ABSTRACT
One of Joseph Ben-David's central ideas and the central idea of the original sociology of science which, together with Robert K. Merton, he helped to establish as a subdiscipline in sociology, was the idea that science was resistant to the point of absolute impermeability to broader social influences. The opposition to Ben-David's position within sociology of science likely has been motivated by considerations of an entirely different nature. The actual contributions of the social scientists trained as such in the graduate departments of American research universities and elsewhere to the common stores of knowledge were almost exclusively of this "natural history" nature. In the American society, rapidly industrializing in the wake of the Civil War and as rapidly changing the traditional (pre–Civil War) class structure, these first social scientists, children of the traditional, displaced elite, educated in the faculties of philosophy in traditional German universities, felt unappreciated and were centrally preoccupied with status.
