ABSTRACT
In the year 1936, Merton-then still a young scholar-published a short essay in which he decidedly proposed to study a hitherto under estimated matter: the unanticipated consequences of purposive social action (Merton 1936). At that time he was able to anticipate the impor tance which this matter would assume fifty years later. Everyone who studies the matter today recurs to Merton; and I doubt that this fact could be attributed in any relevant degree to the rituals of deference characteristic of scientific communities, though I admit that it would be very difficult to evade the influence of such a successful and highly estimated lifework as that of Merton. It is simply the acute sense of the problem conveyed by the author to the reader that makes this short essay indispensable even in today’s discussions of the issue. It might be instructive here to reflect upon the historical, social, and cultural conditions of the scientific interest in studies on unanticipated conse quences; we might try to examine some theorems of Merton’s sociol ogy of science on this occasion. Instead, I prefer to throw light on the topic as such, on the place assigned to it by Merton and on the back-
ground of other approaches to the topic; furthermore, on developments which took place especially in European sociological thought about the topic. In other words, I am concerned with a typology of reasoning and research on this subject in the context of more recent sociological ideas. My concern will thus not be with the further development of the topic within the intellectual biography of Merton; as is well known, the topic is present in many places in his work. It is sufficient to remember the study of Puritanism and science as a concrete historical field or the concepts of latent and manifest functions and the theorem of the Matthew Effect as related to theoretical fields. Starting from some peculiarities of Merton’s essay, I shall point out different ana lytical frameworks for the study of unanticipated consequences. I shall then give an outline of three typical problem-generating contexts for the topic and I shall conclude with some remarks on the practical and ethical dimensions of the problem in connection with a comment on Max Weber.
