The Sorokin-Merton Correspondence on “Puritanism, Pietism, and Science,” 1933-34

On this occasion, ¹ I shall try to respond to the suggestions that I report what it was like to be a graduate student at Harvard in the early 1930s engaged in writing a dissertation that took the shape in print of the monograph, Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth-Century England (Merton 1938). This, quite some time before the sociology of science had emerged with a cognitive and social identity. I shall not attempt an account—let alone an explanatory account—of the micro-environment at Harvard back then that provided local context for that study. Indeed, I suspect that the Gerald Holton, Everett Mendelsohn, and Arnold Thackray reconstructions come closer to the intellectual and social reality of that time and place than anything I might reconstruct.