Introduction

Abstract

This Special Section, based on the workshop “Communism, Anticommunism and the Sciences in Greece” (2023), examines the intellectual history of communism and anticommunism in twentieth-century Greece through the lenses of the natural sciences and history. During the Cold War, the natural sciences acquired not only military and industrial significance but also cultural prestige, functioning as markers of moral and political superiority in the global confrontation between liberal democracy and communism. Yet the ways in which Greek communist and anticommunist discourses appropriated science have remained largely understudied. History, by contrast, became a discipline of central national importance and a key site of ideological struggle. From the 1920s onward, Marxist historiography challenged dominant national narratives, but after the Civil War it was excluded from state institutions, while recent history was mobilized for anticommunist purposes. The contributions gathered here analyse how science and history operated as crucial arenas of ideological contestation, cultural mobilisation and the articulation of both national and global Cold War frameworks.