Sociology and History: Shapin on the Merton Thesis August 28, 2011
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.Tags: Boris Hessen, Gary Abraham, Joseph Ben-David, Robert K. Merton, Steven Shapin, Vilfredo Pareto
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This post will mainly focus on Steven Shapin’s “Understanding the Merton Thesis” Isis 79 (1988): 594-605, which may be my favorite work by him.
Robert K. Merton’s “functionalist” sociology viewed “science” as a kind of Weberian ideal type — a form of thought that is identifiable by its peculiar, philosophically-defined characteristics. Merton’s sociology of science held that this thought could also be identified with social behaviors, characterized by a set of “norms”, which made the thought possible.
The Merton Thesis (which slightly predates Merton’s enumeration of science’s norms) holds that the rise of science in early-modern England could be linked to the social behaviors valued by the Puritanism of that milieu. This was the subject of Merton’s PhD thesis and his 1938 book Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth-Century England.
Viscount James Bryce on the Marketplace and the American Intellect August 25, 2011
Posted by Christopher Donohue in History of Economic Thought, History of the Human Sciences.Tags: Alexis de Tocqueville, Brooks Adams, Edmund Burke, Edward Gibbon, Emile Durkheim, Georg Simmel, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, James Bryce, James Fenimore Cooper, John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, Max Weber
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The British social theorist James Bryce is chiefly known as a writer on the American party system (The American Commonwealth, 1888) and may perhaps be one of the most tolerable early sociologists of modern democracy (Modern Democracies, 1921). This will be the subject of a later post.
Bryce was quite indebted to European thinkers, even those from whom he tried to distance himself. Perhaps nowhere is the influence of Tocqueville more apparent than in Bryce’s discussion of the effect of commerce and the marketplace upon the American intellect. Here Bryce elaborates upon the conclusion of Tocqueville, that the materialism of American culture explained its lack of genius and refinement.
James Bryce, 1st Viscount Bryce (1838 1922)
In the nineteenth century, capitalism and art never mixed well in the minds of social theorists. Consider for a moment the distaste of business and money expressed by John Ruskin or Matthew Arnold. If not commerce, then the natural sciences or industry were the source of the ills of the present.
The market was another sign of modernity and its triumph over history. This caused many theorists — French, German, and English, from Rousseau and Gibbon and back again — to bemoan the discontents of progress and capitalist modernity. Whether progress was worth the costs and what progress consisted of were the chief concerns of sociology at this time. It was this sentiment which welded to together the works of Weber, Simmel, Marx, and Durkheim. Bryce was no different.
Richard Ely on Industrial Civilization and Socialism August 22, 2011
Posted by Christopher Donohue in History of Economic Thought, History of the Human Sciences.Tags: Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Ferdinand Tönnies, Frederic William Maitland, Georg Simmel, Hannah Arendt, Henri Bergson, Henry Maine, John Locke, Max Weber, Richard Ely, Thomas Malthus
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Almost every economist who wrote from the French Revolution to the interwar period (and perhaps even to today) defined the principles of their economics or political economy along with a narrative of the development of civilization. Richard Ely was no exception.
Richard Theodore Ely (1854–1943)
As with Smith and Malthus, in Ely’s economics the reader is treated to several prolonged discussions of why savages made tools, what herdsmen were really like, and how medieval towns came into being. Not only did economists from Adam Smith forward have to address the increasingly complexities of land, labor, and capital, as well as banking and finance, but also the emergence of a new kind of civilization, industrial civilization. Ricardo and Marx’s discussions of technology and machinery alone argue for their continuing relevance.
Ely’s Elementary Principles of Economics (1915), intended for students, began the discussion of the emergence of industrial civilization with the all-too-familiar conceit, the “hunting and fishing stage.” In this initial stage of development, economic activity is “isolated.” Ely considered the earliest stages to be “independent economy” with little exchange of goods or coordination among individuals. Ely also distinguished between two fundamentally differing views towards the natural world in human beings’ march towards civility, namely, “between uncivilized man, who uses what he finds, and civilized man, who makes what he wants.” (more…)
Harry Collins, Methodological Relativism, and Sociological Explanation, Pt. 2 August 20, 2011
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.Tags: Bruno Latour, David Edgerton, Harry Collins, Imre Lakatos, Jerry Ravitz, John Ziman, Joseph Agassi, Karin Knorr Cetina, Karl Popper, Mary Hesse, Paul Feyerabend, Peter Winch, Simon Schaffer, Stephen Toulmin, Steven Shapin, Thomas Kuhn, W. V. O. Quine
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In my previous post on Harry Collins’ ideas about “methodological relativism”, I discussed how in the early 1980s Collins began explicitly using relativism as a “natural attitude” that could be used to produce “sociological explanations” of scientists’ behavior. Methodological relativism was premised on a clear delineation of tasks, which makes it appropriate for the sociologist, but not for scientists.
However, this delineation of tasks remained incomplete: in particular, the relationship between sociology, philosophy, and history of science remained confusingly unresolved. Further, it was unclear what sociological fruits would actually be obtained via methodological relativism. Finally, it left unclear what the relationship was supposed to be between the sociology of scientific knowledge and the more general sociology of knowledge, upon which STS appears to be based.
The Nineteenth Century Problem August 15, 2011
Posted by Christopher Donohue in History of Economic Thought, History of the Human Sciences.Tags: Adam Smith, Alexis de Tocqueville, Alfred Marshall, Archibald Alison, Arnold Guyot, Arthur de Gobineau, E.B. Tylor, Emile Durkheim, Franz Boas, Fustel de Coulanges, Hans Kohn, Henry Buckle, Hippolyte Taine, Jerry Muller, John Maynard Keynes, John Ruskin, Joseph Denniker, Karl Marx, Ludwig von Mises, Martin Heidegger, Matthew Arnold, Max Weber, Mosei Ostrogorski, Philip Mirowski, R.R. Marett, W.E.H. Lecky, Walter Bagehot
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The universal historian Henry T. Buckle (1821-1862) was last subject of a serious scholarly monograph in 1958. This is the fate of any number of nineteenth-century intellectuals. The first reason for the disappearance of these writers has been the inability to connect them to the catastrophic events of the twentieth century: the World Wars, National Socialism, the deradicalization of the European right after Nuremberg, the flight of the Marxist intellectuals, and so on. Second, the nineteenth century has been the province of sociologists and literary scholars. Such attention continues to be selective, judging from the ceaseless publications on the canonical sociologists: springtime for Weber, and winter for Gobineau and Bagehot.
Third, ignoring the nineteenth century allows anthropologists to get on with their own work. Fourth, and finally, while some nineteenth century economists get attention — Alfred Marshall (1842-1924) has been accumulating more slim volumes as the months go by — the impression I get from some not so cursory reading of the literature is that the with the exception of the proponents of “evolutionary” and “heterodox” economics, philosophers of economics, and Philip Mirowski, it’s Smith, Marx, Keynes, Hayek, Mises, or monograph wilderness. (more…)
Holiday & Introductory Course August 3, 2011
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.Tags: Adam Kuper, Amy Dahan, Andrew Warwick, Anthony Grafton, C. S. Lewis, Daniel Greenberg, Edward Appleton, Jack Morrell, James Secord, Jan Golinski, John Gascoigne, John Hedley Brooke, Martin Rudwick, Neil Morgan, Noel Coley, Peter Bowler, Peter Dear, Robert Olby
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I am going to be doing some traveling for the next couple of weeks, and so there are likely to be no new posts in that time. In other news, starting in October, I will be teaching a year-long introduction to the history of science course here at Imperial. I’ve included a tentative lecture schedule and reading list below the fold. This isn’t set in stone yet, so comments and suggestions are welcome.
Will Thomas
Christopher Donohue
