This chapter takes a further step back to consider the broader intellectual context within which the philosophical developments outlined in the previous chapters were situated. In this context, above all, the idea of causality served as a focal point for a whole topography of historically specific ideas and values. Contrary to the prominent externalist argument championed by historian Paul Forman in the 1970s, I argue that cultural values surrounding the idea of causality cannot be seen to have led straightforwardly to the adoption of specific epistemological positions. The various intellectual trajectories surveyed in this chapter show, however, that we can indeed trace a converse movement, though one far less mechanistic than that suggested in the “Forman Thesis”: the mobilization of scientific epistemologies to frame or justify political-theoretical choices. Surveying the engagement of a broad array of physicist-philosophers with the German-language tradition of Kulturwissenschaft, this chapter explores a rich variety of ways in which evolving conceptions of causality within physical science made it possible to stake out novel positions within contemporaneous socio-political discourse.