Concepts and the Social Order: Robert K. Merton and the Future of Sociology

12. Robert K. Merton and the Transformation of Sociology of Knowledge and Possible New Directions

Robert K. Merton and the Transformation of Sociology of Knowledge and Possible New Directions Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt This chapter discusses the place of Robert K. Merton in the transformation of Sociology of Knowledge (SoK) and some indications for possible future directions. The basic sources are the three articles included in Part III of Social Theory and Social Structure, “The Sociology of Knowledge and Mass Communications” (Merton 1957), and a second direction indicated in Merton’s thesis on Puritanism in Science , Technology and Society in Seventeenth Century England (Merton 1970)—or as Harriet Zukermann (1989) has shown, two Merton theses. I shall briefly discuss whether these two directions of Merton’s work on the Sociology of Knowledge are complementary or contradictory , and whether a meeting between them indicates possibilities for the future. Significant from this perspective is the great corpus of Merton’s work on sociology of science that manifests one of the transformations of SoK. A less well known article co-authored by Merton with Sorokin on social time (Sorokin and Merton 1937) is seemingly —but only seemingly—out of kilt from both directions indicated above. Thus the paper also discusses Sorokin’s influence on both Merton and SoK in general. 1 The first question to consider is whether SoK was really transformed from the period when Merton was writing the articles included in Social Theory and Social Structure as well as his dissertation, and, if so, what was the essence of this transformation. Charles Camic wrote an instructive article on SoK in the new international encyclopedia of the Social and Behavioral Sciences (Camic 2004), which, compared with the article written by Lewis Coser about 40 years before (Coser 1968), indicates that Sociology of Knowledge was greatly transformed from the middle or late 1920s and the 1930s onwards in Europe (Shils 1982 and Stehr 1982). During this period SoK in Germany and in France constituted a central component of the sociological discourse. It was presented as bearing on central problems of intellectual discourse of that period. The thinkers connected with SoK in the 1920s and 1930s were above all Max Scheler, and Karl Mannheim in Germany, and in France the Durkheim school, including Durkheim, Mauss, and others (Durkheim and Mauss 1963; Durkheim 1954; and Granet 1950). Three further names are important to mention, albeit neither of them are generally connected with SoK discourse. The first is the RussianAmerican Sorokin, already mentioned, who is especially important when studying Merton (Sorokin 1962, 1964; and Tiryakin 1968). The second is Max Weber. Weber’s brilliant student Alexander von Schelting wrote in 1927 in the Archives an important article on SoK (von Schelting 1927), parts of which were incorporated as an appendix in his book on Max Weber’s “Wissenschaftlehre” (von Schelting 1934). Twenty years later von Schelting published a monograph that deals with SoK, in a book called “Russland und Europa in Russischen Geschichtlichen Daenken” (Russia and Europe in Russian Historiographical Thought) (von Schelting 1948). It was published in Switzerland just after the Second World War and never translated into English, thus it has not gained a wide audience. In this way, Weber’s connection to SoK gains some recognition through von Schelting, despite the fact that it is almost obvious: that at least Weber’s three volumes on Religionsoziologie are among the most important contributions to the SoK discourse. Finally, there is Ernst Cassirer. While seemingly he has no connection with SoK, Cassierer’s work, especially on the different symbolic formations, though not sociological itself, is a very important potential contribution to SoK that, as far as I know, has not been taken up (Cassirer 1957). 2 For some, at the time, the First World War created a crisis in the forward march of modernity. Knowledge and the question of its relativity , fused into the general discourse of European intellectual life of the inter-war period. It was in this context that the above mentioned writers addressed the Sociology of Knowledge. While this did not include scientific knowledge and the question whether it is objective and universally valid or relative to the intellectual life in which it crystallizes, 190 Concepts and the Social Order the issues that it raises were such as, for example, the kin question of whether knowledge is autonomous. In other words, does knowledge have its own momentum or is the way it evolves and develops a reflection of social forces? The difference in focus among German...