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compare biceps with their bigger brothers. They, too, want to count. And when it becomes evident that they neither have the rugged physique nor pack the murderous wallop of their big brothers, some sociologists despair. They begin to ask: is a science of society really possible unless we institute a total system of sociology?” Although sympathetic, however, Merton cautioned that “this perspective ignores the fact that between twentieth century physics and twentieth century sociology stand billions of hours of sustained, disciplined, and cumulative research.” In physics, it was only after Copernicus and Brahe and a host of others had conducted centuries’ worth of painstaking observations that astronomers like Kepler sought out mathematical regularities that could account for the data they had inherited. And only then was a singular genius like Newton in a position to reduce these regularities to bona fide laws. By contrast, the social theorists Merton was describing had gone about it the other way around, proposing whole systems of thought at the outset and only then worrying about what it was that they needed to measure.4 “Perhaps,” Merton lamented, “sociology is not yet ready for its Einstein because it has not yet found its Kepler—to say nothing of its Newton, Laplace, Gibbs, Maxwell, or Planck.”5

Rather than questing after grand theories or universal laws of human behavior, therefore, Merton instead advocated that sociologists should focus on developing “theories of the middle range,” meaning theories that are broad enough to account for more than isolated phenomena but specific enough to say something concrete and useful. For example, the “theory of relative deprivation” states that people feel distressed by circumstances only inasmuch as their hardship exceeds that of the people around them. Thus if your house burns down in a freak fire, you’re devastated, but if your whole city is wiped out in an earthquake and hundreds of your neighbors die, you feel lucky to be alive. It’s not a completely general theory, claiming only to predict how people respond to adversity, but it also aims to apply to perceptions of adversity quite broadly. Likewise, the “theory of the role set” stresses that each individual plays not only multiple roles—a teacher at school, a father at home, a catcher on the weekend softball team—but also that each of these roles is itself a collection of relationships: between a teacher and his students, between him and his colleagues, and between him and his principal. Again, the theory is somewhat specific—saying nothing about markets or governments, or other important features of the social world—but also somewhat general, applying to people of all kinds.6

Merton’s call for middle-range theories is generally regarded as sensible, but it didn’t quell the ardor for theories of a grander nature. Barely a year after Merton published his critique, in fact, the economist John Harsanyi, who shared the 1994 Nobel memorial Prize in Economics for his work on game theory, proposed that rational choice theory—the theory of human decision making that I discussed in Chapter 2—was ready to provide precisely the kind of general theory that Merton has just concluded was wildly premature. And so another cycle began, with rational choice theorists drawing parallels between their efforts and Newtonian mechanics, while critics increasingly leveled the same complaints against it that the rational choice theorists themselves had made about the previous round of theories like Parsons’s.7 Nor has the growing realization that rational choice theory cannot provide a universal theory of human behavior any more than its predecessors could yet delivered social science from the green-eyed monster of physics envy.8 Quite to the contrary, if the complaint of my physicist colleague is anything to go by, even if sociologists have finally gotten tired of grand theories of everything, there is a whole generation of physicists waiting to step into the breach.9

When you think about the sheer complexity of human behavior, this approach to