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The Sorokin-Merton Correspondence on “Puritanism, Pietism and Science,” 1933–341

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Robert K. Merton
Affiliation:
Office of the University ProfessorsColumbia University

Extract

On this occasion, I shall try to respond to the suggestions that I report what it was like to be a graduate student at Harvard in the early 1930s engaged in writing a dissertation which took the shape in print of the monograph, Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth-Century England. This, quite some time before the sociology of science had emerged with a cognitive and social identity. I shall not attempt an account – let alone an explanatory account – of the micro-environment at Harvard back then that provided local context for that study. Indeed, I suspect that the Gerald Holton, Everett Mendelsohn and Arnold Thackray reconstructions come closer to the intellectual and social reality of that time and place than anything I might reconstruct.

Type
Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989

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Footnotes

1

This is a revised version of Professor Merton's concluding remarks at the International Workshop on “Fifty Years of the Merton Thesis,” held in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem from May 16 to May 19, 1988.

References

Becker, George, 1984. “Pietism and Science: A Critique of Robert K. Merton's HypothesisAmerican Journal of Sociology 89:1065–90.Google Scholar
Merton, Robert K., 1936. “Puritanism, Pietism and ScienceSociological Review 28:130.Google Scholar
Merton, Robert K., 1979. The Sociology of Science: An Episodic Memoir. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.Google Scholar
Merton, Robert K., 1984. “The Fallacy of the Latest Word: The Case of ‘Pietism and Science,’American Journal of Sociology 89: 1091–121.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sorokin, P. A., 1937. Social and Cultural Dynamics, 4. vols New York: American Book Company.Google Scholar