Max Weber’s Scientific Religion

Abstract

Sociology dates back to the dawn of science; yet contemporary sociology, whose founding fathers were Emile Durkheim, Max Weber and Georg Simmel, goes back only to the early twentieth century. The sociology of science is twenty, or at most thirty years old, though it was foreshadowed by Robert K. Merton’s doctoral dissertation of the thirties, in which he develops Weber’s view of science as Protestant and puritanical. Indeed, the oldest text repeatedly referred to in the literature of the sociology of science is Merton’s text on social science in general, of 1952. Philosophically, the empirical study of science ought to accord with our views of the rules of scientific method, since, just as the sociology of religion or of law or of prostitution offers the rules exercised by the practitioners of these ancient activities, so must the sociology of science do. This, indeed, is the minimal philosophic requirement; it seems that though the attempt by the empirical method to legitimize itself empirically begs the question, its failure to do so is suspect, to say the very least. It is therefore not surprising that a methodology backed by empirical sociology is taken more seriously than any other methodology. What is puzzling is that the fathers of modern sociology, though they laid stress on method, over which they sharply disagreed, contributed almost nothing to the sociology of science. Possibly they felt that their methodologies would be seriously threatened by sociological examination.