The sociologists’ account of the scientific revolution arose from the growing awareness in the early half of the 20th century of the need to consider the body of a scientist´s work as an indissoluble part of its social, economic, and political context. This has been called the contextual approach to the account of the scientific progress. With this approach the objective of the cultural studies of science has been, mostly, to define the context and not just the content of the scientific works. It is rather a ´more or less´
search for the causes of progress in science, especially during the early modern period.
The American sociologist, Robert K. Merton, is the main pioneer of the sociology of science. His doctoral thesis which was defended in 1935 greatly contributed to the strong historical underpinnings of the many studies he devoted since then to sociological aspects of the scientific enterprise. His thesis Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth-Century England, which was later published in 1938, demonstrated how Puritanism unintentionally provided social and cultural support for the science emerging in 17th-century England. He used massive amount of statistical and historical data to support his cautiously drawn conclusions that Puritanism provided a system of values and beliefs which fostered the development of seventeenth-century English science.
79 David C. Lindberg, ¨Conceptions of the Scientific Revolution from Bacon to Butterfield: A preliminary sketch¨, in Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution eds. David Lindberg & Robert S. Westman (
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) p.11
However, the force of Merton argument seems to be weakened by the fact that he focused his attention upon the relationship between religion, science, and technology in England alone. Could not his argument have been more plausible if he had identified other parts of Europe where such Protestant ethic stimulated the scientific progress? The absence of the Protestant ethic did not either prohibit the progress of science in the pre-Reformation Italy. What insight, then, does the account of the support of Puritanism to science and technology in England bring to the whole idea of the Scientific Revolution in early modern period?
However, by systematically studying a particular national culture he facilitated the acceptance of his conclusions. In fact, the peculiar factor that made Merton´s work a classic of the sociology of science is that he avoided the error of over generalisation and unsupported account covering the whole scope of European science. Rather, he gathered and examined the existing, relevant data in the critical period of one society, and while affirming the possibility of peculiar causal connection in other societies he feels certain to have revealed the source of seventeenth-century English scientific activity by linking together Puritanism, technology, and science
Merton´s argument that interacting socio-economic and religious forces incited on the growth of science in England was inspired by Boris Hessen thesis. From June 29 to July 3, 1931, the Second International Congress of the History of Science and Technology met in London. A large Soviet delegation, headed by the eminent Communist theorist Nikolai I. Bukharin, came to present the Marxist explanation for the development of science. Professor Boris Mikhailovich Hessen presented an extraordinary paper titled
¨The Social and Economic Roots of Newton´s ´Principia´¨.80 In the paper he claimed that Newton´s great masterpiece of mathematical physics, the Principia, was a product of seventeenth-century England´s commercial and industrial activity and the social system associated with it. He asserted that all the subjects handled in the three books of the Principia derive from technological issues that had come up during preceding decades of the century as a result of the needs of incipient capitalism.
80 Boris Hessen, ¨The Social and Economic Roots of Newton´s ´Principia.´¨ in Science at the Cross Roads: Papers presented to the International Congress of the History of Science and Technology Held in London from June 29th to July 3rd, 1931, by the Delegates of the USSR, 2nd ed. (London: Cass, 1971) pp.
149-212. First published in 1931
Most of the scientific activities of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have their root in the technical needs of Europe´s newly emerging bourgeoisie. For instance, the development of the merchant capital created a set of quite distinct problems in several areas of technology: transportation over water, the mining industry, and arms production. Some of the technical needs in these areas include ¨an increase in the tonnage capacity of vessels and in their speed ¨methods of ventilating the mines,¨ and
¨the stability combined with least weight of the firearm¨.81 Hessen later formed with Henryk Grossman the celebrated classical Marxist historiography of science. This is due to the fact that their work displays a specifically Marxist approach. Gideon Freudenthal and Peter McLaughlin (2009) affirmed that they conceptualize science as one kind of labor within the system of social production. Their discussions of the social context and the cognitive content of science are modelled on Marx´s analysis of the labor process.82 However, Hessen has been severely criticised for his distortion of historical facts to fit his ideological mold. Nevertheless, his work has led more judicious historians and sociologists of science to consider the social and economic components of what might first appear to have been problems within the strict domains of science. Edgar Zilsel, an Austrian philosopher/scientist, the author of popular paper on the Sociological Roots of Science,83 adopted a more moderate economic-deterministic approach in his researches.
He propounds the idea that the early capitalistic society broke down the ancient barriers separating the scholar from the craftsman, or what George Basalla (1986) identified as the ´man of formal knowledge´ from the ´man of practical knowledge´84
From antiquity through the Middle Ages, the philosopher and the priest were socially superior to the metallurgist, potter, ship-builder, or other craftsman. On the different extremes the scholar excelled in logic, speculative thinking, and mathematics while the craftsman has a special knowledge of the material objects. Hence, theory and practice
81d., pp. 158, 161, 164
82 Gideon Freudenthal & Peter McLaughlin eds., ¨Classical Marxist Historiography of Science: The Hessen-Grossmann-Thesis¨, in The Social and Economic Roots of the Scientific Revolution, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, 278 (Boston: Springer, 2009) p.1
83 See Edgar Zilsel, ¨The Sociological Roots of Science,¨ The American Journal of Sociology, 1942, 47 (4), 544-562
84 George Basalla ed., The Rise of Modern Science: Internal or External Factors (Lexington, Massachusetts: Heath, 1968) p. x
were separated for centuries until the needs of an emerging capitalistic society joined them together to produce modern science.
Another sociologist whose work is very central to the social historiography of science is Joseph Ben-David. In his The Scientist´s Role in Society85 he sought to identify ´how and when´ was the ´role´ of the modern scientist established in European society? As such, his work tends to shift the focus from the emergence of modern science to the emergence of the role of the modern scientist. Of course, the larger question remains whether or not the intellectual basis of modern science must necessarily precede the creation of the social role of the modern scientist?
All these illustrations of the rise of modern science reviewed here have been based on external causes. External factors (social, economic, religious, artistic etc.) have been advocated as the true stimuli of scientific progress thereby treating scientific ideas as if they do not have a life of their own. However, this idea has been attacked and rejected by some internalists who believe that the history of science is purely an intellectual history, such that though the general cultural, social and economic setting may exert an influence on science they do not determine the direction and rate of growth of scientific thought. Such internalists like Alexandre Koyré and A. Rupert Hall would argue that it is no more meaningful to search for the economic and social roots of Newton´s Principia than it is to seek the economic and social roots of Kant´s Critique of Pure Reason. Therefore, what the sociologist of science can only do is an attempt at an understanding of the specific social conditions which made possible the pursuit of science. What such scholar cannot do is to explain scientist´s thoughts in terms of their social environment.