Merton & Barber - The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity

Robert K. Merton & Elinor Barber, The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity: A Study in Sociological Semantics and the Sociology of Science — written 1958; first published in Italian as Viaggi e avventure della serendipity, Bologna: il Mulino, 2002; first English edition, Princeton University Press, 2004.

A biography of a word. Merton and Barber trace serendipity from its coinage — Horace Walpole, in a 1754 letter, minting it from the fairy tale of The Three Princes of Serendip, whose heroes were “always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of” — as it drifts across two centuries and into the sciences, changing hands and meanings on the way. This is what they call sociological semantics: not what a word means, but how it travels.

The load-bearing half is and sagacity. Serendipity was never a synonym for luck; it is the accident plus the prepared mind that sees what the accident is worth. Merton had already given the idea a technical shape — the serendipity pattern in research: the unanticipated, anomalous, strategic datum that becomes the occasion for a new theory. It is the rigorous version of the misplaced manifesto’s “distraction is a method” — the reason that following an adjacency is method and not drift.

And then the book does the thing it is about. Drafted in 1958, it went unpublished for over forty years, surfacing at last — in Italian, ahead of its own English — and the English “original” had in places to be reconstructed from time-worn pages and back-translated from the Italian. A study of a word that wandered before finding a home, which itself wandered before finding a home. There is no better object for a lost and found: a study of unsought discovery that was, itself, long unsought. (For another word lost and sought across European culture, see Umberto Eco - The Search for the Perfect Language.)