Despite its lack of impact in his home country, Hessen's thesis had a wide effect in Western history of science. Hessen's work has been dismissed as "vulgar Marxism ". However, its focus on the relationship between society and science was, in its time, seen as novel and inspiring. It was a challenge to the notion that the history of science was the history of individual genius in action, the dominant view at least since William Whewell 's History of the Inductive Sciences in 1837.