrate how this methodological framework can be applied to concrete historical cases.
The establishment of new political regimes in Central and Eastern Europe under close Soviet supervision resulted in a tremendous transformation of norms and conventions that determined the foundations of “good” academic and political practice. Science and scholarship in the Soviet Union were supposed to be conducted in accordance with a set of specific “socialist virtues” that, it was claimed, radically opposed the norms and conventions of “bourgeois science.” This circumstance triggered numerous conflicts about how to be a “good” scholar or scientist under the new political conditions.

A significant part of the historiography on Central and Eastern Europe examines the spread of Soviet influence from the perspective of the history of ideas or institutional history. With ideas of the classics of Marxism filling the pages of both political newspapers and academic journals in the countries under Soviet domination as well as many institutions receiving a Soviet-style restructuring, the new regimes proclaimed a triumph of “Sovietization.” Does this mean that the project of “Sovietization” reached its aims? By taking a closer look at the forced adoption of Marxism-Leninism, as well as at the ways that academic institutions were reformed, one can see that these processes unfolded differently in various countries.4 By examining the “Sovietization” of science and scholarship from the perspective of virtues, we can get a more nuanced understanding of how this process “worked” in various contexts and in what respects it failed to succeed.
“Sovietization” implied overcoming the separation between “civic” and “academic” virtues. It became the core task of the activists of “Sovietization” to implement concepts such as “progressiveness,” partisanship, and loyalty to the state and to “the working class” as both scientific and political virtues. The utopian task of this project was, on the one hand, to make scholars and scientists “autonomous” in performing science and scholarship in accordance with the new virtues. On the other hand, “Sovietization” aimed to instill a “correct idea” of socialist virtues, which without proper control could threaten the existence of the regime rather than maintain its stability. This internal contradiction makes it necessary to examine virtues in a more general context of attempts to establish a Soviet style “moral economy” in the countries under Soviet domination. It was important not only to forcibly cultivate the new virtues but also to establish the mechanisms of control over their “correct” expression.

The ideological campaigns that provided “criticism” and demanded “self-criticism” from those who did science and scholarship “wrong” can be seen as a measure aimed at creating mechanisms of “self-regulation” within the new “moral economy.” Based on governmental support, the “teachers” of the new virtues actively tried not only to “re-educate” their colleagues but also to keep an eye on each other to ensure that all were being virtuous in the “correct way.” This strategy allowed “Sovietization” activists to raise the struggle against their ideological enemies and opponents to the level of a moral imperative and to express their quasi-moral indignation; however, the “success” of this project strongly depended on the level of (forced) acceptance of the new virtues. This project could only work out if most scholars and scientists adopted the new virtues or at least recognized their authority. In this regard, the project of “Sovietization” faced significant problems. It was much easier to fill the academic and political press with references to the ideas of Marxism-Leninism and to restructure public and academic institutions than to remold scholarship and science by changing the foundations of academic and political practice.
Postwar Poland as a Case Study
The case of postwar Poland perfectly illustrates this point. In the early postwar years, the official politics of the new regime in the field of culture, scholarship, and science was to make the virtue of “progressiveness” a broad basis of the new “moral economy.” To be accepted within the new circumstances, scientists and scholars were required to be “progressive” and purify their scientific, scholarly, and political practice of “reactionary” elements. However, no strict control over the expression of this virtue had yet been well established. This encouraged some scholars seeking “progressiveness” to publicly attack “dogmatic” (read Soviet-style) Marxists by claiming the “non-progressive” character of their scholarship.

The strengthening of the regime against the backdrop of the escalating Cold War provided the advocates of “Sovietization” with new political resources for conducting a large-scale “re-education” of Polish scholars and scientists. The authorities organized large scientific congresses to assert loyalty to the new forms of “good academic practice” while a group of young Marxist scholars were specially trained to forcibly promote the new forms of “virtuous behavior.” Nevertheless, even under the greatest political pressure, they failed to force all scholars and scientists to accept the foundations of the new “moral economy.” Leading academics publicly called the new requirements “opportunism” and maintained that they did not intend to revise their academic practice in accordance with principles they did not consider “correct.”
A few years later, young Marxist scholars joined the struggle against the new virtues but did not cease to promote Marxist ideas, which made the contrast between these categories more perceptible. In some cases, Polish scholars formed unexpected alliances with their Soviet colleagues to promote “professional” virtues and, under the label of fighting the vice of “quotology” (i.e., the “abuse” of excessively referencing Marxist classics), attacked Polish and Soviet “re-education” activists. This cross-border cooperation showed that, even in case of a formal acceptance of “socialist virtues,” scholars and scientists strove to establish their own niches within the new “moral economy” to maintain continuity in their scholarly and scientific practices.5
Conclusion
“Sovietization” was an attempt not only to forcibly reforge ideas and institutions but also to change the very foundations of previous academic norms and conventions. This project significantly influenced and even distorted scholarly practice in the countries under Soviet domination. Nevertheless, it failed to reach its objectives, though the forms and the degree of its failure were different in various countries. The example of “Sovietization” shows that the perspective of virtues can help us see more complex and sometimes unexpected contexts. In some cases, this perspective helps us to go beyond national borders; in others, it helps us to explain the background of internal divisions between various groups within one academic discipline. Taking virtues as a lens for research does not make the picture of the past more coherent or logical. On the contrary, it gives a very diverse and contradictory account of complex historical processes. Like every other lens, it makes some aspects more visible while pushing others into the background. This is the benefit of using lenses in both science and scholarship, and, at the same time, the reason to be aware of their limitations.
Alexej Lochmatow is a historian working at the University of Erfurt. He got his PhD from the University of Cologne and the Tadeusz Manteuffel Institute of History of the Polish Academy of Sciences. His research interest lies in the history of science and scholarship, public knowledge, and intelligence research.
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- Martin Mulsow, Knowledge Lost: A New View of Early Modern Intellectual History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022), 224–36. ↩︎
- Lorraine Daston, “The Moral Economy of Science,” Osiris 10 (1995): 2–24; Jeroen van Dongen and Herman Paul, eds., Epistemic Virtues in the Sciences and the Humanities (Cham: Springer, 2017). ↩︎
- Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007). ↩︎
- John Connelly, Captive University: The Sovietization of East German, Czech, and Polish Higher Education, 1945–1956 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2000). ↩︎
- Alexej Lochmatow, Public Knowledge in Cold War Poland: Scholarly Battles and the Clash of Virtues, 1945–1956 (London: Routledge, 2024). ↩︎
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Alexej Lochmatow (May 28, 2024). Virtues as a Lens: Exploring Science, Scholarship, and Politics under Soviet Domination. History of Knowledge. Retrieved November 11, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/12pzt
