In Merton's early work in the sociology of science three theses are identified: (1) economic and military influence in shaping early modern science; (2) the “Puritan spur” to scientific activity; (3) the critical role of a democratic social order for the support of science. These themes are located in the contemporary economic crisis of the 1930s, the rise of Nazism and fascism, and the emerging radical and Marxist political activism of scientists in the United States and the United Kingdom. Merton's interaction with this context is critical for understanding his choice of problems and issues for the nascent sociology of science. The enunciation of the four-part normative structure of science is closely identified with the political ideals of this context. Merton's transition from an interest in problems of science in society to his postwar concern with the social and organizational structures of science and the social behavior of scientists is framed against the anticommunist and anti-Marxist thrust of immediate postwar politics in the United States. The implications of this change for the paradigms of the sociology of science are noted.

On this occasion, 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 which took the shape in print of the monograph, Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth-Century England. 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.

Sorokin, Pitirim Alexandrovich, born January 21,1889, in the small village of Turia in Russia [died 1968]. Student at the Teachers' Seminary in the province of Kostroma in Russia (1903–6), at the evening school in St. Petersburg (1907–9), at the Psycho- Neurological Institute in St. Petersburg (1910–14); Magistrant of Criminal Law (1915); Ph.D in Sociology (1922); Privatdozent at the Psycho-Neurological Institute (1914–16), at the University of St. Petersburg (1916–17); Professor of Sociology at the same university (1919–22); Professor of Sociology at the Agricultural Academy (1919–22), at the University of Minnesota (1924–30); Chairman of the Department of Sociology at Harvard University from 1930. Member of the Executive Committee of the All-Russian Peasant's Soviet (1917); Secretary to the Prime Minister [ Kerensky ] (1917); member of the Russian Constitutional Assembly (1918); sentenced to death and finally exiled by the communist administration (1922); emigrated to the United States (1923), naturalized (1930). Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Sociological Association; honorary member of the International Institute of Sociology of the Czechoslovakian Academy for Agriculture, of the German Sociological Society, and of the Ukrainian Sociological Society; President of the International Institute for Sociology (1936–37). Member of the Greek-Orthodox Church.