Robert King Merton
July 4, 1910 – February 23, 2003
Robert K. Merton served as the 47th President of the American Sociological Association. His Presidential Address, “Priorities in Scientific Discovery: A Chapter in the Sociology of Science,” was delivered on August 28, 1957 at the Association’s Annual Meeting in Washington, DC. His Address was later published in the American Sociological Review (ASR Dec 1957 Vol 22, No 6, pp 635-659). An extensive obituary for Merton was published in the March 2003 issue of Footnotes, along with remembrances by his colleagues and former students.
The Spring 1995 issue of Temple Review (Vol 47, No 1) contained an extensive article on Robert Merton entitled “The Improbable Adventures of an American Scholar” by Ruth W. Schultz. Temple Review has graciously provided permission for ASA to make that article available on this page.
Obituary
Written by Craig Calhoun, published in Footnotes, March 2003.
Robert K. Merton, one of the towering figures on whose shoulders contemporary sociology rests, died Sunday, February 23, 2003. He was 92.
Merton was born July 4, 1910, and his extraordinary life story evokes both a very American trajectory appropriate to the holiday birthday and the universalism of science. Merton’s parents were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, and indeed the future RKM was born Meyer R. Schkolnick. The family lived above his father’s small dairy products shop in South Philadelphia until it burned down, without insurance, and his father became a carpenter’s assistant. Merton’s family lacked wealth, but he insisted his childhood did not lack opportunity— and cited such institutions as a very decent public high school and the library donated by Andrew Carnegie in which he first read Tristram Shandy. Indeed, suggested Merton in 1994, that seemingly deprived South Philadelphia slum provided “a youngster with every sort of capital—social capital, cultural capital, human capital, and, above all, what we may call public capital—that is, with every sort of capital except the personally financial.”
The name Robert King Merton evolved out of a teenage career as an amateur magician. Merton took up conjuring and other magic partly through taking his sister’s boyfriend as a “role model” (to borrow a phrase literally his own). As his skill improved, he sought a stage name, initially “Merlin.” Advised that this was hackneyed, he changed it to Merton. Already devoted to tracing origins, he chose a first name after Robert Houdin, the French magician whose name Harry Houdini (himself originally Erich Weiss) had adapted. And when he won a scholarship to Temple University he was content to let the new name become permanent.
At Temple College—a school founded for “the poor boys and girls of Philadelphia” and not yet fully accredited—he chanced on a wonderful undergraduate teacher. It was serendipity, the mature Merton insisted. The sociologist George E. Simpson took him on as a research assistant in a project on race and the media and introduced him not only to sociology but to Ralph Bunche and Franklin Frazier. Simpson also took Merton to the ASA annual meeting where he met Pitirim Sorokin, founding chair of the Harvard sociology department. He applied to Harvard, even though his teachers told him this was usually beyond the reach of those graduating from Temple. And when he arrived, Sorokin took him on as a research assistant. By Merton’s second year they were publishing together.
In addition to Sorokin, Merton apprenticed himself to the historian of science George Sarton—not just for his stay at Harvard but for years of the epistolary exchanges Merton loved. And—serendipity again (perhaps)— Merton decided to sit in on the first theory course offered by the young Talcott Parsons, just back from Europe and working through the ideas that would become The Structure of Social Action. The encounter with Parsons did not just inform his knowledge of European theory, but deepened his idea of sociology itself. Still, as he wrote later, “although much impressed by Parsons as a master-builder of sociological theory, I found myself departing from his mode of theorizing (as well as his mode of exposition).” Indeed, Merton was among the clearest and most careful prose stylists in sociology. He edited each essay over and again, and left behind added footnotes and revisions both large and small to a host of his writings. It was easy to imagine that he might have been a professional editor had he not been an academic.
Indeed it is easy to imagine the young Merton turning in any of several directions. His first articles, written as a graduate student and published in 1934- 35, addressed “Recent French Sociology,” “The Course of Arabian Intellectual Development, 700-1300 A.D.,” “Fluctuations in the Rate of Industrial Invention,” and “Science and Military Technique.” Ultimately, he wrote his first major study on Science, Technology, and Society in Seventeenth Century England (1938), and in the process helped to invent the sociology of science.
By the time he was 40, Merton was one of America’s most influential social scientists and had embarked on a lengthy career at Columbia University. He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and honored in a host of other ways. Since he had chosen sociology, he could not win a Nobel prize, of course, but his son did. And at 90, Merton the father would call on his son for help learning enough new mathematics to read exciting work by younger colleagues like Duncan Watts. He remained intellectually active until the end of his life, a witty and engaged presence at conferences, energetic in using email to stay in touch with an extraordinary range of contacts, and still writing.
Merton was perhaps the last of an extraordinary generation of sociologists whose work shaped the basic definition of the discipline in the mid-20th century. Along with Parsons, he helped make Emile Durkheim’s notion of functional analysis central to the field—though Merton preferred to speak of “structural functional analysis” and tried to avoid reduction of an approach to an orthodoxy or “ism.” Merton eschewed the building of grand theoretical systems in favor of what he called “middle-range theories” designed to guide empirical inquiry. He made famous the distinction of “manifest” from “latent” functions, denied that social cohesion could be assumed as ‘normal,’ and gave analysis of social conflict more attention than did Parsons, though not enough to escape the widespread criticism of functionalism that started in the 1960s.
A crucial argument of Merton’s early work was that science is misunderstood as the product of individual geniuses able to break free from conventions and norms. Instead, he stressed the “ethos of science,” the normative structure specific to the field that encouraged productivity, critical thinking, and pursuit of continually improved understanding. He was not always happy when students left the Mertonian fold in their efforts to push sociology forward, but he did always recognize that this was how science worked.
Sociology of science remained the field closest to Merton’s heart. But his contributions also deeply shaped the later development of such disparate fields of study as bureaucracy, deviance, communications, social psychology, social stratification, and indeed social structure itself. Indeed, his work was pivotal to the emergence of some of these as subfields. In the course of his simultaneously theoretical and empirical analyses, Merton coined such now common phrases as “self-fulfilling prophecy,” and “role model.”
Somewhat surprisingly for a theorist, Merton was also one of the pioneers of modern policy research. He studied an integrated housing project, did a case study of the use of social research by the AT&T Corporation, and analyzed medical education. Most famously, working with his Columbia colleague Paul Lazarsfeld and a range of students and colleagues, he carried out studies of propaganda and mass communications during World War II and wrote the classic, Mass Persuasion (1946).
Merton and Lazarsfeld formed an enormously productive partnership, training generations of students and developing a program of theoretically informed but empirically rigorous research. Though Lazarsfeld was generally considered the methodologist of the pair, Merton also innovated in research methods, developing (with Marjorie Fiske and Patricia Kendall) the “focused group interview” that gave rise to the now-ubiquitous focus groups of political and market research. As Merton later remarked, focus groups are no replacement for surveys based on representative samples. Still, he said, he wished he could be paid a royalty fee whenever the technique was used.
Merton’s writings were not only broad ranging but extraordinarily influential. Their influence can be attributed to the fact that, in addition to having the virtues of clarity and sheer intellectual creativity, his writings were addressed to working sociologists, providing an interpretation of the craft and tools for its improvement. They were the ideal teaching tools for graduate students. While Merton wrote several important books, the extended essay was his chosen form and his classic book, Social Theory and Social Structure (originally published in 1949 and revised and expanded in 1957 and 1968) is a collection of some of his best. He worked hard to give each a precise organization, often offering a classificatory scheme to assist readers in applying his conceptualizations to different empirical phenomena.
Merton not only coined but loved memorable phrases and the patterns of association and evocation in which they were passed on. One of his most famous books traces the phrase, “if I have seen farther it is by standing on the shoulders of giants,” through centuries of use. The phrase is most commonly associated with Sir Isaac Newton, though with the widespread success of On the Shoulders of Giants (1965), Merton must be a very close second. What Merton showed with dazzling erudition and more than a few entertaining digressions was that the aphorism originated with Bernard of Chartres in the 12th century. This corrected not only those who cited merely Newton but those who credited the phrase to ancient authors, including apparently nonexistent ancient authors, perhaps thinking thereby to accord it greater dignity and impress readers with their Latin references (that South Philadelphia high school taught Merton four years of Latin).
Merton’s book became famous enough to be known (at least among initiates) by the acronym “OTSOG.” This was partly because it was so engagingly written, a scholarly detective story in the form of an epistolary novel (remember Merton’s early reading of Tristram Shandy). But it is also a serious inquiry into the phenomena of scholarly reference and citation, the development of reputations, and the place of science amid humane knowledge.
Merton continued to address the relationship between the first appearances of ideas and the occasions when they begin to have more serious influence, noting how many basic scientific advances were anticipated by “prediscoveries” that failed to change the way scientists thought. That in turn raised the question of why this should be, whether in any specific case it was because the “prediscoverer” lacked stature, or because the context wasn’t ready, because a crucial connection wasn’t made, or because an empirical or practical test wasn’t identified. The role of chance connections—serendipity—in scientific breakthroughs became another enduring focus for Merton’s boundless curiosity and careful scholarship. Though he recently allowed a manuscript on the topic to go to press, he did not regard it as finished and one suspects that on this, as was true of so many of his themes, he had countless more index cards squirreled away, footnotes waiting to be added.
Of course, as Merton showed, discoveries once well known could be forgotten, leading to rediscoveries, especially by the young. Some of Merton’s own work has itself been subject to partial eclipse and rediscovery, as for example the recent vogue for identifying causal ‘mechanisms’ that can function in explanations of disparate phenomena reproduces important aspects of his notion of middle-range theories.
Near the end of his life, Merton remarked on the oddity of living long enough to write contributions to the festschriften of so many of his students. The explanation was not mere longevity, of course, but the fact that he was extraordinarily influential as a teacher. As important as each was as an individual intellectual, both Merton and Lazarsfeld may have been even more important as mentors and animators of an intellectual community at Columbia—and indeed beyond, at the Social Science Research Council, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and the Russell Sage Foundation. Merton was a mentor to such disparate but important sociologists as Peter Blau, James Coleman, Lewis Coser, Rose Coser, Alvin Gouldner, Seymour Martin Lipset, Alice Rossi, and Arthur Stinchcombe. He was equally influential in social studies of science, which became increasingly interdisciplinary, with students including Steven and Jonathan Cole, Harriet Zuckerman, and Thomas Gieryn. In the work of all, one can see not only Merton’s specific ideas but the distinctive style of combining theory and research characteristic of Columbia sociology during his time there.
Robert Merton is survived by his wife and collaborator Harriet Zuckerman, by three children, nine grandchildren, and nine great-grandchildren—and by thousands of sociologists whose work is shaped every day by his.
