ROBERT MERTON DIES AT 92

“Mr. Sociology” died recently.

 In fact, it was a cold February morning. For most, it was just another day, but the loss was huge to many in academia. On ABC news, a quick announcement was made by anchor Peter Jennings, Robert Merton died. That’s bad news on the doorstep.

Merton came into this world as a Jewish baby named Meyer Schkolnick. He lived in South Philly where his parents ENDURED  a living as blue-collar workers. Merton chose an Anglicized name to move into the Yankee dominated America of the 20’s and 30’s. At Harvard, he studied under Sorokin and Parsons.* The rest of his life he spent briefly at Tulane University and then remainder at Columbia University. There he rose to the very top of the field of sociology.

If you have ever used  “role model” “opinion leader” “focus group” “self-fulfilling prophesy” “unintended consequences” “peer group” those were Merton’s words.

With 20 books and 200 articles, many in the field read him and most college frosh were introduced to “Merton’s Paradigm.” That 5×2 table answered the question “what do people do in a winner take all society, where most are then considered losers?” His answer was that some conform, others retreat, some gracefully follow the rules; others turn to crime.  A few plan revolution. It was an amazingly simple table, but required numerous books and articles to explain. TIME magazine said that it appealed to 60’s Liberals, but most academics of any time period call that genius with a flair for parsimony. His paradigm applied both to groups and later Inciardi individualized it so that applications could be made at the personal level.

Merton lived at the top of the world when sociology was especially interesting and challenging. Professors enjoyed respect and taught wordy 50-minute lectures to mainly attentive students. The Vietnam War destroyed all that. By the 70’s Reason came under attack from the deconstructionist post-modern Left and the Social Darwin Right. Previously, professors had the prestige and the trust of their community( particularly if they could prove that they were not Communists.) At that time, there was also an inflated vision that things were getting better and in a trend-like trajectory would mean that happy days were ahead. Social problems could be “solved.”

By the 80’s and 90’s, the university was overwhelmed by number crunchers, cost cutters, and  academic “temps.” That last term means an army of adjuncts and grad-teaching assistant taught most of the courses to most of the students. Scholarship was replaced by grantsmanship. Whole committees of writers sharing articles to build their resumes to get more grants, to keep their jobs, replaced articles, once written by individuals. Many “phantom academics” rarely set foot in the classroom.

In a large university today, average undergrads still need a refresher course in basic composition. It appears that campuses have students with high self-esteem and low SAT’s. The top wage earner is not the president, but the winning football coach.

Merton did it all. He was the first sociologist to be invited to the National Academy of Sciences. He won a Guggenheim, Parson prize and National Medal of Sciences. He became the president of the American Sociological Society. He would have been a recipient of the Nobel, but it is not given to sociologists. The closest sociologist to get one also had significant credentials in economics (the Chicago school) in the person of Gary S.  Becker (1992.). However Merton’s son won the prize in 97’in economics.

My own interest in Merton came through my mentor Dr. George Helling of  “Windfall” in rural south Minnesota. He spent most his life at St. Olaf, but spent 10 years at the University of Nebraska-Omaha, rebuilding the department (that is where I met him.) After that was accomplished, he returned to St. Olaf in Northfield, Minnesota. Helling liked Merton. Helling was an extremely interesting and scholarly professor who highly valued Merton. Nearly every class that he taught had things that had Merton in them. That was not hard to do as Dr. Merton was a premiere sociologist from Columbia University who could make many everyday conundrums into simple but understandable paradigms that were useful to many in the field and outside of it.

In the fall of 1969, I attempted to cross Merton’s paradigm with the typologies of

Eric Hoffer’s TRUE BELIEVER. I discovered that I could not do so because Hoffer’s types were sloppy. Then 30 years later, I worked on Merton again. This time, I crossed the paradigm with the Uniform Crime Report and later portions of the DSM IV.

Merton saw my work in the literature and wrote for a copy. Although I walked around in a daze for a couple of days in shock that Mr. Sociology requested my work, I became centered and went to work sending everything that I had along with the paper. He wrote back with a reprint of a recent article where his paradigm was applied to all the 3 major theories of sociology. I was thrilled and told him so by letter and sent two articles, once they were published, to him.

I was saddened when he died. It was his generation in which sociology became important. Morton Gould wrote an excellent article about Robert in 1961 in the NEW YORKER. Sociology came into importance in the early 60’s and for a short while during the “War on Poverty” and then was tossed aside. Americans became interested in psychiatrist in the 50’s, sociologist in the 60’s, psychologists and psychotherapists in the 70’s (human potential movement) Evangelical Protestants ministers in the 80’s, and the 90’s up to now in CEO’s and Law Enforcement officials. Each had what was thought to be the magic bullet.

When I started teaching, my field was already “suspect”. Sociology was too new and not ready to deal with poverty. As you know, poverty won. Some sociology departments have been absorbed into other departments, but the field still remains viable and ready for the next Merton to inspire it.

Ironically, Merton’s last publication will be distributed later this year and deals with a topic that is particularly…Merton. It is called SERENDIPIDITY, and it is the story of how ideas surface. Merton’s writing style is very academic, elusive, and elegant. A number of insights and witty comments come in the footnotes. It is something now missing in academia.

Robert’s first wife died in 1992, and in that year, he married a second time to a prominent sociologist, Harriet Zuckerman. Merton had 2 children, and spent most of his life in Manhattan, the borough of New York City familiar to most Americans.

His passing ends the generation that saw the peak of sociology and all the cultural wars that surrounded it, here in the United States of America. America was good to Merton and some day will realize that he dearly repaid his country.

Sources:

________, TIME (2003) February 8, p. 16

________, uwp.edu/~fried008/merton/awards

Kaufman, Michael T. “Robert Merton, Versatile Sociologist and Father of Focus Group, Dies at 92” NEW YORK TIMES (2003) February 26, p. 1-3.

*It is unclear if Merton had trouble finishing his doctorate at Harvard under the powerful and politically connected Talcott Parsons. The Nation’s cover story in March 6, 1989, p.289-293 by J. Weiner suggests that Parsons was affiliated with government agencies that in migrated Nazi and Nazi sympathizers. Merton’s name change may have helped him “pass” for something other than a Jew.