The Weirdest Guest — William Z. Ripley: Economist, Financial Historian, and Racial Theorist September 26, 2011
Posted by Christopher Donohue in History of Economic Thought, History of the Human Sciences.Tags: Carl Ritter, Earnest Albert Hooton, Franz Boas, Friedrich Ratzel, Georg Hansen, Joseph Deniker, Lothrop Stoddard, Max Nordau, Otto Ammon, Pitirim A. Sorokin, R.R. Marett, Talcott Parsons, William Z. Ripley
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William Ripley’s (October 13, 1867 – August 16, 1941) long career as a writer, public servant, and academician presents nightmarish problems of reconstruction for the historian. Ripley, at one time vice president of the American Economic Association, was an expert on railroads and trusts, a competent historian of the financial history of colonial Virginia, an astute observer on the labor problem in both Europe and America, and, with the publication of the Races of Europe (1899), one of the preeminent sociologists of his day.
William Z. Ripley's Races of Europe
The longevity of Ripley’s influence poses problems for the scope of the academical truism of the “revolution” brought about by Boas’ cultural relativism, as well as the intriguing connections between the Oxford School of Anthropology and American racial theory. Such was the enduring reputation of Ripley’s work that it was revised in 1946 by Carlton Coon, an important twentieth century physical anthropologist who taught at Harvard. Coon’s mentor, Earnest Albert Hooton, a student of R. R. Marett, was a nasty piece of work, producing works in the same mental universe as Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (1920). (more…)
Merton on the Reception of Watson’s The Double Helix September 15, 2011
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.Tags: Augustus de Morgan, Elinore Barber, Erwin Chargaff, Galileo Galilei, Isaac Newton, James Watson, Jean-Martin Charcot, Michael Mulkay, Robert K. Merton, Stephen Brush
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For many decades now, various critics have supposed that the relations between science and society suffer because of the prevalence of an unrealistic view of science as something that is abstract and dehumanized. This supposition licenses the critics to deploy therapeutically realistic images of science to deliver their audience from their false idols into a state of mature understanding.
In his paper, “Should the History of Science Be Rated X?” Science 183 (1974): 1164-1172, Stephen Brush supposed the history of science could play just such a “subversive” role in science education. At that same time, according to some stories, the history of science itself had to be rescued from ne’er-do-well myth-spinners working as philosophers of science, Mertonian sociologists, and, of course, American scientists justifying their work to society and Congress.
All of this overlooks the fact that our entire society had already been freed from its illusions by James Watson’s best-selling 1968 memoir, The Double Helix.
Robert Ranulph Marett, Eugenics, and the Progress of Prehistoric Man September 10, 2011
Posted by Christopher Donohue in History of the Human Sciences.Tags: Andrew Lang, E.B. Tylor, Eugenics, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Robert Ranulph Marett
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R. R. Marett’s account of the progress of prehistoric man in Progress and History (1916), edited by Francis Sydney Marvin, had the object of assuring his audience that no matter how savage individuals were in the past they still grew, through gradual biological adaptation and an increasing awareness of divinity, into full grown Englishmen.
Robert Ranulph Marett (1866–1943)
Marett is remembered, if at all, for succeeding E.B. Tylor as Reader in Anthropology in Oxford in 1910, and for proposing a primal stage of religious worldview, pre-animism. This elaborated on Tylor’s evolutionary scheme of psychic development. Marett, like Lucien Levy-Bruhl, considered the primitive mind to be a uniform entity which ordered reality in a distinct way from that of modern man.
Norms, “Ideology”, and the Move against “Functionalist” Sociology September 4, 2011
Posted by Will Thomas in Uncategorized.Tags: Clifford Geertz, Daniel Greenberg, David Beardslee, Donald O'Dowd, Geoffrey Cantor, George Daniels, Harry Collins, Ian Mitroff, John Tyndall, Lorraine Daston, Margaret Mead, Michael Mulkay, Rhoda Metraux, Robert K. Merton, Roger Cooter, Roger Smith, Ronald Tobey, Steven Shapin, Thomas Gieryn, Thomas Kuhn, West Churchman
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The sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) critique of the Mertonian program to define a “normative structure of science” centered around the complaint that, by focusing on the social conditions that fostered scientific rationality, nothing was said about the sociology of knowledge-producing processes in everyday scientific work. It seems to me that SSK strategies like “methodological relativism”, and Steven Shapin’s embrace of “middle-range” historico-sociological theories, might ultimately have resulted in additions to, and a reconciliation with, the original Mertonian framework.
However, at the same time, another critique questioned the basic validity of that framework. This critique shared the SSK critique’s interest in describing actual scientific work, but, like Mertonian sociology, it focused on scientists’ and others’ sense of the essence of scientific culture without directly addressing knowledge-production processes. This critique held that, because “functionalist” ideal-type systems of scientific behavior could not actually be found in their pure form, such systems did not meaningfully exist. Legitimate sociology had to be obtained inductively from the empirical record, as studied by historians and ethnologists.
A key work here is: Michael Mulkay, “Norms and Ideology in Science,” Social Science Information 15 (1976): 637-656.
Will Thomas
Christopher Donohue
