The Competitiveness of Nations
in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
April 2003
Steven Shapin *
Understanding the Merton Thesis
Isis
Volume 79, Issue 4
Dec. 1988, 594-605.
FIFTY YEARS ON, the Merton
thesis continues to arouse historians’ passions. It is difficult to understand why. There has never been a celebrated historical
theory so cautiously framed, so methodologically eclectic, so hedged about with
qualifications as to its form, content, and consequences, and so temperately
expressed. Robert Merton and his
defenders are accustomed to say that his thesis has been “misunderstood.” They are being much too kind to certain of the
critics. One is tempted to put the case
more strongly than that. On the evidence
of some of those historians who have endeavored to refute what they represent
to be his thesis, Merton’s 1938 monograph and related texts can scarcely have
been read at all. Merton is quite right
to complain at the cavalier treatment he has received at the hands of his
critics in the historical community. Modern
literary theory rightly suggests that the meaning of a text is not determined
by its structure or content, nor indeed by the
author’s intentions. Nevertheless, it is
both a useful convention and a justifiable moral sanction in the academic world
that interpretations and understandings be at least occasionally disciplined by
reminding readers of what is written in the relevant text. How did Merton himself define and characterize
his hypothesis? What bearing did these
representations have on its subsequent career in the academic world?
First, what was the nature
of the thing that Merton was trying to explain? Here, at the very core of his enterprise,
historians nervous about the black beast of “externalism” should be reassured. Neither in his 1938 text nor in subsequent
writings was Merton ever concerned to adduce social factors to explain the form
or content of scientific knowledge or scientific method. Indeed, it is a plausible hypothesis that our
present-day language of “internal” and “external” factors, as well as the
validation of an overwhelmingly “internalist”
historiography of scientific ideas, actually originated with Merton and the
circle of scholars with whom he studied and worked in the 1930s. Thus, for example, Merton was exceedingly
careful to dissociate himself explicitly from any enterprise (e.g., that of the
Marxist Boris Hessen) that sought to account for
scientific method or knowledge by reference to social or economic
considerations, or, indeed, by reference to nonscientific cultural factors such
as religion. [1] Merton’s claims were “not to imply that the discoveries of
Newton, Boyle or other scientists can be directly attributed to the sanction of
science by religion. Specific
discoveries and inventions belong to the internal history of science and are
largely independent of factors other than the purely scientific.” And in an essay published even before
* Science Studies Unit,
University of Edinburgh, 34 Buccleuch Place,
Edinburgh EH8 9JT, Scotland.
1. For Merton’s repudiation of “vulgar materialism” see Robert K.
Merton, “Science and Economy of Seventeenth Century England,” in Merton, Social
Theory and Social Structure, rev. ed. (New York: Free Press, 1957), pp.
607-627, esp. p. 607 (orig. publ. in Science and
Society, 1939, 3:3-27). Merton
made liberal use of Boris Hessen’s empirical findings
in his 1938 text while distancing his own enterprise from Hessen’s
materialist perspective: see, e.g., Robert K. Merton, Science, Technology
and Society in Seventeenth-Century England (orig. publ.
in Osiris, 1938, 4:360-632) (New York: Howard
Fertig/Harper Torchbooks,
1970), pp. 142 n. 24, 206-207, 206 n. 8.
594
the 1938 text Merton conceded that “the Puritan ethos did
not directly influence the method of science and that this was simply a
parallel development in the internal history of science.” Furthermore, even smaller-scale changes in the
foci of scientific interest “are primarily determined by the internal history
of science,” and Merton delivered the study of these “short-time fluctuations”
to “the province of the historian of science rather than that of the
sociologist or the student of culture.” [2] Far from poaching the traditional game of historians of
science, Merton was actually offering them further resources by which they
might protect scientific knowledge from sociological scrutiny.
For Merton, the explanandum was emphatically not scientific method or scientific
knowledge: it was the dynamics and social standing of a scientific enterprise
that was itself conceived of as a black box. There was no reason to open up the box that
contained scientific procedures and knowledge; there was nothing sociological
to be said about what was in the box. On
the one hand, Merton was concerned to offer a causal hypothesis about the
social and cultural dynamics of science as a whole in England during the latter
part of the seventeenth century; on the other, he attempted to account for
shifting patterns of interest in different scientific and technological
problem-areas or disciplines. Thus, one
part of his enterprise was designed to explain “increased attention to
science,” “the growth of interest in science and technology,” “the increased
tempo of scientific activity,” “the enhanced cultivation of science,” the “elevat[ion]
of science to a place of high regard in the social system of values,” the fact
that science was “positively sanctioned”; while another part aimed to account
for relatively large-scale changes in the “foci of scientific interests.” “Which forces guided the interests of
scientists and inventors into particular channels?” [3] Why, for example, was there an increase in attention to
aerostatics and hydrostatics in the setting with which Merton was concerned? Why was so much of
seventeenth-century English science (as Merton claimed) geared toward
economic and military ends?
Even those historians who
have most unfairly misrepresented the status of Merton’s thesis seem to have a
rough-and-ready appreciation of his explanans, the
entity Merton used causally to account for the upsurge of interest in and
approval of science and technology: it is, of course, something to do with religion,
specifically with Puritan strands of religion. I shall examine the precise nature of Merton’s
explanans later, but first Merton may be exculpated
from unwarranted charges of historiographic hubris,
especially from accusations that he advanced a simplistic, or even a simple, monocausal explanation and that the particular explanation
he offered possessed general historical applicability. Almost no historian, for instance, seems to
have read carefully and digested the qualifications and supplementations of the
Puritanism thesis to be found in Chapter XI of Merton’s 1938 text. Here he warned that “any attempt to formulate
a comprehensive sociological theory of scientific development at this time must
be considered premature.” Merton then
proceeded to point to “further orders of factors,” some cultural, some social,
that might be thought relevant to explaining the historical materials with
which he was concerned. These included
2. Merton,
Science, Technology, p. 75; Merton,
“Puritanism, Pietism and Science,” in Merton, Social Theory and Social
Structure, pp. 574-606, on
p. 579 (orig. publ. in Sociological Review, 1936, 28: 1-30); and Merton, Science,
Technology, pp. 48, 50.
3. For these and similar expressions see Merton, Science,
Technology, pp. 27-28, 73, 75, 80, 137, 157, 197; and Merton,
“Puritanism, Pietism,” p. 574.
595
interesting speculations about population density, the rates and
modes of social interaction characteristic of different societies, and other
features of the cultural context not included in religious constructs. [4] And in the essay published before the 1938 text Merton
carefully noted that Puritanism only “constitute[d} one important element in
the enhanced cultivation of science.” In
other settings “a host of other factors - economic, political, and above all
the self-fertilizing movement of science itself” - worked “to swell the rising
scientific current.” Since science
burgeoned in Catholic sixteenth-century Italy, Merton freely acknowledged that
“these associated factors” might come to “outweigh the religious component.” [5] (Merton thus aroused curiosity about these other social and economic
factors, but said nothing that systematically addressed their role.) So science can flourish in Catholic
environments after all. Ascetic Protestantism,
Merton said, is a powerful motive force to science, but not so powerful that
its action cannot be masked by other factors; Catholicism is a powerful
antagonistic force, but not so powerful that other factors present in a
Catholic culture cannot yield a flourishing science.
And even when we focus just
upon the causal role of Puritanism and the utilitarian ethos associated with
it, we are obliged to acknowledge the explanatory limits Merton placed upon
these considerations. How far, for
example, are seventeenth-century English scientific developments (even as
Merton restrictively defined them) to be accounted for by “extrinsic” factors? Concluding his discussion of the effects of
military and economic “needs,” Merton cautiously disavowed any unambiguous
claim that these needs sufficiently determined even the foci of scientific
interest. “The extent of this influence
is still problematic. It is by no means
certain that much the same distribution of interests would not have occurred,
irrespective of this external pressure. Many of these problems likewise flowed
directly from the intrinsic developments of science.” He argued only that “some role must be
accorded these factors external to science, properly so-called.” In 1970 Merton further stressed the
circumscribed status of his explanatory claims for Puritanism. He was not saying that “without Puritanism,
there could have been no concentrated development of modern science in
seventeenth-century England,” nor that Puritanism was a “prerequisite to the
substantial thrust of English science in that time.” Other “ideological movements” (Catholicism?) could
have performed the functions discharged by Puritanism; “as it happened,”
it was Puritanism that “provided major (not exclusive) support in that
historical time and place. But that does
not make it indispensable.” In the same
preface to the reprinting of Science, Technology and Society Merton
endorsed “the subdued concluding sentence of this aged but perhaps not yet
obsolete essay.” The 1938 text, we
recall, ended with a sentence of typically gracious academic modesty: “On the
basis of the foregoing study, it may not be too much to conclude that the
cultural soil of seventeenth century England was peculiarly fertile for the
growth and spread of science.” [6]
Note the domain of
application. The thesis is identified
here as a story about
4. Merton, Science, Technology, p. 208.
5. Merton, “Puritanism, Pietism,” pp. 574-575 (emphasis
in original); and Merton, Science, Technology, p. 136. It is unclear how liberal references here to
the role of various “factors” relate to Merton’s later denial that he espoused
a “doctrine of ‘factors’ “: Merton, “Preface: 1970,” ibid.,
pp. vii-xxxii, on p. x.
6. Merton,
Science, Technology, pp. 198; xviii, xxix (“Preface: 1970”); 238
(emphases in original).
596
seventeenth-century England, indeed, to be precise, about certain
specific developments of scientific dynamics in England in the seventeenth
century after the Restoration. It is no
simple matter to understand how some historians have conflated such a circumscribed
thesis with global claims about the relations between science, society, and
religion. Insofar as “extrinsic factors”
do play a role in Merton’s claims, he formally acknowledged the limits thereby
placed upon causal accounting. Merton
approvingly quoted his teacher George Sarton’s
eclectic contention that even mathematical discoveries were “conditioned by
outside events of every kind... However, we think that those events were only
some of the factors among others, factors the power of which might vary and did
vary from time to time.” What was true
of mathematics was, Merton said, also true of science. Since “these extrinsic conditioning factors”
are variable, it follows “that we cannot extend our findings for the
seventeenth century without further ado to the history of science in general.” [7]
Of course, Merton did, both
in portions of the 1938 text and in an earlier essay, attempt to give his
thesis rather greater scope. He
endeavored, that is, to constitute and to instantiate the seventeenth-century
English science-and-Puritanism thesis as one of his celebrated “theories of the
middle range.” [8] For instance, Merton’s 1936 essay “Puritanism, Pietism
and Science,” a version of Chapter VI of Science, Technology and Society, did
suggest some ways of establishing a thesis that might apply to later periods
and in different countries. Here he systematically
mobilized evidence from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Germany to argue
that “the impression made by this [Protestant] ethic has lasted long after much
of its theological basis has been largely disavowed.” Indeed, the 1957 bibliographic postscript to
that essay reasserted and refined the claim for persistence, citing 1940s and
1950s studies of U.S. scientists that purported to show a disproportionately
large representation of Protestants and a correspondingly small representation
of Catholics. [9]
If the precise nature of
Merton’s explanandum (the dynamics of science taken
as a whole in a specific context) has been widely “misunderstood” by historians,
the status and mode of action of his explanans has
never even been accurately stated by his critics in the historical community,
if this is indeed a causal hypothesis relating some religious entity and the
dynamics of science, what is that religious entity and how does it exert its
effects upon social action? Gary Abraham
has rightly identified important sources of confusion among historians on this
head. [10] When Merton alluded to the motive force of a religious
entity, he did not equate this entity with a church or a specific set of
theological doctrines nor,
7. Merton, Science, Technology, pp. 199-200 (quoting
George Sarton, The Study of the History of
Mathematics [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1936], pp. 15-16); and
Merton, “Preface: 1970,” p. x, where he warned that his inquiry did not suppose
“that the character of the interchanges that occurred in this period is much
the same in other cultures and other times.”
8. Merton,
Social Theory and Social Structure (cit. n. 1), p. 5. See also Merton’s cautious backing
away from the more “far-reaching questions” about the cultural causes of
ascetic Protestantism that characterized his teacher Pitirim
Sorokin’s work on social and cultural dynamics:
Merton, Science, Technology, p. 136.
9. Merton, “Puritanism, Pietism” (cit. n. 2), pp. 583,
602, 605; and Merton, Science, Technology, pp. 119-136, where, however,
the bases of this “persistence” are not discussed.
10. Gary
A. Abraham, “Misunderstanding the Merton Thesis: A Boundary Dispute between
History and Sociology,” Isis, 1983, 74:368-387, on pp. 373-374. Abraham’s article is an excellent diagnosis of
some of the grounds of blocked understanding between Merton and historians. It should be clear to what extent my argument
agrees with and diverges from his.
597
indeed, with formal religious beliefs or the maxims that
gave voice to these beliefs. [11] It is not that Merton was “vague” about the nature and extent of something
called “Puritanism,” “the Protestant ethic,” or “ascetic Protestantism.” The motive force was in fact exerted by an
entity that, so to speak, “lay behind” any cultural expression of “Puritanism”
as it is usually understood. Although
Merton persistently referred to and named this motive force, I cannot discover
that any of his followers or critics have appreciated
what it is and how it is said to influence social action.
The entity is most commonly
designated as a “sentiment.” Throughout
the 1938 monograph Merton repeatedly pointed to the role of “sentiments” as
ultimate motive forces responsible for social action, in this case for the
pursuit and active approval of science. [12] Thus, among very many examples, Merton said he sought to
identify “the dominant values and sentiments,” “the general climate of
sentiment and belief [that] invariably influence[s} the development of
science”; he referred to “the motive power of sentiment” and described the
Puritan advocacy of experimental science as “the inevitable outcome of an
emotionally consistent circle of sentiments and beliefs.” [13] Strictly speaking, sentiments are not to be equated
with any particular form of cultural expression. Instead, sentiments are to be regarded as
socially patterned psychic structures that lie behind, give form to, and
animate a more or less coherent body of cultural expressions, such as those
articulated by the publicists of the “Protestant ethic.” It is therefore the sentiments, not the
religious or ethical doctrines, to which motive force is properly attributed. In outlining his characteristic “Sociological
Approach,” Merton said that the sociologist’s task is to uncover “the sentiments
crystallized in religious values and the cultural orientation which governs
their expression.” While alluding to
“the powerful motivations which derived from Puritanism,” Merton clearly did
not ascribe motive force to the expression of religious values but to
the underlying sentiments:
We must probe under the surface of theological
contentions to the sentiments which govern their meaning. The religious component of thought, belief and
action becomes effective only when it is reinforced by strong sentiments which
lend meaning to certain forms of conduct. These sentiments find expression in word and
deed alike… We are concerned with verbal responses, religious exhortations and
appeals, in so far as they enable us to arrive at the motivating sentiments
which give rise to these ideas and the behaviors associated with them. [14]
Sentiments, therefore, are
the theoretically posited mental entities that make Merton’s system go, that
lie behind the expression of religious values and exert force upon social
action. Remarkably, in light of the
fundamental importance of sentiments in Merton’s scheme, he nowhere said what
they are or clearly indicated where they came from in traditions of
sociological discourse. In fact, the
vocabulary of sentiments and the ascription to them of social force was not at
all
11. Merton,
Science, Technology, p. 100.
12. Apparently
alternative or equivalent locutions in Merton’s work include “value attitudes,”
“basic values,” “dominant ideals,” etc.; see, e.g., Merton, “Puritanism,
Pietism,” pp. 574, 577; and Merton, Science, Technology, p. 79. It is perhaps noteworthy that the language of
“sentiments” is absent from Merton’s 1936 “Puritanism, Pietism” and is
pervasive in his 1938 text.
13. Merton,
Science, Technology, pp. 80, 111, 115; for other invocations of
“sentiments” see, e.g., pp. 58, 60, 75-76, 79.
14. Ibid.,
pp. 55-56.
598
a commonsensical usage in Merton’s work. In the United States in the 1930s, the deployment of the language of sentiments in formal sociological theorizing was a specific and technical usage, embedded within a particular and highly charged theoretical and ideological tradition. Most usually, it indicated affiliation to the sociological theories of Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923). [15] Put unconscionably briefly, Pareto’s system was founded upon an analytical triangle (see Figure 1), the apexes of which were two observable entities - human actions (B) and statements about those actions (C) - and one hypothetical entity - the psychological or neurological states (A) that disposed men toward their actions. This last entity
Fig. 1: Pareto's Analytic Scheme
was what Pareto called a sentiment. Sentiments were integral to the Paretan scheme, yet in the strict sense sociologists did
not have to analyze the nature of sentiments. They were unobservable mental states, and a
leading Harvard Paretan said that “we leave them to
the psychologists and affirm that their study is for our purposes inconvenient
and unnecessary... All we are interested in are… the things we can directly
observe.” But in loose usage, sentiments
were also identified with the Paretan category of
“residues” as opposed to “derivations.” Residues were conceived as the constant
elements, derivations the variable elements, in people’s statements about their
actions. Thus Paretans
contended that residues (verbal behaviors) might, without undue impropriety, be
identified with the sentiments (mental states) underlying them. [16]
15. The masterwork is Vilfredo
Pareto, A Treatise on General Sociology, 4 vols. bound as 2, trans.
Andrew Bongiorno and Arthur Livingston (New York:
Dover, 1963) (orig. publ. in Italian in 1916).
16. George
C. Homans and Char!es P. Curtis, Jr., An Introduction to Pareto: His
Sociology (New York: Knopf, 1934), pp. 78-81, 88-89; and Pareto, Treatise,
Vol. I, pp. 88-94. Sentiments are
also technically invoked in the sociology of Emile Durkheim;
see, e.g., Durkheim, Selected Writings, ed. [and
trans. Anthony Giddens (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.
Press, 1972), p. 219. However, while
Merton wrote a review of Durkheim’s Division of Labour in Society in 1934, there is only one oblique
mention of Durkheim in Science, Technology (p.
60 n. 10). For perceived opposition
between Pareto and Durkheim see Homans
and Curtis, Introduction to Pareto, pp. 90-92.]
HHC: [bracketed] displayed on page 600 of original.
599
Pareto’s system of
sociology was avidly taken up and propagated by a circle of sociologists at
Harvard in the 1930s. The instigator of
the Harvard “Pareto circle” was the functionalist biologist and sociologist L.
J. Henderson, and the seminar on Pareto over which Henderson presided from 1932
included the young Robert Merton, as well as George Homans,
Talcott Parsons, and the industrial sociologist Elton
Mayo. Barbara Heyl
has argued that Paretan sociology was attractive to
Harvard intellectuals because it was a grand historical theory that seemed to
“provide an alternative to the Marxist approach.” [17] George Homans, perhaps the most
vigorous publicist of Pareto’s views, said that he “took to Pareto” because,
“as a Republican Bostonian who had not rejected his comparatively wealthy
family, I felt during the thirties that I was under personal attack, above all
from the Marxists. I was ready to
believe Pareto because he provided me with a defense.” Whether other members of the circle were
attracted to Pareto for similar political reasons is unclear and arguably
irrelevant, although Homans found these
considerations highly relevant, as he did the task of acquitting Pareto from
the charge of being the “‘Karl Marx of Fascism.’” [18] What is evident is that Pareto seemed to provide important resources for
constructing an all-embracing sociological system that avoided what members of
the Harvard circle took to be the intellectual failings of Marxist
orientations. Among these perceived
failings were the Marxist insistence upon the rationality of human behavior,
the oversimplified nature of its causal schemes, and the materialist neglect of
the role of ideas in social action.
Members of the circle took
up Pareto’s ideas to varying extents and put them to various uses. For example, Elton Mayo, though never “a
full-fledged Paretan,” deployed a Paretan
vocabulary of sentiments to depict as irrational yet meaningful the behavior of
workers in the famous Hawthorne experiments that provided the foundations of
the discipline of industrial sociology. [19] And Merton’s 1938 text bears eclectic but unmistakable
marks of leading Paretan
17 Barbara
S. Heyl, “The Harvard ‘Pareto Circle,’” Journal of
the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 1968, 4:316-334, on p. 317. For Merton’s attendance at the Pareto seminar
see Robert K. Merton, “The Sociology of Science: An Episodic Memoir,” in The
Sociology of Science in Europe, ed. Merton and Jerry Gaston (Carbondale:
Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 3-141, on p. 120 n. 32. For Merton’s familiarity with European sociological
perspectives generally see Lewis A. Coser, “Merton’s
Uses of the European Sociological Tradition,” in The Idea of Social
Structure: Papers in Honor of Robert K. Merton, ed. Coser
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), pp. 85-100. Coser claims that Durkheim was Merton’s “consciously chosen role mode!” (pp.
88-89) and documents Merton’s acknowledgment of the influence on his early work
of Durkheim, Weber, and Georg
Simmel (pp. 96-97). There is no mention of Pareto here.
18. For
Homans see George Caspar Homans, Sentiments and Activities: Essays in Social
Science (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), p. 4; for Pareto and fascism see Homans and Curtis, Introduction to Pareto (cit. n.
16), p. 9: “It is true that the Sociologie Générale has become for many Fascists a treatise on
government... But in point of fact Pareto maintained in deed and word his independence as a scientist... [W]hile approving some of the Fascist measures, he openly condemned
others, especially any limitation of academic freedom.” The relationship between Merton’s own
commitment to liberal democracy and his defense of science is well known; see,
e.g., David A. Hollinger, “The Defense of Democracy and Robert K. Merton’s
Formulation of the Scientific Ethos,” Knowledge and Society, 1983, 4:1-15.
19. Timothy
Raison, ed., The Founding Fathers of Social Science (Harmondsworth,
Middlesex: Penguin, 1969), pp. 113, 118; and Homans
and Curtis, Introduction to Pareto, p. 241.
600
themes. Thus, a major
concern of that text was to display the importance of “nonrational”
and “nonlogical” considerations in social action. Sentiments were the nonrational
and unconscious wellsprings of the social actions involved in sanctioning and
pursuing science in seventeenth-century England. [20] And inasmuch as nonrational
dispositions were involved, this would explain why the consequences of much
social action were, as Merton famously insisted, “unanticipated” - for example,
why the original Protestant reformers, who were not inspired to sanction
science, produced an ethic that ultimately did so, or indeed why secularization
was the unintended outcome of the religiously motivated science of the
seventeenth century. [21]
Moreover, Merton shared the
Paretan impulse to build a social science that
substituted the circumspect language of “mutual dependence” for the “vulgar
Marxist” language of “cause and effect.” Hitherto, I have spoken loosely of the
“causal” entities in Merton’s thesis, yet he used the notion of cause in a much
softer sense than is (or was) customary in the social sciences. Critics who fail to recognize the highly
qualified and eclectic sense in which Merton used causal language are doing him
a disservice. Thus, Merton cautioned
that even the apparently “unavoidable implication... that religion was the
independent variable and science the dependent variable during this period” was
“not the least our intention.” Both
Puritanism and science, he said, “were components of a vastly complicated
system of mutually dependent factors.” Having pointed to the motivating force of
sentiments, Merton was exceedingly careful not to attribute to them the sole
causal role. Sentiments, it is true,
underlie and find expression in both “word and deed,” but sentiments, Merton
says, can also be affected by these forms of action: “behavior in its
turn reacts upon the sentiments, reinforcing, moulding,
at times altering them so that the whole process is one of incessant
interaction.” [22] We are to understand that the causal item that motivates
social action is also an effect of that action.
This eclecticism extended
to the general form of sociological approach Merton brought to the
Puritanism-and-science thesis. Indeed,
it is more correct to refer to the general forms of sociological approach,
since Merton’s 1938 text canvassed two relationships between action and ideas
that he himself regarded as distinct. On
the one hand, Merton offered a general social-structural theory that analyzed
the ways by which institutionalized and not-yet-institutionalized activities
are legitimated. Given that the dominant
sentiments of the historical setting were expressed in religious language, any
new form of social action, such as experimental natural philosophy, was obliged
to justify itself and to seek legitimacy by a public display of its
compatibility with those sentiments and their expression: “New patterns of
conducts must be justified if they are to take hold and become the foci of
social sentiments.” Hence, we can make
sense of the constant insistence by “Puritan scientists” on the utility of
their practices and on the manner in which science could contribute to
religious exercises. If these
20. Merton,
Science, Technology (cit. n. 1), pp. 81-82, 101, 107, 136. Pareto is explicitly referred to on pp. 60 n.
10, 91 and n. 30, 106 n. 62, 111 n. 73, 226 and n. 51.
21. Ibid.,
pp. 79, 101-110; Merton, “Puritanism,
Pietism” (cit. n. 2), p. 597; and Merton, “The Unanticipated Consequences of
Purposive Social Action,” American Sociological Review, 1936, 1:894-904.
22. Merton,
Science, Technology, pp. 104-105 (see also p. 63), 56; see also his view
that verbal expressions such as sermons can reinforce “the dominant sentiments
of the day” (p. 60).
601
justifications prove acceptable, the new activity receives social
sanction and becomes a value in its own right. Now scientists do not need to offer any
“extrinsic” justifications for the activities: “Institutionalized values are
conceived as self-evident and require no vindication.” [23]
Merton reckoned that this
theory of “accommodation” was correct and important, but he insisted that it
was by itself insufficient to account for the links between Puritan sentiments
and scientific activity. Such a view
suggested, Merton said, that expressions of Puritan values by leading
scientists were merely rationalizations or “casuistry” - in Paretan
language, “derivations” rather than “residues.” Moreover, it invited an improper psychological
reading of the relationship, one in which scientists consciously cobbled
together socially expedient justifications for their activities, which
activities were in fact motivated solely by “intrinsic” values. On the contrary, Merton stipulated both that scientists were genuinely and powerfully motivated by
religious sentiments and that they need not be conscious of these motivations. [24] Thus, historians who have sought to invalidate Merton’s
thesis by mobilizing evidence that seventeenth-century scientists were not, in
the usual parlance, consciously motivated by religious or utilitarian
considerations have missed the point: Merton’s views cannot be refuted by such
evidence. Nor have they understood how
Merton is entitled to diagnose inaccessible motivational states. Again, the procedure is Paretan.
Merton claimed Paretan
warrant to conclude that constant elements in human speech accounting for
action (the residues) reliably “manifest deep-rooted, effective sentiments.” “Speaking elliptically,” Merton said, “these
constant elements may be held to provide motivations for behavior, whereas the
variable elements [the derivations] are simply post facto justifications.”
The identification of genuine motivating
states might therefore be achieved through a totting-up procedure that assessed
which justifications appeared more or less frequently and consistently. Even so, Merton recognized that “in practice,
it is at times exceedingly difficult to discriminate between the two [residues
and derivations].” [25] If Merton has
been widely misunderstood on this score, part of the reason must arise from
modern readers’ lack of familiarity with Paretan
schema, and part from Merton’s loose Paretan
identification between motivating mental states and the constant speech
elements that were treated as expressions of the psychic states that
23. Ibid., p.83.
24. Ibid.,
pp. 81-82, 91, and n. 30. Cf., however, p. 110, where Merton insisted
that the Protestant ethic represented “the consciously felt motivation of many
eminent seventeenth century scientists.” See also Abraham, “Misunderstanding the Merton
Thesis” (cit. n. 10), pp. 371-372, which claims to identify “ambiguity” in
Merton’s motivational analysis. Merton
characterized this psychological account as “independent” of his
“justification” hypothesis: Science, Technology, p. 81. I must confess to an attempt at constructive
simplification in my brief sketch of “The Merton Thesis” in The Dictionary
of the History of Science, ed. W. F. Bynum, E. J. Browne, and Roy Porter
(London: Macmillan, 1981), p. 262. Given
limited space, I elected to stress the social-structural aspect of Merton’s
thesis, neglecting the psychological dimensions. Apart from purely pragmatic excuses, I could
argue that the elements I emphasized are precisely those less known among
historians.
25. Merton,
Science, Technology, p. 91 and n. 30; and Merton, “Puritanism, Pietism”
(cit. n. 2), pp. 603-604. Of course,
Merton did not approach this aspect of his thesis statistically; constant elements
in Puritan expressions were identified impressionistically. In the “Postscript” to the “Puritanism,
Pietism” essay Merton offered a further definitive test of whether Puritan
values were motives as opposed to rationalizations: such a test is “to be found
in the behavior which accords with these reasons, even when there is little or
no prospect of self-interested mundane reward” (p. 604). Robert Boyle’s behavior was pointed to as such
proof; but cf. James R. Jacob, Robert Boyle and the English Revolution: A Study in Social and Intellectual Change (New York:
Burt Franklin, 1977).
602
caused them, as a cause of the states, and as the means of
discerning the states. Merton’s Paretan language of “mutual dependence” and incessant
reciprocal interaction between mental states and verbal and nonverbal behaviors
cuts across the more familiar sociological vocabulary associated with coherent
“idealist” and “materialist” frameworks. Merton himself insisted in 1938, and again in
1970, that his orientation was neither the one nor the other. In Science, Technology and Society Merton
obliquely engaged with the materialist view that ideas could not properly be
treated as causative agents in social action. His eclectically Paretan
solution was to preserve elements of what was usually taken to be materialism
and to mix them with elements of what was usually taken to be idealism. Thus, Merton said:
It is also an acceptable hypothesis that ideologies
seldom give rise to action and that both the ideology and the action are
rather the product of common sentiments and values which motivate conduct. But these ideas cannot be ignored for two
reasons. They provide clues for
detecting the basic values which motivate conduct. Such sign posts cannot be profitably neglected.
Of even greater importance is the role
of ideas in directing action into particular channels. It is the dominating system of ideas which
determines the choice between alternative modes of action which are equally
compatible with the underlying sentiments. Without such guidance and direction,
non-logical action would become, within the limits of the value-system, random.
[26]
In 1970 Merton applauded
his youthful skill in steering his interpretative boat between the Scylla and Charybdis of materialism and idealism, though without
explaining the eclectically Paretan foundations of
that judiciousness. “As everyone knows,”
Merton ironically commented, “‘idealistic’ and ‘materialistic’ interpretations
are forever alien to one another, condemned to ceaseless contradiction and
intellectual warfare. Still, what
everyone should know from the history of thought often turns out not to be so
at all.” Merton condemned “the mock
choice between a vulgar Marxism and an equally vulgar purism.” [27]
Indeed, there is a
widely diffused, and a well-supported, view that idealism and materialism are rightly
set in opposition, and that one cannot mix elements of the one with the
other as the occasion or eclectic impulses seem to require. If present-day readers treat Merton’s text as
belonging to one or the other of these traditions, they are in no different
position than some of those closer to Merton and the circumstances out of which
his work arose. His own sociology
teacher at Harvard, Pitirim Sorokin,
continually insisted that Merton “succumbed to M[ax] Weber’s theory,
overlooking its weak points,” and that “he gives a vast body of empirical
facts, but applies for their interpretation an uncritically accepted, inadequate
theory of Max Weber.” [28] Sorokin pointed to what he took to be the causal ambiguity
and teleological character of Merton’s functional explanations. [29]
26. Merton,
Science, Technology, p. 91 (emphases in original); see also Merton,
“Puritanism, Pietism,” p. 604.
27. Merton,
“Preface: 1970” (cit. n. 5), pp. xix, xiii.
28. Pitirim A. Sorokin, Society, Culture, and Personality: Their
Structure and Dynamics: A System of General Sociology (New York: Harper,
1947), p. 657n; and Sorokin, Sociological Theories
of Today (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), p. 456n. Sorokin rejected
both materialist Marxism and idealist Weberianism as
untenable theories of cultural change.
29. Sorokin, Sociological
Theories, pp. 447, 450: “A particularly conspicuous trait of Merton’s theories
is their ambivalence” (ibid., p. 447 n. 7). For Merton’s part, he accused his former
teacher of the sins of “emanationism,” relativism,
and neglecting the role of “existential” factors: Robert K. Merton [and
Bernard Barber, “Sorokin’s Formulations in the
Sociology of Science,” in Pitirim A. Sorokin in Review, ed. Philip I. Allen (Durham, N.C.:
Duke Univ. Press, 1963), pp. 332-368, esp. pp. 334, 343, 357-361. (Sorokin did not have a high opinion of Pareto’s work.)]
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603
The more closely one reads
Merton’s 1938 text, the more astonishing it is that this work has elicited such
vigorous and at times intemperate opposition. As I have noted above, Merton phrases his
argument in extremely cautious and prudent terms. Of course, the language of Pareto’s sociology
is now little known in the academic world, and Merton’s disinclination to
explain and to expand upon certain Paretan notions
has not made it easy for modern readers to grasp the basic elements of his
sociological approach. For all that,
failure to appreciate its methodological eclecticism and judiciousness can at
best be the result of the very “swift-reading” at which Merton mildly bridled
in l970. [30] However, there is a price to be paid for eclecticism and
judiciousness. If one tries too hard to
avoid being clearly wrong, one may well be perceived as not clear at all. “Swift-reading” may be culpable in the
academic world, but it is all too common, the more so if one’s readers have
their “straw men” already formed in their minds before they come to the text.
The list of caveats,
cautions, and qualifications that have to be taken into account if one wishes
to understand the Merton thesis properly is, as I have tried to show,
dauntingly large. It is not a
materialist thesis, and not an idealist thesis; it is partly psychological, and
partly social-structural; it is particular to seventeenth-century England, but
not wholly so; it concerns the dynamics of scientific enterprises, but not
their intellectual content or methods; it identifies causes of social action
that are also the effects of action. An
apparently paradoxical conclusion suggests itself. The reason historians are still so animated
about the Merton thesis fifty years on is precisely because it has been
so widely misrepresented.
Less glibly, one might say
that the legacy of this thesis has been both triumph and failure. Given the curmudgeonly disposition of the
scholarly world, victory is always less visible than defeat. Yet no historian of science now seriously contends
that religious forces were wholly, or even mainly, antagonistic to natural
science. When Merton wrote his thesis,
that was not the case, and we owe a debt to him (as well as to other historians
of the 1930s) for establishing the nature of some positive links between
science and religion and for setting up an empirical program of research
dedicated to exploring them. Similarly,
no historian now seriously maintains that the thematics
and dynamics of scientific activity (its “foci of interest”) are unaffected by
social and economic considerations. [31] When Merton wrote his thesis, this was not a common point
of view, especially outside Marxist circles. If historians of science have been reluctant
to give Merton full credit for these contributions, it is perhaps because the
focus of the discipline (intellectualist and contextualist,
rationalist and sociological) has continued to be upon the very knowledge and
methods that Merton surrounded with a black box. [32]
30. Merton,
“Preface: 1970” (cit. n. 5), p. xviii.
31. For
one of the very few historical attempts to apply and develop Merton’s approach
to “foci of interest” constructively see Steven Shapin,
“The Audience for Science in Eighteenth Century Edinburgh,” History of
Science, 1974, 12:95-121, esp. pp. 104-110.
32. Almost
needless to say, present-day historians would not be as comfortable as Merton
was in identifying an entity called “modern science” in the seventeenth
century. On the one hand, historians [discern
many versions of science in that setting; on the other, they question
whether any version of seventeenth-century science can simply be equated
with modern beliefs and practices.]
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604
There is still, however,
important historical work to be done in and around the Merton thesis. There is something about it and the general
orientation from which it emerged that should not be allowed to disappear from
our view. In 1970 Merton identified “a
principal assumption underlying the entire book. The substantial and persistent development of
science occurs only in societies of a certain kind, which provide both cultural
and material conditions for that development.” [33] The problematic from which Merton’s work emerged in the
1930s was one that accepted the interest, importance, and legitimacy of macrosociological theorizing about the historical
development and social setting of culture. How, after all, did we come to inhabit the
world of modern science? What, after
all, are the relations between large-scale social change and large-scale
cultural change? The footnotes of
Merton’s text are littered with the corpses of big men who ventured big
thoughts, scholars of erudition who were not afraid of grappling with such problems,
and who belonged to an academic culture in which they were expected to do so: Hessen, Pareto, Sorokin, Weber,
Franz Borkenau, R. H. Tawney,
Ernst Troeltsh. Where are their like now? Where in the academic history of science are
their concerns being addressed? The
price of professionalism in the history of science has been a
certain timidity, even a certain triviality. If we want to recover our scholarly nerve, we
could do much worse than to explore the resources and orientations, the “foci
of interest,” of the scholarly world that precipitated the Merton thesis.
33. Merton, “Preface: 1970” (cit. n. 5), p. xix.
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The Competitiveness of Nations
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April 2003