ABSTRACT
In Weberian sociology, the social conditions which promoted the growth of rational capitalism (free cities, an autonomous merchant class, rational law and an ethic of world mastery) are typically associated with the emergence of modern science. Protestantism, capitalism and rational science are assumed to require an open discursive space, free from arbitrary restraint on conscience and consciousness. This ‘uniqueness of the west’ argument encounters the following difficulties. Technology and science flourished in Chinese and Islamic cultures in which the political system was patrimonial and bureaucratic. In these societies, innovative science was often associated with oppositional, magical beliefs. Furthermore, in Weber’s interpretation of Protestantism, it was the irrationality of the salvational drive which led to the rationality of a calling as an unintended consequence of action. Although this sceptical viewpoint suggests that no general theory of scientific accumulation is possible, this chapter employs Weber’s economic sociology to identify the close historical relationship between economic change, state regulation and the patronage of intellectuals in the development of science. Scientific rationalism is the outcome of contingent features (such as the requirements of navigation), structural arrangements between the economy and the
state, the presence of rational technologies (in mathematics, writing and experimentation) and finally the teleological impact of rationalization. The sociology of science, like the sociology of knowledge, is concerned to analyse the relationship between scientific thought and social existence. At one level, scientific innovation and changes in scientific paradigms may be regarded as relatively independent of the social organization of science and the scientific community. In this case, the logic of scientific development is seen to be largely self-contained and determined by intellectual problems which are internal to science. Alternatively, sociologists of science have regarded scientific thought and scientific change as shaped by the nature of scientific organization, research networks and professional organization. Scientific change is the result of processes of competition for scarce resources between scientists in sub-disciplines which periodically become over-worked, over-populated and less rewarding (Mulkay and Turner 1971; Mulkay 1972). This chapter argues for a very close relationship between scientific advance and the acquisition of an economic surplus. It has often been claimed that science, technology and economic development stand in an intimate and interdependent relationship. Weber asserted that
the mechanizing process has always and everywhere been introduced to the definite end of releasing labour; every new invention signifies the extensive displacement of hand workers by a relatively small man power for machine supervision (Weber 1927:306).
