ABSTRACT

How can the classical bourgeois ‘scientific’ world view be grasped as a social relation? Efforts to establish a sociological account of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century have met with only limited success. Merton’s influential monograph provoked an extensive literature devoted to elucidating the social and cultural ‘context’ of such a revolution but did little to encourage a sociological analysis of the transformation in the conceptualization of natural processes.1 Different sociological traditions have offered other accounts of the historiographical background but have similarly taken the theoretical transition as given.2 It is difficult not to sympathize with Koyré’s bewilderment, ‘I do not see what the scientia activa has ever had to do with the development of the calculus, nor the rise of the bourgeoisie with that of the Copernican, or the Keplerian, astronomy.’3