ABSTRACT
Merton’s work was in the great European tradition, building on the pioneering studies of Emile Durkheim, Henri Hubert, and Marcel Mauss, whose studies on the theme of time provided many profound insights. However, the intellectual climate of the late-1930s did not seem particularly favorable to a renewal of interest in the study of time, and American sociologists showed no particular interest in
Merton’s attempts to develop it further.1 The themes put forward in Sorokin’s and Merton’s essay were not taken up by anyone else, al though Sorokin, who had been the moving force behind these studies, remained interested in these issues and went on to develop them in Social and Cultural Dynamics ([1937] 1941) and Sociocultural Cau sality, Space, Time (1943).
