Talcott Parsons
Encyclopedia
Talcott Parsons was an American sociologist who served on the faculty of Harvard University
from 1927 to 1973.
Parsons developed a general theory for the study of society called action theory
, based on the methodological principle of voluntarism
and the epistemological principle of analytical
realism
. The theory attempted to establish a balance between two major methodological traditions, that of the utilitarian-positivist tradition on the one hand and the hermeneutic-idealistic tradition on the other. For Parsons, voluntarism established a third alternative between these two. More than a theory of society, Parsons presented a theory of social evolution and a concrete interpretation of the "drives" and directions of world history.
Parsons analyzed the work of Émile Durkheim
and Vilfredo Pareto
and evaluated their contributions within the light of the paradigm of voluntaristic action. Parsons was also largely responsible for introducing and interpreting Max Weber
's work to American audiences. Although he was generally considered a major structuralist functionalist scholar, in an article late in life, Parsons explicitly wrote that the term "functional" or "structural functionalist" were inappropriate ways to describe the character of his theory. For Parsons "structural functionalism" was the term of a particular stage in the methodological development of the social science; it was never a name for any specific school or specific direction. "Functionalism" itself was a universal method and again not a name for any specific school. In the same way, the concept "grand theory" is a derogative term, which Parsons himself never used.
Talcoilton]] (1608–1674) scholar. Talcott Parsons father could be characterized as a liberal on both theological and socio-political issues. At the same time without any notion of orthodoxy, it was a family which mentally and intellectually tt Parsons was born 13 December 1902 in Colorado Springs
. Parsons was the son of Edward Smith Parsons (1863–1943) and Mary Augusta Ingersoll (1863–1949). His father had attended Yale Divinity School
and was ordained as a Congregationalist minister, serving first as a minister for a pioneer community in Greeley, Colorado
. At the time of Parsons' birth Edward S. Parsons was a professor in English at Colorado College
and vice-president of the college. He also became known as an accomplished ohn Milton|Mwas deeply embedded in its Puritan
and Calvinist
tradition and also had an active self-awareness of this fact. He also had a civil partnership with Josef Stalin which sparked much debate and eventually led to his assasination.
During his Congregational ministry in Greeley, Edward S. Parsons had become sympathetic to the social gospel movement yet at the same time, he tended to view this question from a higher theological position and he was hostile to socialism
as a sheer ideology. Also both Edward S. Parsons and his son Talcott would be familiar with the theology of Jonathan Edwards. The father would later become the president of Marietta College
in Ohio. Parsons' family is one of the oldest families in American history; his ancestors were some of the first to arrive from England in the first half of the seventeenth century. The family's heritage consisted of two separate and independently developed Parsons lines, which both went back to the early days of America and indeed deeper into British history. On the father's side the family could be traced back to the Parsons of York, Maine
. On the mother's side, the Ingersoll line was connected with Jonathan Edwards and from Edwards on there would be a new independent Parsons line because his eldest daughter Sarah married Elihu Parsons on June 11, 1750.
Studies: Amherst College
As an undergraduate, Parsons studied biology, sociology and philosophy at Amherst College
and received his B.A. in 1924. Amherst College had become the Parsons' family college by tradition; his father and his uncle Frank had attended it, as had his older brother. Initially Parsons was attracted to a career in medicine, inspired in this direction by his older brother Charles Edward Parsons, so he studied a great deal of biology and spent a summer working at the Oceanographic Institution
at Woods Hole, Massachusetts
.
Parsons' biology teachers while at Amherst were Otto Glaser and Henry Plough. Gently mocked as "Little Talcott, the gilded cherub", Parsons became one of the student leaders at Amherst. Parsons also took courses with Walton Hamilton and the philosopher Clarence Edwin Ayres
, both known as "institutional economists". They exposed him to literature by Thorstein Veblen
, John Dewey
, and William Graham Sumner
, among others. Parsons also took a course with George Brown in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant
, and a course in modern German philosophy with Otto Manthey-Zorn, who was a great Kant interpreter. Parsons showed from early on a great interest in the topic of philosophy
, which most likely was an echo of his father's great interest in theology
in the tradition of which he had been profoundly socialized, a position that contrasted with his teachers' vief
Studies: London School of Economics
After Amherst, he studied at the London School of Economics
for a year, where he was exposed to the work of R. H. Tawney
, Bronisław Malinowski, and Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse
. During his days at LSE he made friends with E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Meyer Fortes
and Raymonth Firth, who all participated in the Malinowski seminar and in addition, he made a close personal friendship with Arthur and Eveline Burns
.
While studying at LSE he met a young American girl in the students common room by the name of Helen Bancroft Walker whom he married on April 30, 1927. The couple had three children, Anne, Charles and Susan and eventually four grandchildren. Helen's father was born in Canada but had moved to the Boston area and had become a naturalized American citizen.
Studies: University of Heidelberg
Parsons went on to the University of Heidelberg
, where he received his Ph.D. in sociology and economics. During his time in Heidelberg, he worked with Alfred Weber
(Max Weber
's brother), Edgar Salin (who was his dissertation adviser) Emil Lederer, and Karl Mannheim
and in addition he was examined in Immanuel Kant's "Critique of pure Reason" by the philosopher Karl Jaspers
. At Heidelberg Parsons was also examed by Willy Andreas in the French Revolution. Parsons wrote his Dr. phil. thesis on The Concept of Capitalism in the Recent German Literature with his main focus on the work of Werner Sombart
and Max Weber
. It was clear from his discussion that he rejected Sombart's quasi-idealistic views and was in favor of Weber's attempt to strike a balance between "historicism
", "idealism
" and a Neo-Kantian approach.
The most crucial encounter for Parsons at Heidelberg was his encounter with the work of Max Weber
, who he never had heard about before he arrived. Weber became tremendously important for Parsons because given his upbringing with a liberal yet strongly religious father, the question of the role of culture and religion in the basic processes of world history had been a persistent puzzle in his mind. Weber was the first scholar who truly provided Parsons with a compelling theoretical "answer" to this question and Parsons became absorbed in the reading of Weber to the utmost extent.
Parsons decided among other things that he would like to translate Weber's work into English and approached Marianne Weber
, Max Weber's wife in this regard and he would eventually translate several of Weber's works into English. During his time in Heidelberg Parsons was invited by Marianne Weber to "sociological teas," which was study group meetings Marianne would held in the library room of her and Max Weber's old apartment. One scholar who Parsons met at Heidelberg who shared his enthusiasm for Weber was Alexander von Schelting and Parsons would later write a review article on von Schelting's work on Weber. Generally, Parsons would read extensively in religious literature and especially on works focusing on the sociology of religion. One scholar who especially became important for Parsons in this regard was Ernst D. Troeltsch (1865–1923). Parsons would also read very widely on the topic of Calvinism
and his reading would include the work of Emile Doumerque, Eugéne Choisy and Henri Hauser.
Instructor at Harvard Department of Economics, 1927
In 1927, after a year teaching at Amherst (1926–27), Parsons entered Harvard as an instructor in the Department of Economics, where he followed F.W. Taussig's lectures on Alfred Marshall
and became friend with the economist historian Edwin Gay, who was the founder of Harvard Business School
. Parsons also became a close associate of Joseph Schumpeter
and followed his course on "General Economics". Parsons was generally at odds with some of the trends in Harvard's Economics department which in those days went in a highly technical, mathematical direction, and Parsons looked for other options at Harvard and gave courses in "Social Ethics" and in the "Sociology of Religion." Although Parsons entered Harvard through the Economics Department, he never aimed at becoming an economist; all his activities and his basic intellectual interest propelled him toward Sociology
, although no Sociology Department existed in the first years at the time at Harvard. However, Harvard was in these years working toward establishing a Sociology Department and Parsons positioned himself in various ways through writing and teaching obligations so he was ready to join a Sociology Department, when it finally was established. In contrast to legend Parsons was never "forced" out of the Economics Department, his exit was voluntary and a deliberate decision.
Harvard's first Sociology Department, 1931
The chance for a shift to sociology
came in 1931, when Harvard's first Sociology Department was created under the Russian scholar Pitirim Sorokin
. Sorokin, who had fled the Russian Revolution and had emigrated from Russia to the United States in 1923, was given the opportunity to establish the department. Parsons became one of the new department's two instructors, along with Carl Joslyn. During this period Parsons established close ties with biochemist
and sociologist Lawrence Joseph Henderson
, who took personal interest in Parsons' career at Harvard. Parsons became part of L.J. Henderson's famous Vilfredo Pareto
study group in which some of the most important intellectuals at Harvard participated, including Crane Brinton
, George C. Homans
, and Charles P. Curtis. Parsons wrote an article on Pareto's theory and later explained that he had adopted the concept of "social system" from his reading of Pareto. Parsons also made strong connections with two other influential intellectuals with whom he corresponded for years; one was economist Frank H. Knight and the other was Chester I. Barnard, one of US's most dynamic business-men at the time. The relationship between Parsons and Sorokin quickly ran sour. A pattern of personal tensions was aggravated by Sorokin's deep dislike for American civilization, which he regarded as a sensate culture in decline. Sorokin's writings became increasingly anti-scientistic in his later years, widening the gulf between his work and Parsons', and turning the increasingly positivisitic American sociology community against him. Sorokin also tended to belittle all other sociology tendencies than his own writings and by 1934 the perception of Sorokin at Harvard had already turned quite negative.
Some of Parsons' students in the first years of the new department of Sociology were people like Robin William Jr., Robert K. Merton
, Kingsley Davis, Wilbert Moore, Edward C. Devereux, Logan Wilson, Nicholas Demereth, John Riley, Jr. and Mathilda White Riley. Later cohorts of students, included among others Harry Johnson, Bernard Barber, Marion Levy and Jesse R. Pitts
. Parsons established, at the students' request, a little informal study group which met year after year in Adams house. Toward the end of Parsons' career, the German systems theorist Niklas Luhmann
also attended his lectures.
In 1932 Parsons bought his famous farmhouse in New Hampshire
for $2.500. The farmhouse was located in a wooden area near the small town of Acworth
, although Parsons often in his writing referred to it as "the farmhouse in Alstead
." The farmhouse was not big and impressive; indeed, it was a very humble structure with almost no modern utilities. The farmhouse became central to Parsons' life, and many of his most important works were written in the peace and quiet at the farmhouse.
In the spring of 1933, Susan Kingsbury, a pioneer of women's rights in America, wrote to Parsons and offered him a position at Bryn Mawr
; however, Parsons declined the offer because, as he wrote to Kingsbury, "neither salary nor rank is really definitely above what I enjoy here."
In the academic year of 1939-40 Talcott Parsons and Joseph Schumpeter
conducted an informal faculty seminar at Harvard, which met in Emerson Hall and discussed the concept of rationality
. Among the participants in the seminary were D.V. McGranahan, Abram Bergson, Wassily Leontief
, Gottfried Haberler
, and Paul Sweezy
. Schumpeter contributed with the essay "Rationality in Economics" to the seminar, while Parsons submitted the paper "The Role of Rationality in Social Action" for a general discussion. Schumpeter suggested that he and Parsons write or edit a book together on the topic of rationality but the project never materialized.
Neoclassical economics versus institutionalists
In the prevailing discussion between neoclassical economics
and the institutionalists
, which was one of the conflicts that prevailed within the field of economics in the 1920s and early 1930s, Parsons attempted to walk a very fine line. He was basically very critical about neo-classical theory and this was an attitude that prevail all the way through his life and is reflected in his critique of Milton Friedman
and Gary Becker
. He was basically opposed to the utilitarian bias within the neo-classical approach not in the sense that he discredited everything they said but to the effect that he could not embrace them fully. However, he agreed generally (or at least up to a point) on their theoretical and methodological style of approach (which should be discriminated from its substance). For the same reasons (and for several other reasons in addition) he was unable to accept the institutionalist solution. In an interview late in life Parsons recalled his conversation with Joseph Schumpeter
about the institutionalist methodological position, the following way: "An economist like Schumpeter, by contrast, would absolutely have none of that. I remember talking to him about the problem and ... I think Schumpeter was right. If economics had gone that way [like the institutionalists] it would have had to become a primarily empirical discipline, largely descriptive, and without theoretical focus. That's the way the 'institutionalists' went, and of course Mitchell (Wesley Mitchell) was affiliated with that movement."
Revisit to Germany and fight against Nazism
Parsons revisited Germany in the summer of 1930 and became a direct eye-witness to the feverish atmosphere in Weimar Germany
during which the Nazi Party rose to power. In the following period Parsons received constant reports about the rise of Nazism
through his friend Edward Y. Hartshorne
who was travelling in Germany. Parsons began in the late 1930s to warn the American public about the Nazi threat; this was not an easy task since US in those days was predominantly isolationist.
One of the first articles Parsons wrote in this regard was entitled: "New Dark Age Seen If Nazis Should Win." Parsons became one of the key initiators of the Harvard Defense committee, an organization aimed at rallying the American public against the Nazis. Parsons' voice would sound again and again over Boston's local radio-stations as a part of this campaign. Parsons also spoke against Nazism during a dramatic meeting at Harvard campus which was disturbed by isolationist activists. To fight isolationism
in those days was a very difficult task since polls showed that 91 percent of the population was unwilling to go to war for the allied cause. Together with graduate student Charles O. Porter
, Parsons would rally graduate students at Harvard for the war effort. (Porter would later become a US Congressman for Oregon elected on a Democratic ticket). During the War Parsons conducted a special study group at Harvard, which analyzed the causes of Nazism and where leading experts on the topic participated.
1940s: The Second World War and the Harvard School of oversea administration
In the spring of 1941 a discussion group on Japan began to meet at Harvard. The group's five core members were Talcott Parsons, John K. Fairbank
, Edwin O. Reischauer
, William M. McGovern and Marion Levy, Jr.. A few others would also occasionally join the group including Ai-Li Sung (Ai-Li Sung Chin) and Edward Y. Hartshorne. The group rose out of a strong desire to understand Japan
whose power in the East had grown tremendously (while at the same time allied with Nazi Germany since November 1936) but as Levy frankly admit "Reischauer was the only one who knew anything about Japan." Parsons, however, was eager to learn more about Japan and was "concerned with general implications." Shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor
, Parsons wrote in a letter to Arthur Upham Pope (1881–1969) that the importance of studies of Japan certainly had intensified. During 1942 Parsons worked on arranging a major study of occupied countries together with Bartholomew Landheer of the Netherland Information Office (located in New York). Parsons had mobilized Georges Gurvitch, Conrad Arnsberg, Dr. Safranek and Theodore Abel to participate in these studies but this initiative never materialized because of lack of funding. In early 1942 Parsons approached Hartshorne, who had joined the Psychology Division of the Office of the Coordinator of Information (COI) in Washington, DC to interest his agency in the research project but without result. In February 1943, Parsons became the deputy director of Harvard School of Overseas administration, a school which educated administrators to "run" the occupied territories in Germany and the Pacific. The task of finding relevant literature on both Europe and Asia for the Harvard School of Oversea administration (ASOA) was mind-boggling and occupied a fair amount of Parsons' time. One scholar Parsons came to know in his period was Karl August Wittfogel
with whom he discussed Max Weber
and whom he asked to lecture at the ASOA. On the issue of China, which also was taught at the school, Parsons received fundamental information from Chinese scholar Ai-Li Sung Chin and her husband Robert Chin. Another Chinese scholar Parsons worked closely with during the ASOA period was Hsiao-Tung Fei (also written: Fei Xiaotong) (1910–2005) who had studied at the London School of Economics and who was an expert on the social structure of the Chinese village.
1940s: Intellectual exchange with Schutz, Vögelin, Dodd and other debates
Parsons met Alfred Schutz
(Schütz) during the rationality seminar, which he conducted jointly together with Joseph Schumpeter at Harvard in the spring of 1940. Schutz has been close to Edmund Husserl
and was deeply embedded in his phenomenological philosophy. Schutz who had been born in Vienna and had moved to the US in 1939, had for years worked on the project of developing a phenomenological sociology
primarily based on an attempt to find some fixpoint between Husserl's method and Weber's sociology. Parsons had asked Schutz to give a presentation at the rationality seminar, which he did on April 13, 1940 and Parsons and Schutz had lunched together afterward. Schutz was fascinated with Parsons theory, which he regarded as the state of the art of social theory and he had written an evaluation of Parsons' theory which he kindly asked Parsons to comment on. This led to a short but intensive correspondence, which generally revealed that the gap between Schutz's sociologized phenomenology and Parsons concept of voluntaristic action was far too great. From Parsons' point of view Schutz's position was too speculative and subjectivist of nature and he felt that Schutz was essentially a philosopher, who tended to reduce social processes to the articulation of a Lebenswelt consciousness, while for Parsons the defining edge of human life was action as a catalyst for historical change. For Parsons it was essential that sociology as a science should pay strong attention to the subjective element of action but it should never become completely absorbed in it, since the purpose of a science was to explain causal relationships, whether by covering laws or by other types of explanatory devices. Schutz's basic argument was that sociology cannot ground itself and that epistemology was not a luxury but a necessity for the social scientist. Parsons agreed but stressed the pragmatic need to demarcate science and philosophy and insisted moreover that the grounding of a conceptual scheme for empirical theory construction cannot aim at absolute solutions but need to take a sensible stock-taking of the epistemological balance at each point in time. However, there is no doubt that the two men shared many basic assumptions about the nature of social theory, which have made the debate simmering ever since. By request from Mrs. Ilse Schutz, after her husband's death, Parsons gave on July 23, 1971 permission to the publication of the correspondence between him and Schutz. Parsons also wrote "A 1974 Retrospective Perspective" to the correspondence, where he characterized his own position as a "Kantian point of view" and still found that Schutz strong dependence of Husserl's "phenomenological reduction" would make it very difficult to reach the kind of "conceptual scheme," which Parsons found essential for theory building in the social sciences.
Between 1940 and 1943, Parsons and Eric Voegelin
(Vögelin) (1901–1985) exchanged their intellectual views through correspondence. Parsons had probably met Voegelin during 1938-39 when Voegelin held a temporary instructor appointment at Harvard. The bouncing point for their conversation was Parsons´' manuscript on anti-Semitism and other materials Parsons had sent to Voegelin. The discussion touched on the nature of capitalism
, the rise of the West and the origin of Nazism
. The key to this discussion was the implication of Max Weber's interpretation of the Protestant ethics and the impact of Calvinism
on modern history. Although the two scholars agree on many fundamental characteristics about Calvinism, their understanding of its historical impact was quite different. Generally, Voegelin regarded Calvinism as essentially a dangerous totalitarian ideology
; Parsons argued that these features of Calvinism
was temporary and that the functional implications of its long-term, emerging value-system had revolutionary and by no means simply "negative" impact on the general rise of the institutions of modernity. The two scholars also discussed Parsons' debate with Alfred Schutz
(Schütz) and especially why Parsons had ended his encounter with Schutz. Parsons found that Schutz rather than attempting to build social science theory tended to get consumed in philosophical detours. In this regard Parsons wrote to Voegelin: "Possibly one of my troubles in my discussion with Schuetz lies in the fact that by cultural heritage I am a Calvinist. I do not want to be a philosopher – I shy away from the philosophical problems underlying my scientific work. By the same token I don't think he wants to be a scientist as I understand the term until he has settled all the underlying philosophical difficulties. If the physicists of the 17th century had been Schuetzes there might well have been no Newtonian system."
In 1942, Stuart C. Dodd
published a major work called Dimensions of society, which attempted to build a general theory of society on the foundation of a mathematical and quantitative systematization of the Social Sciences. Especially, Dodd advanced a particular approach known as a "S-theory." Parsons discussed Dodd's theoretical outline in a review article the same year. Parsons acknowledge Dodd's contribution to be an exceedingly formidable work but at the same time he argued against its premises as a general paradigm for the social sciences
. Parsons generally argued that Dodd's "S-theory," which included the socalled "social distance" scheme of Bogardus, was unable to construct a sufficiently sensitive and systematized theoretical matrix, compared with the "traditional" approach, which has developed around the lines of Max Weber
, Vilfredo Pareto
, Émile Durkheim, Sigmund Freud
, William Isaac Thomas
, and other important agents of an action-system approach with a more clear dialogue with the cultural and motivational dimensions of human interaction.
In April 1944, Parsons participated in the conference "On Germany after the war," which was a conference of psychoanalytical oriented psychiatrists and a few social scientists with the aim of analyzing the causes of Nazism
and to discuss the principles for the coming occupation. During the conference Parsons opposed what he found to be Dr. Lawrence S. Kubie's reductionism. Dr. Lawrence S. Kubie was a psychoanalyst who strongly argued that the German national character was completely "destructive" and that it would be necessary for a special agency of the United Nation to control the German educational system directly. Parsons and many others at the conference were strongly opposed to Dr. Kubie's idea. Parsons argued that such an enterprise certainly would fail and he suggested that Dr. Kubie was viewing the question of German's reorientation "too exclusively in psychiatric terms." Parsons was also against the Morgenthau plan
, which was aired in September 1944. After the conference Parsons wrote an article called, "The Problem of Controlled Institutional Change," which essential was designed as an argument against the Morgenthau plan. Parsons participated as part-time adviser to the Foreign Economic Administration Agency between March and October 1945, where he participated in discussions about reparations and deindustrialization practices after the war. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
in 1945.
Parsons takes charge at Harvard
Parsons situation at Harvard University changed significantly in early 1944 when he received a good offer from Northwestern University
. Harvard reacted to the offer from Northwestern by appointing Parsons as the chairman of the department, promoting him to the rank of full professor and accepting the process of reorganization, which could lead to the establishment of the new department of Social Relations. Parsons letter to Dean Paul Buck of April 3, 1944 reveals the high point of this moment. Because of the new development at Harvard Parsons chose to decline an offer from William Langer
about joining the O.S.S. (Office of Strategic Services
). The assignment Langer proposed for Parsons was that Parsons should follow the American army in its march into Germany and function as a political adviser to the administration of the occupied territories. Late in 1944 under the auspices of the Cambridge Community Council Parsons directed a project together with Elizabeth Schlesinger, which investigated ethnic and racial tensions in the Boston
area with students from Radcliffe College
and Wellesley College in the role as interviewers. This study was a reaction to the upsurge of antisemitism in the Boston area, which began in late 1943 and continued into 1944. At the end of November 1946, the Social Research Council (SSRC) officially asked Parsons to write a comprehensive report of the topic of how the social sciences could contribute to the understanding of the modern world. The background was a controversy over whether the social sciences should be incorporated into the National Science Foundation. Parsons' report in form of a large memorandum called Social Science: A Basic National Resource became available in July 1948 and remains a powerful historical statement about how Talcott Parsons saw the role of the modern Social Sciences
.
The Russian Research Center at Harvard
Parsons became a member of the Executive Committee of the newly established Russian Research Center at Harvard in 1948, which had Parsons' close friend and colleague, Clyde Kluckhohn
, as its director. Parsons went to Allied-occupied Germany in the summer of 1948 where he functioned as a contact person on behalf of RRC who was interested in the Russian refugees who had been stranded in Germany. Among the people Parsons happened to interview while in Germany were a few members of the Vlasov movement, which was an anti-Stalinist Russian Liberation Movement
who had collaborated with the Germans during the war. The movement was named after Andrey Vlasov
who was a brilliant Russian general captured by the Germans in June 1942. The Vlasov movement's ideology was a hybrid of elements but has been called "communism without Stalin" although in the Prague Manifesto
(1944) the Vlasovs moved toward the framework of a constitutional liberal state. While in Germany that summer of 1948 Parsons wrote several letters to Kluckhohn reporting on his intelligence-investigations.
Against Communism
Parsons' fight against Communism
was a natural extension of his fight against fascism
in the 1930s and 1940s. For Parsons, communism and fascism were two aspects of the same problem; they both represented what Parsons in his discussion in his article "A Tentative Outline of American Values" (posthum, 1989) called collectivistic types of "empirical finalism," which he believed was a secular "mirror" of religious types of "salvationalism." In contrast, Parsons highlighted that American values generally was based on the principle of "instrumental activism," which he believed was the outcome of Puritanism as a historical process. It representing what Parsons called "worldly asceticism
" and in that capacity, it represented the absolute opposite principle of empirical finalism. It is also in this light one shall understand Parsons' statement late in life that the greatest threat to Mankind was that of "fundamentalism
" in whatever form. By the term "empirical finalism" Parsons implied the type of claim assessed by cultural and ideological actors about the correct or "final" ends of particular patterns of value-orientation in the actual historical world (such as the notion of "a truly just society") which was absolutist and "indisputable" in its manner of declaration and in its function as a belief system. For example, the Jacobins behavior during the French Revolution would be a typical example of "empirical finalism." Parsons' rejection of communist and fascist totalitarianism was both theoretically and intellectually an integral part of his theory of world history, where Parsons tended to regard the European Reformation as the most crucial event in "modern" world history and where he like Max Weber tended to highlight the crucial impact of Calvinist religiosity in the socio-political and socio-economic processes, which followed; this development Parsons maintained reached its most radical form in England during the seventeenth century and gave in effect birth to the special cultural mode, which has characterized the American (United States) value-system and history ever since. Although it was not intended, the Calvinist faith-system, though authoritarian in the beginning, released in its long-term institutional effects a fundamental democratic revolution in the world; a revolution Parsons maintained was steadily unfolding as a part of the interpenetration of Puritan values in the world at large.
American exceptionalism
Parsons defended the notion of American exceptionalism
, and argued that because of a variety of historical circumstances, the impact of the Reformation
had reached a certain intensity in the history of Great Britain. Puritan, essentially Calvinist value-patterns had become institutionalized within the internal situation there. The outcome was that Puritan radicalism was reflected in the religious radicalism of the Puritan sects, in the poetry of John Milton
, in the English Civil War
and in the process coming to a head in the Glorious Revolution
of 1688. It was the radical fling of Puritan revolution which provided settlers in early seventeenth colonial America
, and the Puritans who settled in America represented the radical wing with regard to ideals of individuality, egalitarianism
, skepticism toward state power and the zeal of the religious calling. These settlers established something unique in the world, under the religious zeal of Calvinist values.
Therefore a new kind of nation was born, the character of which became clear by the time of the American Revolution
and in the American constitution
of 1787, and the dynamics of which later was studied by Alexis de Tocqueville
. The French Revolution
was an attempt to copy the American model, but it was essentially a process that failed. Although America has changed in its social composition since 1787, it preserves, Parsons maintained, the basic revolutionary Calvinist value-pattern. This development has been further revealed in the pluralist and highly individualized America with its thick, network-oriented civil society
, which is of crucial importance to America's success, and these factors have provided the United States with its historical lead in the industrialized process.
This momentum, Parsons maintained, has continued to place the United States in the leading position in the world, but as a historical process and not in "the nature of things". As Parsons argued, the "highly special feature of the modern Western social world, dependent on the peculiar circumstances of its history, and not the necessary universal result of social development as a whole."
Defender of Modernity
In contrast to many "radicals," Parsons was a defender of modernity, he believed that modern civilization with its technology and its constantly evolving institutions was ultimately strong, vibrant and essentially progressive. He acknowledged that the future of Mankind had no inherent guarantees, yet at the same time as Robert J. Holton and Bryan S. Turner
have said: Parsons was not nostalgic; he did not believe in the past as a lost "golden age" rather he maintained that modernity generally had improved the conditions of Man although often in troublesome and painful ways, yet in sum mankind's condition has generally progressed. In this way he had faith in Man, not naively but still believing in human beings potentials. When asked at the Brown seminary in 1973, whether he was optimistic about the future, he answered, "Oh, I think I'm basically optimistic about the human prospects in the long run." Parsons pointed out that he was student at Heidelberg
at the height of the vogue of Oswald Spengler
, the author of Der Untergang des Abenlandes "and he didn't give the West more than 50 years of continuing vitality after the time he wrote ... Well, its more than 50 years later now, and I don't think the West has just simply declined. He was wrong in thinking it was the end."
Harvard Department of Social Relations, 1946
At Harvard, Parsons was instrumental in forming the Department of Social Relations
, an interdisciplinary venture among sociology, anthropology, and psychology. The new department was officially created in January 1946 with Talcott Parsons as the chairman and with prominent figures at the faculty such as Samuel Stouffer, Clyde Kluckhohn
, Henry Murray
and Gordon Allport
. An appointment for Hartshorne was considered but came to a bloody end, when Hartshorne was killed in Germany by an unknown gunman while driving on the highway. His position went instead to George C. Homans
. The new department was galvanized by Parsons' idea of creating a theoretical and institutional base for a unified social science. During this period Parsons also became strongly interested in systems theory and cybernetics and began to adopt their basic ideas and concepts to the realm of social science, especially the work of Norbert Wiener
(1894–1964) had his attention.
Some of the students who arrived at the Department of Social Relations in the years after the Second World War were: David Aberle, Gardner Lindzey, Harold Garfinkel
, Benton Johnson, Marian Johnson, Naspar Naegele, James Olds, Albert Cohen, Norman Birnbaum, Jackson Toby, Robert Bellah, Joseph Kahl, Joseph Berger, Morris Zelditch, Renee Fox
, Tom O'Dea, Ezra Vogel
, Clifford Geertz
, Joseph Elder, Theodore Mills, Mark Field and Francis Sutton. Renee Fox
, who arrived at Harvard in 1949, would become a very close, personal friend of the Parsons family. Joseph Berger, who also arrived at Harvard in 1949, after finishing his B.A. from Brooklyn College
, would become Parsons' research assistant in the year 1952-53 and would get involved in Parsons' research projects with Robert F. Bales.
According to Parsons' own account, it was during his conversations with Elton Mayo
(1880–1949) that he realized it was necessary for him to take a serious look at the work of Freud. In the fall of 1938 Parsons began to offer a series of non-credit evening courses on Sigmund Freud
. As time passed, Parsons developed a strong interest in psychoanalysis
. He volunteered to participate in non-therapeutic training at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute, where he began a didactic analysis with Dr. Grete Bibring in September 1946. Insight into psychoanalysis is significantly reflected in his later work, especially reflected in The Social System and in his general writing on psychological issues and on the theory of socialization. This influence was also to some extent apparent in his empirical analysis of fascism during the war. Beside the work of Freud, also Wolgang Koehler's study of the mentality of apes and Kurt Koffka
's ideas of Gestalt Psychology
had Parsons attention.
The Social System and Toward a General Theory of Action
During the late 1940s and early 1950s Parsons worked very hard on producing some major theoretical statements. In 1951 Parsons published two major theoretical works, The Social System and Toward a General Theory of Action. The latter work which was coauthored with Edward Tolman, Edward Shils and several others, was the outcome of the so-called Carnegie Seminar, which had taken place in the period of September 1949 and January 1950. The Social System represented Parsons first major attempt to present his basic outline of a general theory of society, since The Structure of Social Action (1937) can be regarded as the work, where he discussed the basic methodological and meta-theoretical principles for such a theory. The Social system attempted to present a general social system theory build systematically from it most basic premises and hence, it featured the idea of an interaction situation based on need-dispositions and facilitated through the basic concepts of cognitive, cathectic and evaluative orientation. By the same token the work also became known for the place, where Parsons introduced his famous pattern variables, which in reality represented choices distributed along a Gemeinschaft versus Gesellschaft axis. However, the way Parsons' thought about the outline of the social system went through a rapid series of re-editing processes in the follow years although the basic core remained. During the early 1950s the idea of the AGIL model took stepwise place in Parsons mind. According to Parsons the key idea to the AGIL scheme was sparked during Parsons' work with Robert F. Bales on the study of motivational processes in small groups. Parsons carried this idea into the major work he coauthored with his student Neil Smelser
, which was published in 1956 with the title Economy and Society, where the first rudimentary model of the AGIL scheme was presented. The AGIL scheme reorganized the basic concepts of the pattern variables in a new way and presented the solution within a system-theoretical approach using the idea of a cybernetic hierarchy as an organizing principle. The real innovation in the AGIL model was the concept of the "latent function" or the pattern maintenance function, which became the crucial key to the whole cybernetic hierarchy.
During this theoretical development Parsons showed a persistent interest in symbol
ism. An important statement in this regard was Parsons' article "The theory of symbolism in relation to action." This article was stimulated by a series of informal discussion group meetings, which Parsons and several other colleagues in the spring of 1951 had conducted with philosopher and semiotician Charles W. Morris
. Parsons interest in symbolism went hand in hand with his interest in Freud's theory and the paper "The Superego and the Theory of Social Systems," written in May, 1951, for the meeting of the American Psychiatric Association can be regarded as a main statement of his own Freud interpretation but also as a statement how Parsons try to use Freud's pattern of symbolization as a way to structure the theory of social system and eventually a way in which to codify the cybernetic hierarchy of the AGIL system within the parameter of a system of symbolic differentiation. His discussion of Sigmund Freud
also contains several layers of criticism, which reveal that Parsons use of Freud is selective rather than orthodox. Especially he highlights in his critique of Freud that "Freud introduced an unreal separation between the superego and the ego."
Subscriber to system-theory, early 1950s
Parsons was an early subscriber to system-theory. Parsons had from early on been fascinated by the writing of Walter B. Cannon and his concept of homeostasis, as well as of the writings of French physiologist Claude Bernard
. His interest in system-theory had been further stimulated through his contract with L.J. Henderson. Parsons called the concept of "system" for an indispensable master concept in the work of building theoretical paradigms for the social sciences. From 1952 to 1957 Parsons participated in an ongoing Conference on System Theory under the chairmanship of Dr. Roy Grinker in Chicago. During these conferences Parsons came into contact with several prominent intellectuals of the time and he was particularly impressed by the ideas of social insect biologist Alfred Emerson. Parsons was especially compelled by Emerson's idea that in the sociocultural world, the functional equivalent of the gene was that of the "symbol." Parsons also participated in two of the meetings of the famous Macy conferences
on system theory (and on issues which today is classified as cognitive science
), which took place in New York in the period from 1946–1953 and include scientists like John von Neumann
. Parsons read widely in system theory at the time and read especially some of the works by Norbert Wiener
and William Ross Ashby
who also were part of the core participants in the Macy Conferences. Around the same time Parsons also benefited from conversations with political scientist Karl Deutsch
over the concept of system theory. In one conference, the Fourth Conference of the problems of consciousness
, taking place in March 1953 at Princeton and sponsored by the Macy Foundation, Parsons would give a presentation on "Conscious and Symbolic Processes" and embark in an intensive group discussion which included exchange with child psychologist Jean Piaget
. Among the other participants in the Conference were Mary A.B. Brazier, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann
, Nathaniel Kleitman
, Margaret Mead
and Gregory Zilboorg
. During the Conference Parsons would defend the thesis that consciousness
was essentially a social action phenomenon and not primarily a "biological" one. During the conference Parsons criticized Jean Piaget
for not sufficiently separating cultural factors from a physiologistic concept of "energy."
The McCarthy era, 1952
During the McCarthy era, on April 1, 1952, J. Edgar Hoover
received a personal letter from an informant who reported on Communist activities at Harvard. During a later interview the informant claimed that "Professor Talcott Parsons ... was probably the leader of an inner group" of Communist sympathizers at Harvard. The informant reported that the old department under Sorokin had been conservative and consisted of "loyal Americans of good character," but that the new department of Social Relation had turned into a decisive left wing place as a result of "Parsons' manipulations and machinations." Based on this evidence Hoover granted on October 27, 1952, Boston FBI authorization to initiate a security-type investigation on Parsons. In February 1954, Parsons' colleague Samuel Stouffer wrote to Parsons, who was located in England and informed him that he, Stouffer, had been denied access to classified documents and a part of the stated reason was that Stouffer knew Communists, including Talcott Parsons "who was a member of the Communist Party." Parsons immediately wrote a sworn affidavit in defense of Stouffer, where he also defended himself against the charges. In the affidavit Parsons wrote, "This allegation is so preposterous that I cannot understand how any reasonable person could come to the conclusion that I was a member of the Communist Party or ever had been." In a personal letter to Stouffer, Parsons wrote, "I will fight for you against this evil with everything there is in me: I am in it with you to the death." The charges against Parsons resulted in Parsons being unable to participate in a UNESCO conference and it was not until January 1955 that he was acquitted of the charges.
Since the late 1930s Parsons had continued to show great interest in psychology
and in psychoanalysis
. In the academic year of 1955-56, he taught a seminar at Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute
entitled "Sociology and Psychoanalysis." In 1956, he published a major work entitled Family, Socialization and Interaction Process which explored the way in which psychology (and psychoanalysis) bounce into the theories of motivation
and socialization
, as well into the question of kinship, which for Parsons established the fundamental axis for that subsystem he later would call "the social community." This work contained articles written by Parsons alone as well as articles written in collaboration with Robert F. Bales, James Olds
, Morris Zelditch, Jr., and Philip E. Slater. The work included a theory of personality
as well as studies of role-differentiation. The strongest intellectual stimuli in this period, Parsons most likely got from brain-researcher James Olds
, who was one of the founders of neuroscience
and Olds' book from 1955 on the question of learning and motivation is strongly influenced from his conversations with Parsons. Some of the ideas in the book Parsons had submitted in an intellectual brain-storm in an informal "work group," which he had organized which consisted in part of Joseph Berger, William Caudill, Frank E. Jones, Kaspar D. Naegele, Theodore M. Mills and Bengt G. Rundblad. In addition professor Albert J. Reiss from the Vanderbilt University had submitted his critical commentary. During the mid-1950s, Parsons also had extensive discussions with Olds about the motivational structure of psychosomatic problems and Parsons' concept of psychosomatic problems at the time was strongly influence by readings and direct conversations with Franz Alexander
(a psychoanalyst (originally associated with Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute) who was a pioneer of psychosomatic medicine), Roy Grinker and John Spiegel.
In 1955, Francois Bourricaud was preparing a reader of some of Parsons work for a French audience and Parsons who wrote a preface for the book called "Au lecteur francais", also went over Bourricaud's introduction very carefully. In his correspondence with Bourricaud, Parsons insisted that he did not necessarily treat values as the only let alone "the primary empirical reference point" of the action system, since so many other factors was involved in the actual historical pattern of an action situation.
Center of Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, 1957-58
Parsons spent the year 1957-58 at the center of Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto, California
where he, for the first time in his life, met Kenneth Burke
whose flamboyant, explosive temperament made a great impression on Parsons. The two men became close friends. Parsons explained in a letter the impression Burke had left on him: "The big thing to me is that Burke more than anyone else has helped me to fill a major gap in my own theoretical interests, in the field of the analysis of expressive symbolism."
Another scholar Parsons met while at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Bahvioral Sciences at Palo Alto was Alfred L. Kroeber
who at the time was the "dean of American anthropologists." Kroeber who had received his Ph.D. at Columbia and who had worked with the Arapaho Indians, was about 81 years old when he met Parsons. Parsons had the greatest admiration of Kroeber and called him "my favorite elder statesman." While in Palo Alto, Kroeber suggested to Parsons that they wrote a joint statement together, which purpose it was to clarify the distinction between cultural and social systems, which in those day was the subject of endless debates. In October 1958, Parsons and Kroeber published their joint statement in a small article, which became highly influential. Parsons and Kroeber declared in the article that it was important to keep a clear distinction between the two concepts and to avoid a methodology by which the one would be reduced to the other.
Discussion of Parsons' writings, late 1950s
During the academic year of 1955-56, a group of faculty members at Cornell University
met regularly and discussed Parsons' writings. In the next academic year a series of seven widely attended public seminars followed culminating in a session at which Parsons himself answered his critics. The discussions in these seminars was summed up in a joined publication edited by Max Black entitled The Social Theories of Talcott Parsons: A Critical Examination and included an essay by Parsons called "The point of view of the author." The scholars included in the volume were Edward C. Devereux, Jr., Robin M. Williams, Jr., Chandler Morse, Alfred L. Baldwin, Urie Bronfenbrenner
, Henry A. Landsberger, William Foote Whyte
, Max Black
and Andrew Hacker. The contributions converted many angles including personality theory, organizational theory and various methodological discussions. Parsons' essay is particularly notable because it, together with another essay published in 1960 and called "Pattern Variables Revisited," represents one of the most full-scale account of the basic elements of his theoretical strategy and the general principles behind his approach to theory building. The essay also included although in meta-theoretical terms a criticism of the theoretical foundations for the so-called "conflict theory
".
Starting from the late 1950s and culminating during the student rebellion in the 1960s and its aftermath, Parsons' theory was relentlessly attacked from scholars and intellectuals of the left. A massive campaign took form in which Parsons' theory through various channels of criticism was cried out to be
The first manifestations of this branch of criticism would be intellectuals like Lewis Coser, Ralf Dahrendorf
, David Lockwood, John Rex, C.W. Mills, Tom Bottomore and Alvin Gouldner among other.
Early 1960s
Parsons voted for John F. Kennedy
on November 8, 1960; since 1923 with one exception Parsons would vote for Democrats all his life. He discussed the Kennedy election widely in his correspondence at the time. Parsons was especially interested in the symbolic implications involved in the fact of Kennedy's Catholic background for the implications for United States as an integral community. (It was the first time a Catholic became President of the United States). In a letter to Robert Bellah, he wrote: "I am sure you have been greatly intrigued by the involvement of the religious issue in our election." Parsons who described himself as a "Stevenson Democrat," was especially enthusiastic about that his favored politician Adlai Stevenson had been appointed Ambassador to the United Nation. Parsons had persistently voted for Stevenson in both of the years he had run for election and was greatly disappointed that Stevenson twice was rejected by the American voters.
In the early 1960s it became obvious that Parsons' ideas had a great impact on much of the theories of modernization
at the time. His influence was very extensive yet at the same time the concrete adoption of his theory was often quite selective, half-hearted, superficial and at times utterly confused. In this way, many of the modernization theorists never used the full power of Parsons theory but concentrated on some formalist formula, which often was taken out of context with the deeper meaning by which Parsons originally had introduced them. Nonetheless, works such as Gabriel A. Almond and James S. Coleman, The Politics of the Developing Areas, as well as works by Karl W. Deutsch, S.N. Eisenstadt, Seymour Martin Lipset
, Samuel Huntington
, David E. Apter, Lucian W. Pye, Sidney Verba
and Chalmer Johnson among others were was importantly influenced by Talcott Parsons in some way or another. Indeed, it was the intensive influence of Parsons ideas in Political Sociology, which originally made a scholar like William Buxton interested in Parsons work. In addition, a scholar like David Easton
would claim that in the history of Political Science, the two scholars who had made any serious attempt to construct a general theory for Political Science on the issue of political support were was himself and Talcott Parsons.
One of the scholars Parsons corresponded extensively with during his lifetime and whose opinion he highly valued was Robert N. Bellah
. Parsons' discussion with Bellah would cover a wide range of topics including the theology of Paul Tillich
. The correspondence would continue when Bellah in the early fall of 1960 went to Japan in order to study Japanese religion and ideology. In August 1960, Parsons sent Bellah a draft of his paper on "The Religious Background of the American Value System" and ask for his commentary. In a letter to Bellah of September 30, 1960, Parsons discussed his reading of Perry Miller
's An Errand into the Wilderness. Parsons wrote that Miller's discussion of the role of Calvinism
"in the early New England theology
... is a first rate and fit beautifully with the broad position I have taken." Perry Miller
(1905–1963) was a literary Harvard historian whose books such as The New England Mind established new standards for the writing of American cultural and religious history. Miller remain one of Parsons most favoured historians throughout his life. Indeed, religion
had always a special place in Parsons heart, although his son in an interview maintained that he didn't really think that his father was "religious." Throughout his life Parsons interacted with a broad range of intellectuals and others who took a deep interest in religious belief systems, doctrines and institutions. One notable person among these people who Parsons interacted with in this regard was Maria Augusta Neal who was a Catholic sister of Notre Dame de Namur, who would send Parsons countless of her manuscripts and invite him to Conferences and intellectual events in the Catholic Church. Maria Augusta Neal received her Ph.D. from Harvard under Parsons supervision in 1963 and would eventually became professor at Emmanuel College in Boston. Maria Augusta Neal was great enthusiastic about the Second Vatican Council and became known for the National Sisters Survey, which aimed at improving women's right in the Catholic Church.
Parsons and Winston White wrote together an article called "The Link Between Character and Society," which was published in 1961. Parsons and White's article was a critical discussion of David Riesman
's The Lonely Crowd, which had been published a decade earlier and which had turned into an unexpected bestseller reaching 1 million sold copies in 1977. Riesman was a prominent member of the American academic left influenced by Erich Fromm
and the Frankfurt School
. In reality, Riesman's book was an academic attempt to give credit to the concept of "mass society
" and especially to the idea of an America suffocated in social conformity. Riesman had essentially argued that at the emerging of highly advanced capitalism
, the America basic value-system and its socializing roles had change from an "inner-directed" toward an "other-directed" pattern of value-orientation. Parsons and White challenged Riesman's idea and argued that there had been no change away from an inner-directed personality structure. While noticing that Riesman's "other-directness" look like a caricature of Cooley's looking-glass self, they argued that the framework of "institutional individualism" as the basic code-structure of America's normative system had essentially not changed. What had happen, however, was that the industrialized process and its increased pattern of societal differentiation had changed the family's generalized symbolic function in society and had allowed for a greater permissiveness in the way the child related to his parents. This, however, Parsons and White argued was not the prelude to greater "otherdirectness" but a more complicated way by which inner-directed pattern situated itself in the social environment.
Political power and the concept of Influence, 1963
1963 became a notable year in Parsons's theoretical development because it was the year when he published two important articles; one on political power
and one on the concept of influence
. The two articles represented Parsons's first published attempt to work out the idea of Generalized Symbolic Media as an integral part of the exchange processes within the AGIL system. This was a theoretical development, which Parsons had worked on ever since the publication of Economy and Society (1956). The prime model for the generalized symbolic media was money
and Parsons was reflecting on the question whether the functional characteristics of money represented an exclusive uniqueness of the economic system or whether it was possible to identify other generalized symbolic media in other subsystems as well. Although each medium had unique characteristics, Parsons claimed that power (for the political system
) and influence
(for the societal community) had institutional functions, which essentially was structurally similar to the general systemic function of money. Utilizing Roman Jakobson
's idea of "code" and "message," Parsons divided the components of the media into a question of value-principle versus coordination standards for the "code-structure" and the question of factor versus product control within those social process which carried the "message" components. In this way, while "utility" could be regarded as the value-principle for the economy
(medium: money), "effectiveness" was the value-principle for the political system
(medium: political power
) and solidarity for the societal community (medium: influence
). Parsons would eventually chose the concept of value-commitment as the generalized symbolic medium for the fiduciary system with integrity
as the value-principle.
In August 1963 Parsons got a new research assistant, Victor Lidz, who would become an important collaborator and colleague. In 1964 Parsons flew to Heidelberg in Germany in order to celebrate the 100th birthday of Max Weber
and discuss Weber's work with Jürgen Habermas, Herbert Marcuse
and others. Parsons delivered his paper "Evaluation and Objectivity in Social Science: An Interpretation of Max Weber's Contribution." The meeting became in reality a clash between pro-Weberian scholars and the representatives for the Frankfurther School. Before leaving for Germany Parsons discussed the upcoming meeting with Reinhard Bendix
and commented that "I am afraid I will be something of a Daniel in the Lion's den." Bendix wrote back and told Parsons that Marcuse in his ears sounded very much like Christoph Steding (who was a Nazi philosopher).
Parsons conducted a persistent correspondence with noted scholar Benjamin Nelson, with whom he shared a common interest in the rise and destiny of civilizations, a correspondence which only ceased with Nelson's death in 1977. The two scholars also shared a common enthusiasm for the work of Max Weber and the two scholars would generally agree on the main interpretative approach to the study of Weber. Benjamin Nelson had participated in the Weber Centennial in Heidelberg and during the conference Nelson had got into a violent argument with Herbert Marcuse
, whom he accused to tarnish Weber's name. In reading the written version of Nelson' s contribution to the Weber Centennial, Parsons wrote, "I cannot let the occasion pass without a word of congratulations which is strong enough so that if it were concert I should shout bravo." In several letters Nelson would keep Parsons informed of the often turbulent leftist environment of Herbert Marcuse. In the letter of September 1967, Nelson would tell Parsons how much he enjoyed reading Parsons' essay on "Kinship and the associational Aspect of Social Structure." Also, among the scholars on whom Parsons and Nelson would share internal commentaries was the work of Jürgen Habermas
.
Mark Gould was educated at Reed College
in Portland, Oregon
, at the time a center for political radicalism. At Reed, Gould's theoretical interest was sparked by Professor Howard Jolly's exegesis of Parsons. Gould decided that he wanted to study with Parsons and arrived at Harvard in the fall of 1967 and entered Parsons' office, at their first meeting, with hair down to his shoulders, with a wild beard and dressed in the colorful manners of the late sixties. Gould would become Parsons' research assistant by the summer of 1968. Parsons was opposed to the Vietnam War
, yet he was disturbed by what he considered the anti-intellectual tendency in the student rebellion, where serious debate often was substituted by handy slogans by Marx
, Mao
and Fidel Castro
. Gould, who was thrown out by the state police from University Hall (at Harvard) early in the morning on April 10, 1969, often had heated discussions with Parsons about politics and society in Parsons' office, yet as Gould insisted these dialogues were always theoretically fruitful.
1960s: Toward a concept of the societal community: Ethnicity, kinship and diffuse solidarity
Talcott Parsons had for years corresponded with his former graduate student David M. Schneider
who had taught at the University of California Berkeley before he in 1960 accepted a position as professor in Anthropology at the University of Chicago
. Schneider had received his Ph.D. at Harvard in Social Anthropology in 1949 and had become a leading expert in the American kinship system. Schneider had in 1968 published American Kinship: A cultural account, which became a classic within the field and he had sent Parsons a copy of the copy-edited manuscript before publication. Parsons was highly appreciative of Schneider's work and Schneider became in many ways a crucial bouncing-point for Parsons' own attempt to understand the fundamental elements of the American kinship system, which for him was a key to understand the factor of ethnicity and especially to build up the theoretical foundation of his concept of the societal community, which by the beginning of the early 1970s had begun to become a strong priority in the number of theoretical projects, which occupied his intellectual life. Among other things Parsons borrowed the term "diffuse enduring solidarity" from Schneider as a major concept for his own considerations regarding the theoretical construction of the concept of the societal community. In the spring of 1968 Parsons and Schneider discussed Clifford Geertz
's article on religion as a cultural system in regard to which Parsons wrote a review article. Parsons, who was a close friend of Geertz, was puzzled over Geertz's article. In a letter to David Schneider, Parsons spoke about "the rather sharp strictures on what he (Geertz) calls the extremely narrow intellectual tradition with special reference to Weber, but also to Durkheim. My basic point is in this respect, he greatly overstated his case seeming to argue that this intellectual tradition was by now irrelevant." David Schneider wrote back to Parsons, "So much, so often, as I read Cliff's stuff I cannot get a clear consistent picture of just what the religious system consist in instead only how it is said to work."
In a letter of July 1968 to Gene Tanke of the University of California Press, Parsons offers a critical note on the state of Psychoanalytical theory and writes: "The use of psychoanalytical theory in interpretation of social and historical subject matter is somewhat hazardous enterprise, and a good deal of nosense has been written in the name of such attempts." Around 1969, Parsons was approached by the prestigious Encyclopedia of the History of Idea about writing an entrance in the encyclopedia on the topic of the "Sociology of Knowledge." Parsons accepted and wrote one of his most powerful essays entitled "The Sociology of Knowledge and the History of Ideas" during the period of 1969-1970. In this essay Parsons discussed how the Sociology of knowledge
as a modern intellectual discipline had emerged out of the dynamics of European intellectual history reaching a kind of cutting point in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant
and further explored by Hegel yet reaching its first "classical" formulation in the writing of Karl Mannheim
, whose brilliance Parsons acknowledged yet also found himself in opposition to, since Mannheim never betrayed German historicism, whose antipositivistic epistemology was largely rejected in the more positivistic world of American social science. For various reasons the editors of the encyclopedia turned down Parsons essay since it didn't fit the general format of their volume, so Parsons essay was not published before 2006. Parsons had several conversations with Daniel Bell
on a "Post-industrial society", some of which were conducted over lunch at William James Hall. After reading an early version of Bell's magnum opus
, "The Coming of the Post-Industrial Society", Parsons wrote a letter to Daniel Bell dated November 30, 1971, where he offered his criticism. Among his many critical points, Parsons stressed especially that Bell's discussion of technology tended to "separate off culture" and treat these two categories "as what I would call culture minus the cognitive component."
Early 1970s: System-theoretical considerations about biological and social systems
In his later years Parsons became increasingly interested in working out the higher conceptual parameters of the human condition, which in part led him toward rethinking questions of cultural and social evolution and the "nature" of telic systems, the latter which he especially discussed with Robert Bellah, Victor Lidz, Reene Fox, Willy de Craemer and others. As a part of this pattern, Parsons became increasingly interested in clarifying the relationship between biological and social theory. Parsons was the initiator of the first Daedalus conference on "Some Relations between biological and social theory" sponsored by the American Academy of Arts and Science. Parsons wrote a memorandum dated September 16, 1971, where he spelled out the intellectual framework for the conference. As Parsons explained in the memo, the basic goal of the conference was to establish a conceptual fundament for a theory of living systems
. The first conference was held on January 7, 1972. Among the participants beside Parsons and Victor Lidz were Ernst Mayr
, Seymour Kety, Gerald Holton
, A. Hunter Dupree
, and William Wimsatt
. A second Daedalus Conference on Living Systems was held on March 1–2, 1974 and included Edward O. Wilson, who at the time was about to publish his famous work on sociobiology
. Other new participants were John T. Bonner, Karl H. Pribram
, Eric Lennenberg and Stephen J. Gould.
Early 1970s
Parsons began in the fall of 1972 to conduct a seminar on "Law and Sociology" with Lon L. Fuller
who was well known for his work The Morality of Law (1964). The seminar and his conversations with Fuller stimulated Parsons to write one of this most influential articles "Law as an Intellectual Stepchild." In this article Parsons discusses among other things Roberto Mangabeira Unger
's Law in Modern Society (1976). Another indication of Parsons interest in law is reflected in his students, hence Parsons' student John Akula writes his dissertation in Sociology on the topic Law and the Development of Citizenship (1973). In September 1972 Parsons participates in a Conference in Salzburg on "The Social Consequences of Modernization in Socialist Countries." Among the other participants in this conference is Alex Inkeles, Ezra Vogel, and Ralf Dahrendorf
.
In 1972 Parsons wrote two reviews articles, where he discussed the work of Reinhard Bendix
, which provides a clear statement on Parsons' approach to the study of Max Weber
. Bendix was an emigrant scholar who had become well known for his Weber-interpretations. In the first review article, Parsons analyzed Bendix's work entitled Embattled Reason. Parsons basically praised the work's attempt to defend the basic values of cognitive rationality, a defense Parsons unconditionally shared and he agree with Bendix that the question of cognitive rationality was primarily a cultural issue and not a category, which could be reduced from biologial, economic and social factors. However, Parsons did have problems with the way Bendix had proceed with his task and he especially felt that Bendix had misrepresented the work of Freud and Durkheim. Parsons found that the real reason behind this case of misrepresentation lied in the way Bendix tended to conceive the question of systematic theorizing under the concept of "reductionism." Parsons further found that Bendix approach suffered from a "conspicuous hostility" toward the idea of evolution
. It was true Parsons assessed that Max Weber
rejected the one-linear evolutionary approaches of Karl Marx
and Herbert Spencer
but it didn't follow that Weber rejected the question of evolution as a generalized question. In his second review article, which was a commentary of Reinhard Bendix
and Guenther Roth, Scholarship and Partisanship: Essays on Max Weber, Parsons continued his line of criticism. Parsons was especially concerned with a statement by Bendix, where Bendix claimed that Weber was a subscriber to Karl Marx
's notion that ideas were "the epiphenomena of the organization of production." Parsons strongly rejected this assessment. As he said: "I should contend that certainly the intellectual "mature" Weber never was an "hypothetical" Marxist." Somewhere behind these attitudes of Bendix, Parsons detected a discomport on Bendix behalf to move out of an "idiographic" mode of theorizing.
In 1973 Parsons published The American University, which he had coauthored together with Gerald M. Platt. The idea had originally emerged then Martin Meyerson and Stephen Graubard of the American Academy of the Art and Sciences in 1969 asked Parsons to undertake a monographic study of the American University System. The work on the book went on for years and was first finished in June 1972. From the theoretical point of view the book had several functions, one important one was to substantiate Parsons' concept of the educational revolution, which was a crucial component in his theory of the rise of the modern world. What was equally intellectually compelling, however, was undoubtedly Parsons' discussion of "the cognitive complex", which aimed at explaining how cognitive rationality and learning operated as an interpenetrative zone on the level of the general action-system in society. In retrospect the categories of "the cognitive complex" serve as a theoretical foundation for an understanding of what has been called the modern knowledge-based society.
Retired from Harvard, 1973
He retired from Harvard in 1973, but continued his writing, teaching and other activities in the same rapid pace as before. Parsons also continued his extensive correspondence with a wide group of colleagues and intellectuals. He taught at the University of Pennsylvania
, Brown University
, Rutgers University
, the University of Chicago
and the University of California at Berkeley. At Parsons' retirement banquet held on May 18, 1973, Robert K. Merton was asked to preside, while John Riley, Bernard Barber, Jesse Pitts, Neil J. Smelser and John Akula were asked to share their experiences of the man with the audience.
One scholar who became important in Parsons' later years was professor Martin U. Martel of Brown University
. Martel and Parsons made contact in the early 1970s, the occasion was a discussion of an article, which Martel had written about Talcott Parsons' work. Martel arranged a series of seminars at Brown University in 1973-74, where Parsons spoke about his life and work and answered question from students and faculty. Among the participants at the seminars were Martin U. Martel, Robert M. Marsh, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, C. Parker Wolf, Albert F. Wessen, A. Hunter Dupree, Philip L. Quinn, Adrian Hayes and Mark A. Shields. In February–May 1974, Parsons also gave the Culver lectures at Brown and spoke on the issue "The Evolution of Society." These lectures as well as the seminars were videotaped.
Late in life Parsons began to work out a new level of the AGIL model, which he called "A Paradigm of the Human Condition." This new level of the AGIL model crystallized in the summer of 1974 and the ideas of the new paradigm he worked out with a variety of people but especially with Victor Lidz, Renee Fox and Harold Bershady. The new meta-paradigm featured the environment of the general action system, which include the physical system, the biological system and what Parsons called the telic system; the latter system represented the sphere of ultimate values in a sheer metaphysical sense. Parsons also worked toward a more comprehensive understanding of the code-structure of social systems and on the logic of the cybernetic pattern of control facilitating the AGIL model, where he among many things worked out a bulk of notes, he called "Thoughts on the linking of systems" and another memo he called "money and time." He had also extensive discussions with Larry Brownstein and Adrian Hayes concerning the possibility of a mathematical formalization of Parsons' theory.
Parsons had during his lifetime worked intensively with questions of medical sociology
, the medical profession, psychiatry
, psychosomatic problems and related issues with the questions of health
and illness
. Most of all Parsons had become known for his concept of "the Sick role
." This field of social research was an issue, which Parsons constantly developed through elaboration and self-criticism. Parsons participated at the World Congress of Sociology in Toronto in August 1974, where he presented a paper called "The sick role revisited: a response to critics and an updating in terms of the theory of action," which was published under a slightly different title in 1975. In his essay Parsons highlighted that his concept of "sick role" never was meant to confine this category to "deviant behavior," although as he stated it: "its negative valuation should not be forgotten." It was also important to keep a certain focus on the "motivatedness" of illness, since there always is a factor of unconscious motivation in the therapeutic aspects of the sick role.
In 1975 Robert N. Bellah
published his book called The Broken Covenant. "The Covenant" Bellah speaks about refers to the sermon delivered by John Winthrop
(1587–1649) to this flock on board his ship 'Arbella' on the evening of the landing in Massachusetts Bay
in the year 1630. In his sermon Winthrop declared that the Puritan colonists emigrating to the New World was part of a special pact (Covenant) with God to create a holy community. Winthrop used the phrases: "For we must consider that we shall be a city on the hill. The eyes of all people are upon us." Parsons disagreed strongly with Bellah's analysis in The Broken Covenant and insisted that "the covenant" was not broken. Parsons later used a major part of his influential article, "Law as an Intellectual Stepchild" to discuss Bellah's position in The Broken Covenant. Parsons found that Bellah unduly trivialized the discussion of the tension and problems involved in questions of individual interests and collective interests on the level of total society by reducing them to the concept of "capitalism." Parsons find that Bellah in his characterization of the negative aspects of American society is compelled by a charismatic based optimalism and he declared that Bellah's position in The Broken Covenant is that of moral absolutism
.
In 1975 Parsons responded to an article by Jonathan H. Turner
called "Parsons as a symbolic interactionist." In his response Parsons acknowledged that action theory
and symbolic interactionism
should not be regarded as two separate, antagonistic positions; in contrast they have overlapping structures of conceptualization. Parsons regarded symbolic interactionism and the theory of George Herbert Mead
as valuable contributions to action theory specifying certain aspects of the theory of the personality of the individual. Parsons, however, criticized the symbolic interactionism of Herbert Blumer
, since in Blumer's theory there is no end to the openness of action. Parsons regarded Blumer as the mirror image of Claude Lévi-Strauss
who tended to stress the quasi-determined nature of macro-structural systems. Action theory
, Parsons maintained, represented a middle ground between these two extremes.
In 1976 Parsons was asked to contribute to a volume celebrating the eightieth years birthday of Jean Piaget
. Parsons contributed with an essay called "A few considerations on the place of rationality in Modern Culture and Society." Parsons characterized Piaget as the most eminent contributor to cognitive theory in the Twenty Century. However, in his article, he also argued that the future study of cognition
had to go beyond its narrow encounter with psychology
and aim at a higher understanding of how cognition as a human intellectual force was entangled in the processes of social and cultural institutionalization.
In 1978, when James Grier Miller
published his famous work Living Systems, Parsons was approached by Contemporary Sociology who asked him to write a review article on Miller's work. Parsons had already complained in a letter to A. Hunter Dupree
that American intellectual life suffered from a deep-seated tradition of empiricism
and he saw Miller's book the latest confirmation of that tradition. In his review article called "Concrete and "Abstrated" systems, he generally praised the hercules task behind Miller's work but he criticized Miller for getting caught in the effort of hierarchize concrete systems while underplaying the importance of structural categories in theory building. Parsons was also concerned about Miller's lack of any clear-cut discrimination between cultural and non-cultural systems.
In Japan, 1978
Japan was a country where from early on there was a keen interest in Talcott Parsons' work. As early as 1958 a Japanese translation of Economy and Society appeared. Also The Structure of Social Action was translated into Japanese. In the same way, The Social System was translated into Japanese by Tsutomu Sato in 1974. Indeed, already Ryozo Takeda had in 1952 in his Shakaigaku no Kozo (The Framework of Sociology) introduced Japanese scholars to some of Parsons' ideas. Parsons visited Japan for the first time in 1972, where he gave a lecture on November 25 to the Japanese Sociological Association entitled "Some Reflections on Post-Industrial Society." The lecture was published in The Japanese Sociological Review. At the same time Parsons participated in an international symposium on "New Problems of Advanced Societies," that was held in Tokyo and two short articles written by Parsons appeared in the proceedings of the symposium in 1973. Ken'ichi Tominaga (born, 1931), a leading figure in Japanese Sociology and professor at the University of Tokyo
was asked by Victor Lidz to contribute to a two-volume collection of Essays in honor of Talcott Parsons. Ken'ichi Tominaga wrote an essays on the industrial growth model of Japan using Parsons' AGIL Model.
In 1977, professor Washio Kurata, who just had been elected Dean of the Faculty of Sociology of Kwansei Gakuin University
wrote to Parsons and invited him to visit Japan during the 1978-79 academic year. In the early spring Parsons accepted Kurata's invitation and on October 20, 1978 Parsons arrived in airport of Osaka, accompanied by his wife and was greeted royally by a large entourage.
Parsons began weekly lectures at Kwansei Gakuin's sociology department from October 23 to December 15. Parsons gave his first public lecture to a huge mass of undergraduates speaking on the issue of "The Development of Contemporary Sociology," while professor Hideichiro Nakano served as an interpreter. On November 17–18, when the Sengari Seminar House was opened, Parsons was invited as the key speaker at the event and gave two lectures, one entitled "On the Crisis of Modern Society" and the other on "Modern Society and Religion." Among those present at this event were Ken'ichi Tominaga, Mutsundo Atarashi, Kazuo Muto and Hideichiro Nakano.
On November 25 Parsons lectured at Kobe University
. This lecture was organized by Hiroshi Mannari and Parsons lectured on the topic of organization theory to faculty and graduate students from the department of economics, management and sociology. Also faculty members from Kyoto and Osaka Universities were present. The lecture was published the following year. On November 30-December 1, Parsons participated in the Tsukuba (University) Conference in Tokyo, where Parsons spoke on "Enter the New Society: The Problem of the Relationship of Work and Leisure in Relation to Economic and Cultural Values." On December 5, Parsons gave a lecture at Kyoto University on the topic "A Sociologist Looks at Contemporary U.S. Society."
At a special lecture at Osaka on December 12, Parsons spoke at the suggestion of Tominaga on the topic "Social System Theory and Organization Theory" to the Japanese Sociological Association. Earlier the same day Parsons had a discussion with Professor Ken'ichi Tominaga at Iwanami Shoten, which was published in the journal SHISO.
On December 14, Kwansei Gakuin University granted Parsons an honorary doctor degree. A number of his lectures was collected into a volume by Dean Kurata and published in 1983. The Parsons` flew back to the US in mid-December 1978. As a sign of friendship Hideichiro Nakano sent Parsons a Buddha mask. Parsons had especially been captivated by certain aspects of Zen Buddhism. He told his friends that after his experience in Japan he was going to reconsider certain aspects of his interpretation of the origination of modern civilizations.
The end, 1979
Parsons died of a stroke on May 8, 1979 in Munich while on a trip to Germany, where he was celebrating the 50th anniversary of his Heidelberg degree. The day before he died he gave a lecture on the declining significance of social class for an audience of German intellectuals, including Jürgen Habermas
, Niklas Luhmann
, Richard Munch and Wolfgang Schluchter. This is simply not true. These prominent German sociologists may have been in Parsons's presence during the celebrations of his doctorate in Heidelberg, but they were not in Munich! Habermas and Schluchter came to Munich for the funeral service at the occasion of his cremation. Leon Mayhew is wrong (Horst J. Helle).
Parsons was a strong advocate for the professionalization of sociology and its expansion within American academia. He was elected president of the American Sociological Association
in 1949 and served as secretary from 1960–1965.
His son Charles Parsons
is a distinguished figure in philosophy of mathematics and an expert in Immanuel Kant. His daughter Anne Parsons committed suicide in June 1964 at the age of 33.
Work
Parsons produced a general theoretical system for the analysis of society
, which he called 'theory of action' based on the methodological and epistemological principle of "analytical realism" and on the ontological assumption of "voluntaristic action." Parsons concept of analytical realism can be regarded as a kind of compromise between nominalist and realist
views on the nature of reality and human knowledge. Parsons assesses that we (as scientists and humans) relate to objective reality but only through a particular encounter of such reality, and that our general intellectual understanding is only feasible through conceptual schemes and theories. Our interaction with objective reality on an intellectual level should always be understood as an approach. Parsons often explicated the meaning of analytical realism by quoting a statement by L.J. Henderson: "A fact is a statement about experience in terms of a conceptual scheme."
Generally, Parsons maintained that his inspiration regarding analytical realism had been Lawrence Joseph Henderson
and A.N. Whitehead although it is possible the idea originated much earlier. It is important in this regard that Parsons' "analytical realism" insist on the reference to an objective reality since Parsons at several occasions highlighted that his concept of "analytical realism" was importantly different from the "fictionalism" of Hans Vaihiger (Hans Vaihinger). As Parsons specify this: "We must start with the assertion that all knowledge which purports to be valid in anything like the scientific sense presumes both the reality of object known and of a knower. I think we can go beyond that and say that there must be a community of knowers who are able to communicate with each other. Without such a presupposition it would seem difficult to avoid the pitfall of solipsism. The so-called natural sciences do not, however, impute the "status of knowing subjects" to the objects with which they deal."
The Structure of Social Action
The Structure of Social Action, (SSA) Parsons' most famous work took form piece by piece. Its central figure was Weber and the other key figures in the discussion was added little by little as the central idea took form. One work, which became important for shaping Parsons idea of the central argument in SSA was when he unexpected around 1932 came over Élie Halévy
, La Formation du Radicalisme Philosophique, (1901–1904) a 3 volume work, which he read in French. About Halévy work Parsons explained, "Well, Halévy was just a different world ... and helped me to really get in to many clarifications of the assumptions distinctive to the main line of British
utilitarian thought
; assumptions about the 'natural identity of interest', and so on. I still think it is one of the true masterpieces in intellectual history." Parsons first achieved significant recognition with the publication of The Structure of Social Action (1937), his first grand synthesis, combining the ideas of Durkheim, Max Weber
, and Pareto
, among others.
Parsons' action theory
Parsons' action theory can be characterized as an attempt to maintain the scientific rigour of positivism, while acknowledging the necessity of the "subjective dimension" of human action incorporated in hermeneutic types of sociological theories. It is cardinal in Parsons' general theoretical and methodological view that human action must be understood in conjunction with the motivational component of the human act. In this way social science must consider the question of ends, purpose and ideals in its analysis of human action. Parsons' strong reaction to behavioristic theory as well as to sheer materialistic approaches derives from the attempt of these theoretical positions to eliminate ends, purpose and ideals as factors of analysis. Parsons already in his college student term-papers at Amherst criticized attempts to reduce human life to psychological, biological or materialist forces. What was essential in human life, Parsons maintained, was how the factor of culture
was codified. Culture, however, was to Parsons an independent variable in that it could not be "deducted" from any other factor of the social system. This methodological intention is given the most elaborate presentation in The Structure of Social Action, which was Parsons' first basic discussion of the methodological foundation of the social sciences. Some of the themes reaching a high point in The Structure of Social Action were presented in a compelling essay published two years earlier with the title: "The Place of Ultimate Values in Sociological Theory."
Relations to cybernetics and system theory
Parsons developed his ideas during a period when systems theory
and cybernetics
were very much on the front burner of social and behavioral science. In using systems thinking, he postulated that the relevant systems treated in social and behavioral science were "open," meaning that they were embedded in an environment consisting of other systems. For social and behavioral science, the largest system is "the action system," consisting of interrelated behaviors of human beings, embedded in a physical-organic environment.
As Parsons developed his theory it became increasingly bound to the fields of cybernetics and system theory, but also to Alfred E. Emerson's concept of "homeostasis
" and Ernst Mayr
's concept of "teleonomic processes." On the meta-theoretical level Parson attempted to balance psychologist phenomenology and idealism on the one hand and pure types of what Parsons called the utilitarian-positivistic complex, on the other hand. The theory includes a general theory of social evolution
and a concrete interpretation of the major drives of world-history. In Parsons' theory of history and evolution, the constitutive-cognitive symbolization of the cybernetic hierarchy of action-systemic levels has in principle the same function as genetic information in DNA's control of biological evolution, except this factor of meta-systemic control does not "determine" any outcome, but rather defines the orientational boundaries of the real pathfinder, which is action itself. Parsons compares also the constitutive level of society with Noam Chomsky's concept of "deep structure." As Parsons writes, "The deep structures do not as such articulate any sentences which could convey coherent meaning. The surface structures constitute the level at which this occurs. The connecting link between them is a set of rules of transformation, to use Chomsky's own phase." These transformative processes and entities are generally (at least on one level of empirical analysis) performed or actualized by myths and religions but also philosophies, art-systems, or even semiotic consumer behavior might in principle perform this function.
A unified concept of social science
Parsons' theory reflects a vision of a unified concept of social science and indeed, of living systems
in general. Parsons' approach differs in essence from Niklas Luhmann's theory because Parsons rejects the idea that systems can be autopoietic short of the actual action-system of individual actors. Systems have immanent capacities but only as an outcome of the institutionalized processes of action-systems, which in the final analysis consists of the historical effort of individual actors. While Niklas Luhmann
became caught up in sheer systemic immanence, Parsons insisted that the question of autocatalytic and homeostatic processes on the one hand, and the question about the actor as the ultimate "first mover" on the other, was not mutually exclusive. Homeostatic processes might be necessary if and when they occur but action is necessitating.
It is only within this perspective of the ultimate reference in action that Parsons' dictum that higher order cybernetic systems during the course of history will tend to control social forms organized on the lower levels of the cybernetic hierarchy, should be understood. For Parsons the highest levels of the cybernetic hierarchy as far as the general action level is concerned is what Parsons calls the constitutive part of the Cultural system (the L of the L). However, within the interactional processes of the system specially attention should be made to the cultural-expressivistic axis (the L-G line in the AGIL). By the term "constitutive," Parsons generally referred to very highly codified cultural values especially religious elements (but other interpretation of the term "constitutive" is possible). Cultural systems Parsons maintained had an independent status from that of the normative and orientational pattern of the social system; the one system cannot be reduced to the other. For example, the question of the "cultural capital" of a social system as a sheer historical entity (that is, in its function as a "fiduciary system"), is not identical with the higher cultural values of that system; that is, the cultural system is embodied with a meta-structural logic there cannot be reduced to any given social system or cannot be viewed as a materialist (or behavioralist) deduction from the "necessities" of the social system (or from the "necessities" of its economy). Within this context, culture would have an independent power of transition, not only as factors of actual socio-cultural units (like Western civilization or China) but also in the way original cultural bases would tend to "universalize" through interpenetration and spread over large numbers of social systems as with classical Greece and Israel, where the original social bases had died but where the cultural system survived as an independently "working" cultural pattern, as in the case of Greek philosophy or in the case of Christianity as a modified derivation from its original seed-bed in ancient Israel.
Parsons and Habermas
The difference between Parsons and Jürgen Habermas
lies essentially in how Habermas uses Parsons' theory to establish the basic propositions of his own. Habermas takes the division between Parsons' separation between the "outer" and the "inner" dimensions of the social system and labels them "system" (outer dimension (A-G)) and "lifeworld" (inner dimension (I-L)). The problem with this model from Parsons' point of view is a) that conflict within the social system can in reality emerge from any relational point and not simply from the system-lifeworld dichotomy, and b) by relating the system-lifeworld model to some kind of "liberation"-epic, Habermas produces the Utopian notion that the potentiality of conflict within the social system has some kind of "final solution," which produces a misleading concept of the nature of systemic conflict.
General theory
It is important to highlight that Parsons discriminates between two "meanings" or modes of the term "general theory." For some purposes he speaks about general theory as those aspects of theoretical concerns for the field of the social sciences, where the focus is on the most "constitutive" elements of cognitive concern for the basic theoretical systematization of a given field. Within these concerns Parsons would include the basic conceptual scheme for the given field, including its highest order of theoretical relations and naturally also the necessary specification of this system's axiomatic, epistemological and methodological foundations from the point of view of logical implications. All these elements would signify the quest for a general theory on the highest level of theoretical concern. However, the term general theory also referred to a more fully operational system, which was a system, where the implications of the conceptual scheme was "spelled out" on lower levels of cognitive structuralization, that is, levels standing closer to a perceived "empirical object." In his speech to the American Sociological Society in 1947, he spoke of five of such levels. These levels were the following:
During his life Parsons would work on developing all five fields of theoretical concerns but he would pay special attention to the development on the highest "constitutive" level, since the rest of the building would stand or fall on the solidity of the highest level.
Contrary to prevailing myths Parsons never thought that modern societies exist in some kind of perfect harmony with their norms or that most modern societies necessary were characterized by some high level of consensus or a "happy" institutional integration. Parsons highlighted two things in this regard. a) It is almost logically impossible that there can be any "perfect fit" or perfect consensus situation in the basic normative structure of complex modern societies because the basic value-pattern of modern societies are generally differentiated in such a way so some of the basic normative categories will exist in inherent conflict with each other if not actually, then at least potentially. For example, both freedom and equality is generally viewed as fundamental and in a sense non-negotiable values of modern societies. Each represents a kind of ultimate imperative about what the higher values of humanity is all about. However, as Parsons emphasizes there does not exist any simple answer to the priority of freedom versus equality or any simple solution to how they possibly can be mediated if at all. Therefore all modern societies are faced with the inherent conflict prevailing between these two values of which there is no "eternal solution" as such. For this reason alone, there cannot exist any perfect match between motivational pattern, normative solutions and the prevailing value-pattern in any modern society. Parsons would also maintain that the never-ending "dispute" between "left" and "right" had something to do with the fact that they both defend ultimately "justified" human values (or ideals), which each on their own terms are indispensable as values but these fundamental values will always exist in an endless conflictual position to each other. b) As a general token Parsons always maintained that the integration of normative pattern in society always is problematic and the level of integration reached are in principle always far from harmonious and perfect. If some "harmonious pattern" does emerge, then it is related to specific historical circumstances, it is not a general law of the social systems.
AGIL paradigm
The heuristic scheme Parsons used to analyze systems and subsystems is called the "AGIL Paradigm
", "AGIL scheme". To survive or maintain equilibrium with respect to its environment, any system must to some degree adapt to that environment (Adaptation), attain its goals (Goal Attainment), integrate its components (Integration), and maintain its latent pattern (Latency Pattern Maintenance), a sort of cultural template. These concepts can be abbreviated as AGIL. These are called the system's functional imperatives. It is important to understand that Parsons AGIL model is an analytical scheme for the sake of theoretical "production," it is not any simply "copy" or any direct historical "summary" of empirical reality. Also the scheme itself doesn't explain "anything" as little as the periodical table in the natural sciences explains anything in and by itself. The AGIL scheme is a tool for explanations and no better than the quality of those theories and explanation by which it is processed.
In the case of the analysis of a social action system, the AGIL Paradigm
, according to Parsons, yields four interrelated and interpenetrating subsystems: the behavioral systems of its members (A), the personality systems of those members (G), the social system (as such) (I) and the cultural system of that society (L). To analyze a society as a social system (the I subsystem of action), people are posited to enact roles associated with positions. These positions and roles become differentiated to some extent and in a modern society are associated with things such as occupational, political, judicial and educational roles.
Considering the interrelation of these specialized roles, as well as functionally differentiated collectivities (e.g., firms, political parties), the society can be analyzed as a complex system of interrelated functional subsystems, namely:
The pure AGIL model for all living systems:
The Social system level:
The General Action Level:
The cultural level:
The Generalized Symbolic media:
Social System level:
Parsons elaborated upon the idea that each of these systems also developed some specialized symbolic mechanisms of interaction analogous to money in the economy, e.g.., influence in the social community. Various processes of "interchange" among the subsystems of the social system were postulated.
Parsons' use of social systems analysis based on the AGIL scheme was established in his work Economy and Society (with N. Smelser, 1956) and has prevailed in all his work ever since. However, the AGIL system does only exist in a "rudimentary" form in the beginning and is then gradually elaborated and expanded in the decades which followed. A brief introduction to Parsons' AGIL scheme can be found in chapter 2 of The American University (with G. Platt, 1973). There is, however, no single place in Parsons writing where the total AGIL system is visually displayed or explained—the complete system have to be reconstructed from multiple places in his writing. The system displayed in "The American University" is only the most basic elements and should not be mistaken for the whole system.
Social evolutionism
Parsons contributed to the field of social evolutionism and neoevolutionism
. He divided evolution into four sub-processes:
Furthermore, Parsons explored these sub-processes within three stages of evolution:
Parsons viewed Western civilisation
as the pinnacle of modern societies, and out of all western cultures he declared the United States as the most dynamically developed.
Parsons' late work focused on a new theoretical synthesis around four functions common (he claimed) to all systems of action—from the behavioral to the cultural, and a set of symbolic media that enable communication across them. His attempt to structure the world of action according to a scheme that focused on order was unacceptable for American sociologists, who were at that time retreating from the grand pretensions of the 1960s to a more empirical, grounded approach.
Pattern variables
Parsons asserted that there were two dimensions to societies: instrumental and expressive. By this he meant that there are qualitative differences between kinds of social interaction.
He observed that people can have personalized and formally detached relationships based on the roles that they play. The characteristics that were associated with each kind of interaction he called the pattern variables.
An interaction can be characterized by one identifier of each contrastive pair:
Influences
For many years Parsons was the best-known sociologist in the United States
, and indeed one of the most influential and most controversial sociologists in the world. His work was very influential well into the 1960s, particularly in the United States
, until it met with extensive criticism and was generally dismissed by the 1970s. Currently, interest in Parsons is increasing worldwide. Despite the traditional view that Parsons' theories are unsatisfactory if not inaccessible, prominent attempts to revive Parsonian thinking have been made by Parsonsian sociologists and social scientists like Jeffrey Alexander, Bryan S. Turner
, Victor Lidz, Giuseppe Sciortino, Helmut Staubmann, David Sciulli, Richard Münch
, Roland Robertson
, A. Javier Trevino, Mark Gould, Thomas J. Fararo, Harold J. Bershady, Reneé Fox, Leon Mayhew, Jens Beckert, Harald Wenzel, Bernard Barber, Robert Holton, Frank J. Lechner, Rudolf Stichweh, Mathieu Deflem, Wolfgang Schluchter, Riccardo Prandini, Akira Tokuyasu, Kiyomitsu Yui, Kazuyoshi Takagi and Ken'chi Tominaga, the latter a towering figure in Japanese sociology. On the issue of studying Parsons' biographical and historical data scholars such as William Buxton, Uta Gerhardt
, Charles Camic, Lawrence T. Nichols, and Jens Kaalhauge Nielsen have been most prominent. The key centers of Parsons interest today beside the US are Germany, Japan, Italy, and the United Kingdom.
Parsons had a seminal influence and early mentorship of many American and international scholars among them Ralf Dahrendorf
, Alain Touraine
, Niklas Luhmann
and Jürgen Habermas
.
Publications (Books)
Edited volumes
Translations by Parsons
Ph.D. dissertations supervised by Parsons
Works on Parsons
External links
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
from 1927 to 1973.
Parsons developed a general theory for the study of society called action theory
Action theory (sociology)
In sociology, action theory refers to the theory of social action presented by the American theorist Talcott Parsons.Parsons established action theory in order to integrate the study of social order with the structural and voluntaristic aspects of macro and micro factors...
, based on the methodological principle of voluntarism
Voluntarism
Voluntarism is a descriptive term for a school of thought that regards the will as superior to the intellect and to emotion. This description has been applied to various points of view, from different cultural eras, in the areas of metaphysics, psychology, sociology, and theology.The term...
and the epistemological principle of analytical
Analytic philosophy
Analytic philosophy is a generic term for a style of philosophy that came to dominate English-speaking countries in the 20th century...
realism
Realism
Realism, Realist or Realistic are terms that describe any manifestation of philosophical realism, the belief that reality exists independently of observers, whether in philosophy itself or in the applied arts and sciences. In this broad sense it is frequently contrasted with Idealism.Realism in the...
. The theory attempted to establish a balance between two major methodological traditions, that of the utilitarian-positivist tradition on the one hand and the hermeneutic-idealistic tradition on the other. For Parsons, voluntarism established a third alternative between these two. More than a theory of society, Parsons presented a theory of social evolution and a concrete interpretation of the "drives" and directions of world history.
Parsons analyzed the work of Émile Durkheim
Émile Durkheim
David Émile Durkheim was a French sociologist. He formally established the academic discipline and, with Karl Marx and Max Weber, is commonly cited as the principal architect of modern social science and father of sociology.Much of Durkheim's work was concerned with how societies could maintain...
and Vilfredo Pareto
Vilfredo Pareto
Vilfredo Federico Damaso Pareto , born Wilfried Fritz Pareto, was an Italian engineer, sociologist, economist, political scientist and philosopher. He made several important contributions to economics, particularly in the study of income distribution and in the analysis of individuals' choices....
and evaluated their contributions within the light of the paradigm of voluntaristic action. Parsons was also largely responsible for introducing and interpreting Max Weber
Max Weber
Karl Emil Maximilian "Max" Weber was a German sociologist and political economist who profoundly influenced social theory, social research, and the discipline of sociology itself...
's work to American audiences. Although he was generally considered a major structuralist functionalist scholar, in an article late in life, Parsons explicitly wrote that the term "functional" or "structural functionalist" were inappropriate ways to describe the character of his theory. For Parsons "structural functionalism" was the term of a particular stage in the methodological development of the social science; it was never a name for any specific school or specific direction. "Functionalism" itself was a universal method and again not a name for any specific school. In the same way, the concept "grand theory" is a derogative term, which Parsons himself never used.
Biography
Two term papers Parsons wrote as a student for Clarence E. Ayres' class in Philosophy III at Amherst have survived. These are referred to as the Amherst papers and have been of strong interest to Parsons scholars. The first is written on December 19, 1922 and is called "The Theory of Human Behavior in its Individual and Social Aspects." The second term paper is written on March 27, 1923 and is called "A Behavioristic Conception of the Nature of Morals." The papers reveal in part Parsons' early interest in social evolutionary questions. The Amherst Papers also reveal that Parsons did not agree with his institutionalist teachers, since he writes in the Amherst papers that technological development and moral progress are two structurally independent empirical processes,Family's heritageTalcoilton]] (1608–1674) scholar. Talcott Parsons father could be characterized as a liberal on both theological and socio-political issues. At the same time without any notion of orthodoxy, it was a family which mentally and intellectually tt Parsons was born 13 December 1902 in Colorado Springs
Colorado Springs, Colorado
Colorado Springs is a Home Rule Municipality that is the county seat and most populous city of El Paso County, Colorado, United States. Colorado Springs is located in South-Central Colorado, in the southern portion of the state. It is situated on Fountain Creek and is located south of the Colorado...
. Parsons was the son of Edward Smith Parsons (1863–1943) and Mary Augusta Ingersoll (1863–1949). His father had attended Yale Divinity School
Yale Divinity School
Yale Divinity School is a professional school at Yale University, in New Haven, Connecticut, U.S. preparing students for ordained or lay ministry, or for the academy...
and was ordained as a Congregationalist minister, serving first as a minister for a pioneer community in Greeley, Colorado
Greeley, Colorado
The City of Greeley is a Home Rule Municipality that is the county seat and the most populous city of Weld County, Colorado, United States. Greeley is located in the region known as Northern Colorado. Greeley is situated north-northeast of the Colorado State Capitol in Denver. According to the...
. At the time of Parsons' birth Edward S. Parsons was a professor in English at Colorado College
Colorado College
The Colorado College is a private liberal arts college in Colorado Springs, Colorado, United States, in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. It was founded in 1874 by Thomas Nelson Haskell...
and vice-president of the college. He also became known as an accomplished ohn Milton|Mwas deeply embedded in its Puritan
Puritan
The Puritans were a significant grouping of English Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries. Puritanism in this sense was founded by some Marian exiles from the clergy shortly after the accession of Elizabeth I of England in 1558, as an activist movement within the Church of England...
and Calvinist
Calvinism
Calvinism is a Protestant theological system and an approach to the Christian life...
tradition and also had an active self-awareness of this fact. He also had a civil partnership with Josef Stalin which sparked much debate and eventually led to his assasination.
During his Congregational ministry in Greeley, Edward S. Parsons had become sympathetic to the social gospel movement yet at the same time, he tended to view this question from a higher theological position and he was hostile to socialism
Socialism
Socialism is an economic system characterized by social ownership of the means of production and cooperative management of the economy; or a political philosophy advocating such a system. "Social ownership" may refer to any one of, or a combination of, the following: cooperative enterprises,...
as a sheer ideology. Also both Edward S. Parsons and his son Talcott would be familiar with the theology of Jonathan Edwards. The father would later become the president of Marietta College
Marietta College
Marietta College is a co-educational private college in Marietta, Ohio, USA, which was the first permanent settlement of the Northwest Territory. The school offers 42 majors along with a large number of minors, all of which are grounded in a strong liberal arts foundation...
in Ohio. Parsons' family is one of the oldest families in American history; his ancestors were some of the first to arrive from England in the first half of the seventeenth century. The family's heritage consisted of two separate and independently developed Parsons lines, which both went back to the early days of America and indeed deeper into British history. On the father's side the family could be traced back to the Parsons of York, Maine
York, Maine
York is a town in York County, Maine, United States at the southwest corner of the state. The population in the 2000 census was 12,854. Situated beside the Atlantic Ocean on the Gulf of Maine, York is a well-known summer resort. It is home to three 18-hole golf clubs, three sandy beaches, and...
. On the mother's side, the Ingersoll line was connected with Jonathan Edwards and from Edwards on there would be a new independent Parsons line because his eldest daughter Sarah married Elihu Parsons on June 11, 1750.
Studies: Amherst College
As an undergraduate, Parsons studied biology, sociology and philosophy at Amherst College
Amherst College
Amherst College is a private liberal arts college located in Amherst, Massachusetts, United States. Amherst is an exclusively undergraduate four-year institution and enrolled 1,744 students in the fall of 2009...
and received his B.A. in 1924. Amherst College had become the Parsons' family college by tradition; his father and his uncle Frank had attended it, as had his older brother. Initially Parsons was attracted to a career in medicine, inspired in this direction by his older brother Charles Edward Parsons, so he studied a great deal of biology and spent a summer working at the Oceanographic Institution
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is a private, nonprofit research and higher education facility dedicated to the study of all aspects of marine science and engineering and to the education of marine researchers. Established in 1930, it is the largest independent oceanographic research...
at Woods Hole, Massachusetts
Woods Hole, Massachusetts
Woods Hole is a census-designated place in the town of Falmouth in Barnstable County, Massachusetts, United States. It lies at the extreme southwest corner of Cape Cod, near Martha's Vineyard and the Elizabeth Islands...
.
Parsons' biology teachers while at Amherst were Otto Glaser and Henry Plough. Gently mocked as "Little Talcott, the gilded cherub", Parsons became one of the student leaders at Amherst. Parsons also took courses with Walton Hamilton and the philosopher Clarence Edwin Ayres
Clarence Edwin Ayres
Clarence Edwin Ayres was the principal thinker in the Texas school of Institutional Economics, during the middle of the 20th century.-Life:...
, both known as "institutional economists". They exposed him to literature by Thorstein Veblen
Thorstein Veblen
Thorstein Bunde Veblen, born Torsten Bunde Veblen was an American economist and sociologist, and a leader of the so-called institutional economics movement...
, John Dewey
John Dewey
John Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist and educational reformer whose ideas have been influential in education and social reform. Dewey was an important early developer of the philosophy of pragmatism and one of the founders of functional psychology...
, and William Graham Sumner
William Graham Sumner
William Graham Sumner was an American academic and "held the first professorship in sociology" at Yale College. For many years he had a reputation as one of the most influential teachers there. He was a polymath with numerous books and essays on American history, economic history, political...
, among others. Parsons also took a course with George Brown in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher from Königsberg , researching, lecturing and writing on philosophy and anthropology at the end of the 18th Century Enlightenment....
, and a course in modern German philosophy with Otto Manthey-Zorn, who was a great Kant interpreter. Parsons showed from early on a great interest in the topic of philosophy
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...
, which most likely was an echo of his father's great interest in theology
Theology
Theology is the systematic and rational study of religion and its influences and of the nature of religious truths, or the learned profession acquired by completing specialized training in religious studies, usually at a university or school of divinity or seminary.-Definition:Augustine of Hippo...
in the tradition of which he had been profoundly socialized, a position that contrasted with his teachers' vief
Studies: London School of Economics
After Amherst, he studied at the London School of Economics
London School of Economics
The London School of Economics and Political Science is a public research university specialised in the social sciences located in London, United Kingdom, and a constituent college of the federal University of London...
for a year, where he was exposed to the work of R. H. Tawney
R. H. Tawney
Richard Henry Tawney was an English economic historian, social critic, Christian socialist, and an important proponent of adult education....
, Bronisław Malinowski, and Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse
Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse
Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse was a British liberal politician and sociologist, who has been considered one of the leading and earliest proponents of social liberalism. His works, alongside that of writers such as T.H. Green and John A. Hobson, occupy a seminal position within the canon of New...
. During his days at LSE he made friends with E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Meyer Fortes
Meyer Fortes
Meyer Fortes was a South African-born anthropologist, best known for his work among the Tallensi and Ashanti in Ghana.Originally trained in psychology, Fortes employed the notion of the "person" into his structural-functional analyses of kinship, the family, and ancestor worship setting a standard...
and Raymonth Firth, who all participated in the Malinowski seminar and in addition, he made a close personal friendship with Arthur and Eveline Burns
Eveline M. Burns
Eveline Mabel Richardson Burns was a British-American economist, writer and instructor.Born Eveline Mabel Richardson in London, England, she was the only child of Eveline Maud Falkner and Frederick Haig Richardson. Her mother died following her birth, so her father remarried and had three more...
.
While studying at LSE he met a young American girl in the students common room by the name of Helen Bancroft Walker whom he married on April 30, 1927. The couple had three children, Anne, Charles and Susan and eventually four grandchildren. Helen's father was born in Canada but had moved to the Boston area and had become a naturalized American citizen.
Studies: University of Heidelberg
Parsons went on to the University of Heidelberg
Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg
The Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg is a public research university located in Heidelberg, Baden-Württemberg, Germany. Founded in 1386, it is the oldest university in Germany and was the third university established in the Holy Roman Empire. Heidelberg has been a coeducational institution...
, where he received his Ph.D. in sociology and economics. During his time in Heidelberg, he worked with Alfred Weber
Alfred Weber
Alfred Weber was a German economist, sociologist and theoretician of culture whose work was influential in the development of modern economic geography.-Life:...
(Max Weber
Max Weber
Karl Emil Maximilian "Max" Weber was a German sociologist and political economist who profoundly influenced social theory, social research, and the discipline of sociology itself...
's brother), Edgar Salin (who was his dissertation adviser) Emil Lederer, and Karl Mannheim
Karl Mannheim
Karl Mannheim , or Károly Mannheim in the original writing of his name, was a Jewish Hungarian-born sociologist, influential in the first half of the 20th century and one of the founding fathers of classical sociology and a founder of the sociology of knowledge.-Life:Mannheim studied in Budapest,...
and in addition he was examined in Immanuel Kant's "Critique of pure Reason" by the philosopher Karl Jaspers
Karl Jaspers
Karl Theodor Jaspers was a German psychiatrist and philosopher who had a strong influence on modern theology, psychiatry and philosophy. After being trained in and practicing psychiatry, Jaspers turned to philosophical inquiry and attempted to discover an innovative philosophical system...
. At Heidelberg Parsons was also examed by Willy Andreas in the French Revolution. Parsons wrote his Dr. phil. thesis on The Concept of Capitalism in the Recent German Literature with his main focus on the work of Werner Sombart
Werner Sombart
Werner Sombart was a German economist and sociologist, the head of the “Youngest Historical School” and one of the leading Continental European social scientists during the first quarter of the 20th century....
and Max Weber
Max Weber
Karl Emil Maximilian "Max" Weber was a German sociologist and political economist who profoundly influenced social theory, social research, and the discipline of sociology itself...
. It was clear from his discussion that he rejected Sombart's quasi-idealistic views and was in favor of Weber's attempt to strike a balance between "historicism
Historicism
Historicism is a mode of thinking that assigns a central and basic significance to a specific context, such as historical period, geographical place and local culture. As such it is in contrast to individualist theories of knowledges such as empiricism and rationalism, which neglect the role of...
", "idealism
Idealism
In philosophy, idealism is the family of views which assert that reality, or reality as we can know it, is fundamentally mental, mentally constructed, or otherwise immaterial. Epistemologically, idealism manifests as a skepticism about the possibility of knowing any mind-independent thing...
" and a Neo-Kantian approach.
The most crucial encounter for Parsons at Heidelberg was his encounter with the work of Max Weber
Max Weber
Karl Emil Maximilian "Max" Weber was a German sociologist and political economist who profoundly influenced social theory, social research, and the discipline of sociology itself...
, who he never had heard about before he arrived. Weber became tremendously important for Parsons because given his upbringing with a liberal yet strongly religious father, the question of the role of culture and religion in the basic processes of world history had been a persistent puzzle in his mind. Weber was the first scholar who truly provided Parsons with a compelling theoretical "answer" to this question and Parsons became absorbed in the reading of Weber to the utmost extent.
Parsons decided among other things that he would like to translate Weber's work into English and approached Marianne Weber
Marianne Weber
Marianne Weber, , sociologist, women's rights activist and wife of Max Weber.-Girlhood, 1870-1893:...
, Max Weber's wife in this regard and he would eventually translate several of Weber's works into English. During his time in Heidelberg Parsons was invited by Marianne Weber to "sociological teas," which was study group meetings Marianne would held in the library room of her and Max Weber's old apartment. One scholar who Parsons met at Heidelberg who shared his enthusiasm for Weber was Alexander von Schelting and Parsons would later write a review article on von Schelting's work on Weber. Generally, Parsons would read extensively in religious literature and especially on works focusing on the sociology of religion. One scholar who especially became important for Parsons in this regard was Ernst D. Troeltsch (1865–1923). Parsons would also read very widely on the topic of Calvinism
Calvinism
Calvinism is a Protestant theological system and an approach to the Christian life...
and his reading would include the work of Emile Doumerque, Eugéne Choisy and Henri Hauser.
Instructor at Harvard Department of Economics, 1927
In 1927, after a year teaching at Amherst (1926–27), Parsons entered Harvard as an instructor in the Department of Economics, where he followed F.W. Taussig's lectures on Alfred Marshall
Alfred Marshall
Alfred Marshall was an Englishman and one of the most influential economists of his time. His book, Principles of Economics , was the dominant economic textbook in England for many years...
and became friend with the economist historian Edwin Gay, who was the founder of Harvard Business School
Harvard Business School
Harvard Business School is the graduate business school of Harvard University in Boston, Massachusetts, United States and is widely recognized as one of the top business schools in the world. The school offers the world's largest full-time MBA program, doctoral programs, and many executive...
. Parsons also became a close associate of Joseph Schumpeter
Joseph Schumpeter
Joseph Alois Schumpeter was an Austrian-Hungarian-American economist and political scientist. He popularized the term "creative destruction" in economics.-Life:...
and followed his course on "General Economics". Parsons was generally at odds with some of the trends in Harvard's Economics department which in those days went in a highly technical, mathematical direction, and Parsons looked for other options at Harvard and gave courses in "Social Ethics" and in the "Sociology of Religion." Although Parsons entered Harvard through the Economics Department, he never aimed at becoming an economist; all his activities and his basic intellectual interest propelled him toward Sociology
Sociology
Sociology is the study of society. It is a social science—a term with which it is sometimes synonymous—which uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about human social activity...
, although no Sociology Department existed in the first years at the time at Harvard. However, Harvard was in these years working toward establishing a Sociology Department and Parsons positioned himself in various ways through writing and teaching obligations so he was ready to join a Sociology Department, when it finally was established. In contrast to legend Parsons was never "forced" out of the Economics Department, his exit was voluntary and a deliberate decision.
Harvard's first Sociology Department, 1931
The chance for a shift to sociology
Sociology
Sociology is the study of society. It is a social science—a term with which it is sometimes synonymous—which uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about human social activity...
came in 1931, when Harvard's first Sociology Department was created under the Russian scholar Pitirim Sorokin
Pitirim Sorokin
Pitirim Alexandrovich Sorokin was a Russian-American sociologist born in Komi . Academic and political activist in Russia, he emigrated from Russia to the United States in 1923. He founded the Department of Sociology at Harvard University. He was a vocal opponent of Talcott Parsons' theories...
. Sorokin, who had fled the Russian Revolution and had emigrated from Russia to the United States in 1923, was given the opportunity to establish the department. Parsons became one of the new department's two instructors, along with Carl Joslyn. During this period Parsons established close ties with biochemist
Biochemist
Biochemists are scientists who are trained in biochemistry. Typical biochemists study chemical processes and chemical transformations in living organisms. The prefix of "bio" in "biochemist" can be understood as a fusion of "biological chemist."-Role:...
and sociologist Lawrence Joseph Henderson
Lawrence Joseph Henderson
Lawrence Joseph Henderson was a physiologist, chemist, biologist, philosopher, and sociologist. He became one of the leading biochemists of the first decades of the 20th century.Lawrence Henderson graduated from Harvard College in 1898 and from Harvard Medical School in 1902, receiving the M. D...
, who took personal interest in Parsons' career at Harvard. Parsons became part of L.J. Henderson's famous Vilfredo Pareto
Vilfredo Pareto
Vilfredo Federico Damaso Pareto , born Wilfried Fritz Pareto, was an Italian engineer, sociologist, economist, political scientist and philosopher. He made several important contributions to economics, particularly in the study of income distribution and in the analysis of individuals' choices....
study group in which some of the most important intellectuals at Harvard participated, including Crane Brinton
Crane Brinton
Clarence Crane Brinton was an American historian of France, as well as an historian of ideas...
, George C. Homans
George C. Homans
George Casper Homans was an American sociologist, founder of behavioral sociology and the exchange theory.Homans is best known for his research in social behavior and his works including The Human Group, Social Behavior: Its Elementary Forms, his exchange theory and the many different propositions...
, and Charles P. Curtis. Parsons wrote an article on Pareto's theory and later explained that he had adopted the concept of "social system" from his reading of Pareto. Parsons also made strong connections with two other influential intellectuals with whom he corresponded for years; one was economist Frank H. Knight and the other was Chester I. Barnard, one of US's most dynamic business-men at the time. The relationship between Parsons and Sorokin quickly ran sour. A pattern of personal tensions was aggravated by Sorokin's deep dislike for American civilization, which he regarded as a sensate culture in decline. Sorokin's writings became increasingly anti-scientistic in his later years, widening the gulf between his work and Parsons', and turning the increasingly positivisitic American sociology community against him. Sorokin also tended to belittle all other sociology tendencies than his own writings and by 1934 the perception of Sorokin at Harvard had already turned quite negative.
Some of Parsons' students in the first years of the new department of Sociology were people like Robin William Jr., Robert K. Merton
Robert K. Merton
Robert King Merton was a distinguished American sociologist. He spent most of his career teaching at Columbia University, where he attained the rank of University Professor...
, Kingsley Davis, Wilbert Moore, Edward C. Devereux, Logan Wilson, Nicholas Demereth, John Riley, Jr. and Mathilda White Riley. Later cohorts of students, included among others Harry Johnson, Bernard Barber, Marion Levy and Jesse R. Pitts
Jesse R. Pitts
Jesse Richard Pitts , was an American sociologist specializing in deviance and social control, family sociology, sociological theory, French society, and criminology. He is considered one of the leading disciples of Talcott Parsons, dean of American sociologists for much of the 20th century...
. Parsons established, at the students' request, a little informal study group which met year after year in Adams house. Toward the end of Parsons' career, the German systems theorist Niklas Luhmann
Niklas Luhmann
Niklas Luhmann was a German sociologist, and a prominent thinker in sociological systems theory.-Biography:...
also attended his lectures.
In 1932 Parsons bought his famous farmhouse in New Hampshire
New Hampshire
New Hampshire is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States of America. The state was named after the southern English county of Hampshire. It is bordered by Massachusetts to the south, Vermont to the west, Maine and the Atlantic Ocean to the east, and the Canadian...
for $2.500. The farmhouse was located in a wooden area near the small town of Acworth
Acworth, New Hampshire
Acworth is a town in Sullivan County, New Hampshire, United States. As of the 2010 census, the town had a total population of 891.-History:Originally chartered by Governor Benning Wentworth in 1752, it was called Burnet after William Burnet, a former governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay...
, although Parsons often in his writing referred to it as "the farmhouse in Alstead
Alstead, New Hampshire
Alstead is a town in Cheshire County, New Hampshire, United States. The population was 1,937 at the 2010 census. Alstead is home to Feuer State Forest.-History:...
." The farmhouse was not big and impressive; indeed, it was a very humble structure with almost no modern utilities. The farmhouse became central to Parsons' life, and many of his most important works were written in the peace and quiet at the farmhouse.
In the spring of 1933, Susan Kingsbury, a pioneer of women's rights in America, wrote to Parsons and offered him a position at Bryn Mawr
Bryn Mawr College
Bryn Mawr College is a women's liberal arts college located in Bryn Mawr, a community in Lower Merion Township, Pennsylvania, ten miles west of Philadelphia. The name "Bryn Mawr" means "big hill" in Welsh....
; however, Parsons declined the offer because, as he wrote to Kingsbury, "neither salary nor rank is really definitely above what I enjoy here."
In the academic year of 1939-40 Talcott Parsons and Joseph Schumpeter
Joseph Schumpeter
Joseph Alois Schumpeter was an Austrian-Hungarian-American economist and political scientist. He popularized the term "creative destruction" in economics.-Life:...
conducted an informal faculty seminar at Harvard, which met in Emerson Hall and discussed the concept of rationality
Rationality
In philosophy, rationality is the exercise of reason. It is the manner in which people derive conclusions when considering things deliberately. It also refers to the conformity of one's beliefs with one's reasons for belief, or with one's actions with one's reasons for action...
. Among the participants in the seminary were D.V. McGranahan, Abram Bergson, Wassily Leontief
Wassily Leontief
Wassily Wassilyovich Leontief , was a Russian-American economist notable for his research on how changes in one economic sector may have an effect on other sectors. Leontief won the Nobel Committee's Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1973, and three of his doctoral students have also...
, Gottfried Haberler
Gottfried Haberler
Gottfried von Haberler was an economist. He worked in particular on international trade....
, and Paul Sweezy
Paul Sweezy
Paul Marlor Sweezy was a Marxist economist, political activist, publisher, and founding editor of the long-running magazine Monthly Review...
. Schumpeter contributed with the essay "Rationality in Economics" to the seminar, while Parsons submitted the paper "The Role of Rationality in Social Action" for a general discussion. Schumpeter suggested that he and Parsons write or edit a book together on the topic of rationality but the project never materialized.
Neoclassical economics versus institutionalists
In the prevailing discussion between neoclassical economics
Neoclassical economics
Neoclassical economics is a term variously used for approaches to economics focusing on the determination of prices, outputs, and income distributions in markets through supply and demand, often mediated through a hypothesized maximization of utility by income-constrained individuals and of profits...
and the institutionalists
Institutional economics
Institutional economics focuses on understanding the role of the evolutionary process and the role of institutions in shaping economic behaviour. Its original focus lay in Thorstein Veblen's instinct-oriented dichotomy between technology on the one side and the "ceremonial" sphere of society on the...
, which was one of the conflicts that prevailed within the field of economics in the 1920s and early 1930s, Parsons attempted to walk a very fine line. He was basically very critical about neo-classical theory and this was an attitude that prevail all the way through his life and is reflected in his critique of Milton Friedman
Milton Friedman
Milton Friedman was an American economist, statistician, academic, and author who taught at the University of Chicago for more than three decades...
and Gary Becker
Gary Becker
Gary Stanley Becker is an American economist. He is a professor of economics, sociology at the University of Chicago and a professor at the Booth School of Business. He was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1992, and received the United States' Presidential Medal of Freedom...
. He was basically opposed to the utilitarian bias within the neo-classical approach not in the sense that he discredited everything they said but to the effect that he could not embrace them fully. However, he agreed generally (or at least up to a point) on their theoretical and methodological style of approach (which should be discriminated from its substance). For the same reasons (and for several other reasons in addition) he was unable to accept the institutionalist solution. In an interview late in life Parsons recalled his conversation with Joseph Schumpeter
Joseph Schumpeter
Joseph Alois Schumpeter was an Austrian-Hungarian-American economist and political scientist. He popularized the term "creative destruction" in economics.-Life:...
about the institutionalist methodological position, the following way: "An economist like Schumpeter, by contrast, would absolutely have none of that. I remember talking to him about the problem and ... I think Schumpeter was right. If economics had gone that way [like the institutionalists] it would have had to become a primarily empirical discipline, largely descriptive, and without theoretical focus. That's the way the 'institutionalists' went, and of course Mitchell (Wesley Mitchell) was affiliated with that movement."
Revisit to Germany and fight against Nazism
Parsons revisited Germany in the summer of 1930 and became a direct eye-witness to the feverish atmosphere in Weimar Germany
Weimar Republic
The Weimar Republic is the name given by historians to the parliamentary republic established in 1919 in Germany to replace the imperial form of government...
during which the Nazi Party rose to power. In the following period Parsons received constant reports about the rise of Nazism
Nazism
Nazism, the common short form name of National Socialism was the ideology and practice of the Nazi Party and of Nazi Germany...
through his friend Edward Y. Hartshorne
Edward Y. Hartshorne
Edward Yarnall Hartshorne, Jr. was the principal education officer in the American Military Government responsible for the reopening of the German universities in the U.S...
who was travelling in Germany. Parsons began in the late 1930s to warn the American public about the Nazi threat; this was not an easy task since US in those days was predominantly isolationist.
One of the first articles Parsons wrote in this regard was entitled: "New Dark Age Seen If Nazis Should Win." Parsons became one of the key initiators of the Harvard Defense committee, an organization aimed at rallying the American public against the Nazis. Parsons' voice would sound again and again over Boston's local radio-stations as a part of this campaign. Parsons also spoke against Nazism during a dramatic meeting at Harvard campus which was disturbed by isolationist activists. To fight isolationism
Isolationism
Isolationism is the policy or doctrine of isolating one's country from the affairs of other nations by declining to enter into alliances, foreign economic commitments, international agreements, etc., seeking to devote the entire efforts of one's country to its own advancement and remain at peace by...
in those days was a very difficult task since polls showed that 91 percent of the population was unwilling to go to war for the allied cause. Together with graduate student Charles O. Porter
Charles O. Porter
Charles Orlando Porter was a politician from the U.S. state of Oregon.-Early life:Born in Klamath Falls, Oregon, to Frank Porter and Ruth Peterson, he graduated from high school in Eugene, Oregon and then went on to graduate from Harvard University with a B.S. in 1941...
, Parsons would rally graduate students at Harvard for the war effort. (Porter would later become a US Congressman for Oregon elected on a Democratic ticket). During the War Parsons conducted a special study group at Harvard, which analyzed the causes of Nazism and where leading experts on the topic participated.
1940s: The Second World War and the Harvard School of oversea administration
In the spring of 1941 a discussion group on Japan began to meet at Harvard. The group's five core members were Talcott Parsons, John K. Fairbank
John K. Fairbank
John King Fairbank , was a prominent American academic and historian of China.-Education and early career:...
, Edwin O. Reischauer
Edwin O. Reischauer
Edwin Oldfather Reischauer was the leading U.S. educator and noted scholar of the history and culture of Japan, and of East Asia. From 1961–1966, he was the U.S. ambassador to Japan.-Education and academic life:...
, William M. McGovern and Marion Levy, Jr.. A few others would also occasionally join the group including Ai-Li Sung (Ai-Li Sung Chin) and Edward Y. Hartshorne. The group rose out of a strong desire to understand Japan
Japan
Japan is an island nation in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean, it lies to the east of the Sea of Japan, China, North Korea, South Korea and Russia, stretching from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea and Taiwan in the south...
whose power in the East had grown tremendously (while at the same time allied with Nazi Germany since November 1936) but as Levy frankly admit "Reischauer was the only one who knew anything about Japan." Parsons, however, was eager to learn more about Japan and was "concerned with general implications." Shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor
Pearl Harbor
Pearl Harbor, known to Hawaiians as Puuloa, is a lagoon harbor on the island of Oahu, Hawaii, west of Honolulu. Much of the harbor and surrounding lands is a United States Navy deep-water naval base. It is also the headquarters of the U.S. Pacific Fleet...
, Parsons wrote in a letter to Arthur Upham Pope (1881–1969) that the importance of studies of Japan certainly had intensified. During 1942 Parsons worked on arranging a major study of occupied countries together with Bartholomew Landheer of the Netherland Information Office (located in New York). Parsons had mobilized Georges Gurvitch, Conrad Arnsberg, Dr. Safranek and Theodore Abel to participate in these studies but this initiative never materialized because of lack of funding. In early 1942 Parsons approached Hartshorne, who had joined the Psychology Division of the Office of the Coordinator of Information (COI) in Washington, DC to interest his agency in the research project but without result. In February 1943, Parsons became the deputy director of Harvard School of Overseas administration, a school which educated administrators to "run" the occupied territories in Germany and the Pacific. The task of finding relevant literature on both Europe and Asia for the Harvard School of Oversea administration (ASOA) was mind-boggling and occupied a fair amount of Parsons' time. One scholar Parsons came to know in his period was Karl August Wittfogel
Karl August Wittfogel
Karl August Wittfogel was a German-American playwright, historian, and sinologist. Originally a Marxist and an active member of the Communist Party of Germany, after the Second World War Wittfogel was an equally fierce anticommunist.-Biography:...
with whom he discussed Max Weber
Max Weber
Karl Emil Maximilian "Max" Weber was a German sociologist and political economist who profoundly influenced social theory, social research, and the discipline of sociology itself...
and whom he asked to lecture at the ASOA. On the issue of China, which also was taught at the school, Parsons received fundamental information from Chinese scholar Ai-Li Sung Chin and her husband Robert Chin. Another Chinese scholar Parsons worked closely with during the ASOA period was Hsiao-Tung Fei (also written: Fei Xiaotong) (1910–2005) who had studied at the London School of Economics and who was an expert on the social structure of the Chinese village.
1940s: Intellectual exchange with Schutz, Vögelin, Dodd and other debates
Parsons met Alfred Schutz
Alfred Schütz
Alfred Schütz was an Austrian social scientist, whose work bridged sociological and phenomenological traditions to form a social phenomenology, and who is gradually achieving recognition as one of the foremost philosophers of social science of the [twentieth] century.-Life:Schütz was born in...
(Schütz) during the rationality seminar, which he conducted jointly together with Joseph Schumpeter at Harvard in the spring of 1940. Schutz has been close to Edmund Husserl
Edmund Husserl
Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl was a philosopher and mathematician and the founder of the 20th century philosophical school of phenomenology. He broke with the positivist orientation of the science and philosophy of his day, yet he elaborated critiques of historicism and of psychologism in logic...
and was deeply embedded in his phenomenological philosophy. Schutz who had been born in Vienna and had moved to the US in 1939, had for years worked on the project of developing a phenomenological sociology
Phenomenological Sociology
Phenomenological Sociology is the study of the formal structures of concrete social existence as made available in and through the analytical description of acts of intentional consciousness. The object of such an analysis is the meaningful lived world of everyday life: the Lebenswelt, or...
primarily based on an attempt to find some fixpoint between Husserl's method and Weber's sociology. Parsons had asked Schutz to give a presentation at the rationality seminar, which he did on April 13, 1940 and Parsons and Schutz had lunched together afterward. Schutz was fascinated with Parsons theory, which he regarded as the state of the art of social theory and he had written an evaluation of Parsons' theory which he kindly asked Parsons to comment on. This led to a short but intensive correspondence, which generally revealed that the gap between Schutz's sociologized phenomenology and Parsons concept of voluntaristic action was far too great. From Parsons' point of view Schutz's position was too speculative and subjectivist of nature and he felt that Schutz was essentially a philosopher, who tended to reduce social processes to the articulation of a Lebenswelt consciousness, while for Parsons the defining edge of human life was action as a catalyst for historical change. For Parsons it was essential that sociology as a science should pay strong attention to the subjective element of action but it should never become completely absorbed in it, since the purpose of a science was to explain causal relationships, whether by covering laws or by other types of explanatory devices. Schutz's basic argument was that sociology cannot ground itself and that epistemology was not a luxury but a necessity for the social scientist. Parsons agreed but stressed the pragmatic need to demarcate science and philosophy and insisted moreover that the grounding of a conceptual scheme for empirical theory construction cannot aim at absolute solutions but need to take a sensible stock-taking of the epistemological balance at each point in time. However, there is no doubt that the two men shared many basic assumptions about the nature of social theory, which have made the debate simmering ever since. By request from Mrs. Ilse Schutz, after her husband's death, Parsons gave on July 23, 1971 permission to the publication of the correspondence between him and Schutz. Parsons also wrote "A 1974 Retrospective Perspective" to the correspondence, where he characterized his own position as a "Kantian point of view" and still found that Schutz strong dependence of Husserl's "phenomenological reduction" would make it very difficult to reach the kind of "conceptual scheme," which Parsons found essential for theory building in the social sciences.
Between 1940 and 1943, Parsons and Eric Voegelin
Eric Voegelin
Eric Voegelin, born Erich Hermann Wilhelm Vögelin, was a German-born American political philosopher. He was born in Cologne, then Imperial Germany, and educated in political science at the University of Vienna. He became a teacher and then an associate professor of political science at the...
(Vögelin) (1901–1985) exchanged their intellectual views through correspondence. Parsons had probably met Voegelin during 1938-39 when Voegelin held a temporary instructor appointment at Harvard. The bouncing point for their conversation was Parsons´' manuscript on anti-Semitism and other materials Parsons had sent to Voegelin. The discussion touched on the nature of capitalism
Capitalism
Capitalism is an economic system that became dominant in the Western world following the demise of feudalism. There is no consensus on the precise definition nor on how the term should be used as a historical category...
, the rise of the West and the origin of Nazism
Nazism
Nazism, the common short form name of National Socialism was the ideology and practice of the Nazi Party and of Nazi Germany...
. The key to this discussion was the implication of Max Weber's interpretation of the Protestant ethics and the impact of Calvinism
Calvinism
Calvinism is a Protestant theological system and an approach to the Christian life...
on modern history. Although the two scholars agree on many fundamental characteristics about Calvinism, their understanding of its historical impact was quite different. Generally, Voegelin regarded Calvinism as essentially a dangerous totalitarian ideology
Ideology
An ideology is a set of ideas that constitutes one's goals, expectations, and actions. An ideology can be thought of as a comprehensive vision, as a way of looking at things , as in common sense and several philosophical tendencies , or a set of ideas proposed by the dominant class of a society to...
; Parsons argued that these features of Calvinism
Calvinism
Calvinism is a Protestant theological system and an approach to the Christian life...
was temporary and that the functional implications of its long-term, emerging value-system had revolutionary and by no means simply "negative" impact on the general rise of the institutions of modernity. The two scholars also discussed Parsons' debate with Alfred Schutz
Alfred Schütz
Alfred Schütz was an Austrian social scientist, whose work bridged sociological and phenomenological traditions to form a social phenomenology, and who is gradually achieving recognition as one of the foremost philosophers of social science of the [twentieth] century.-Life:Schütz was born in...
(Schütz) and especially why Parsons had ended his encounter with Schutz. Parsons found that Schutz rather than attempting to build social science theory tended to get consumed in philosophical detours. In this regard Parsons wrote to Voegelin: "Possibly one of my troubles in my discussion with Schuetz lies in the fact that by cultural heritage I am a Calvinist. I do not want to be a philosopher – I shy away from the philosophical problems underlying my scientific work. By the same token I don't think he wants to be a scientist as I understand the term until he has settled all the underlying philosophical difficulties. If the physicists of the 17th century had been Schuetzes there might well have been no Newtonian system."
In 1942, Stuart C. Dodd
Stuart C. Dodd
Stuart Carter Dodd was an American sociologist and an educator, who published research on the Middle East and on mathematical sociology, and was a pioneer in scientific polling.- Biography :Stuart Dodd graduated from Princeton University in 1926...
published a major work called Dimensions of society, which attempted to build a general theory of society on the foundation of a mathematical and quantitative systematization of the Social Sciences. Especially, Dodd advanced a particular approach known as a "S-theory." Parsons discussed Dodd's theoretical outline in a review article the same year. Parsons acknowledge Dodd's contribution to be an exceedingly formidable work but at the same time he argued against its premises as a general paradigm for the social sciences
Social sciences
Social science is the field of study concerned with society. "Social science" is commonly used as an umbrella term to refer to a plurality of fields outside of the natural sciences usually exclusive of the administrative or managerial sciences...
. Parsons generally argued that Dodd's "S-theory," which included the socalled "social distance" scheme of Bogardus, was unable to construct a sufficiently sensitive and systematized theoretical matrix, compared with the "traditional" approach, which has developed around the lines of Max Weber
Max Weber
Karl Emil Maximilian "Max" Weber was a German sociologist and political economist who profoundly influenced social theory, social research, and the discipline of sociology itself...
, Vilfredo Pareto
Vilfredo Pareto
Vilfredo Federico Damaso Pareto , born Wilfried Fritz Pareto, was an Italian engineer, sociologist, economist, political scientist and philosopher. He made several important contributions to economics, particularly in the study of income distribution and in the analysis of individuals' choices....
, Émile Durkheim, Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...
, William Isaac Thomas
W. I. Thomas
William Isaac Thomas was an American sociologist. He is noted for his innovative work on the sociology of migration on which he co-operated with Florian Znaniecki, and for his formulation of what became known as the Thomas theorem, a fundamental principle of sociology: "If men define situations as...
, and other important agents of an action-system approach with a more clear dialogue with the cultural and motivational dimensions of human interaction.
In April 1944, Parsons participated in the conference "On Germany after the war," which was a conference of psychoanalytical oriented psychiatrists and a few social scientists with the aim of analyzing the causes of Nazism
Nazism
Nazism, the common short form name of National Socialism was the ideology and practice of the Nazi Party and of Nazi Germany...
and to discuss the principles for the coming occupation. During the conference Parsons opposed what he found to be Dr. Lawrence S. Kubie's reductionism. Dr. Lawrence S. Kubie was a psychoanalyst who strongly argued that the German national character was completely "destructive" and that it would be necessary for a special agency of the United Nation to control the German educational system directly. Parsons and many others at the conference were strongly opposed to Dr. Kubie's idea. Parsons argued that such an enterprise certainly would fail and he suggested that Dr. Kubie was viewing the question of German's reorientation "too exclusively in psychiatric terms." Parsons was also against the Morgenthau plan
Morgenthau Plan
The Morgenthau Plan, proposed by United States Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr., advocated that the Allied occupation of Germany following World War II include measures to eliminate Germany's ability to wage war.-Overview:...
, which was aired in September 1944. After the conference Parsons wrote an article called, "The Problem of Controlled Institutional Change," which essential was designed as an argument against the Morgenthau plan. Parsons participated as part-time adviser to the Foreign Economic Administration Agency between March and October 1945, where he participated in discussions about reparations and deindustrialization practices after the war. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences is an independent policy research center that conducts multidisciplinary studies of complex and emerging problems. The Academy’s elected members are leaders in the academic disciplines, the arts, business, and public affairs.James Bowdoin, John Adams, and...
in 1945.
Parsons takes charge at Harvard
Parsons situation at Harvard University changed significantly in early 1944 when he received a good offer from Northwestern University
Northwestern University
Northwestern University is a private research university in Evanston and Chicago, Illinois, USA. Northwestern has eleven undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools offering 124 undergraduate degrees and 145 graduate and professional degrees....
. Harvard reacted to the offer from Northwestern by appointing Parsons as the chairman of the department, promoting him to the rank of full professor and accepting the process of reorganization, which could lead to the establishment of the new department of Social Relations. Parsons letter to Dean Paul Buck of April 3, 1944 reveals the high point of this moment. Because of the new development at Harvard Parsons chose to decline an offer from William Langer
William Langer
William "Wild Bill" Langer was a prominent US politician from North Dakota. Langer is one of the most colorful characters in North Dakota history, most famously bouncing back from a scandal that forced him out of the governor's office and into prison. He served as the 17th and 21st Governor of...
about joining the O.S.S. (Office of Strategic Services
Office of Strategic Services
The Office of Strategic Services was a United States intelligence agency formed during World War II. It was the wartime intelligence agency, and it was a predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency...
). The assignment Langer proposed for Parsons was that Parsons should follow the American army in its march into Germany and function as a political adviser to the administration of the occupied territories. Late in 1944 under the auspices of the Cambridge Community Council Parsons directed a project together with Elizabeth Schlesinger, which investigated ethnic and racial tensions in the Boston
Boston
Boston is the capital of and largest city in Massachusetts, and is one of the oldest cities in the United States. The largest city in New England, Boston is regarded as the unofficial "Capital of New England" for its economic and cultural impact on the entire New England region. The city proper had...
area with students from Radcliffe College
Radcliffe College
Radcliffe College was a women's liberal arts college in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was the coordinate college for Harvard University. It was also one of the Seven Sisters colleges. Radcliffe College conferred joint Harvard-Radcliffe diplomas beginning in 1963 and a formal merger agreement with...
and Wellesley College in the role as interviewers. This study was a reaction to the upsurge of antisemitism in the Boston area, which began in late 1943 and continued into 1944. At the end of November 1946, the Social Research Council (SSRC) officially asked Parsons to write a comprehensive report of the topic of how the social sciences could contribute to the understanding of the modern world. The background was a controversy over whether the social sciences should be incorporated into the National Science Foundation. Parsons' report in form of a large memorandum called Social Science: A Basic National Resource became available in July 1948 and remains a powerful historical statement about how Talcott Parsons saw the role of the modern Social Sciences
Social sciences
Social science is the field of study concerned with society. "Social science" is commonly used as an umbrella term to refer to a plurality of fields outside of the natural sciences usually exclusive of the administrative or managerial sciences...
.
The Russian Research Center at Harvard
Parsons became a member of the Executive Committee of the newly established Russian Research Center at Harvard in 1948, which had Parsons' close friend and colleague, Clyde Kluckhohn
Clyde Kluckhohn
Clyde Kluckhohn , was an American anthropologist and social theorist, best known for his long-term ethnographic work among the Navajo and his contributions to the development of theory of culture within American anthropology.-Early life and education:...
, as its director. Parsons went to Allied-occupied Germany in the summer of 1948 where he functioned as a contact person on behalf of RRC who was interested in the Russian refugees who had been stranded in Germany. Among the people Parsons happened to interview while in Germany were a few members of the Vlasov movement, which was an anti-Stalinist Russian Liberation Movement
Russian Liberation Movement
Russian Liberation Movement is a term used to describe Russians during World War II who tried to create an anti-communist armed force which would topple the regime of Joseph Stalin...
who had collaborated with the Germans during the war. The movement was named after Andrey Vlasov
Andrey Vlasov
Andrey Andreyevich Vlasov or Wlassow was a Russian Red Army general who collaborated with Nazi Germany during World War II.-Early career:...
who was a brilliant Russian general captured by the Germans in June 1942. The Vlasov movement's ideology was a hybrid of elements but has been called "communism without Stalin" although in the Prague Manifesto
Prague Manifesto
The Prague Manifesto is a document that was created by several members of the Committee for the Liberation of the Peoples of Russia, an anti-communist coalition of former Soviet military and citizens who aimed to overthrow Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and establish a non-communist government in...
(1944) the Vlasovs moved toward the framework of a constitutional liberal state. While in Germany that summer of 1948 Parsons wrote several letters to Kluckhohn reporting on his intelligence-investigations.
Against Communism
Parsons' fight against Communism
Communism
Communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...
was a natural extension of his fight against fascism
Fascism
Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood...
in the 1930s and 1940s. For Parsons, communism and fascism were two aspects of the same problem; they both represented what Parsons in his discussion in his article "A Tentative Outline of American Values" (posthum, 1989) called collectivistic types of "empirical finalism," which he believed was a secular "mirror" of religious types of "salvationalism." In contrast, Parsons highlighted that American values generally was based on the principle of "instrumental activism," which he believed was the outcome of Puritanism as a historical process. It representing what Parsons called "worldly asceticism
Asceticism
Asceticism describes a lifestyle characterized by abstinence from various sorts of worldly pleasures often with the aim of pursuing religious and spiritual goals...
" and in that capacity, it represented the absolute opposite principle of empirical finalism. It is also in this light one shall understand Parsons' statement late in life that the greatest threat to Mankind was that of "fundamentalism
Fundamentalism
Fundamentalism is strict adherence to specific theological doctrines usually understood as a reaction against Modernist theology. The term "fundamentalism" was originally coined by its supporters to describe a specific package of theological beliefs that developed into a movement within the...
" in whatever form. By the term "empirical finalism" Parsons implied the type of claim assessed by cultural and ideological actors about the correct or "final" ends of particular patterns of value-orientation in the actual historical world (such as the notion of "a truly just society") which was absolutist and "indisputable" in its manner of declaration and in its function as a belief system. For example, the Jacobins behavior during the French Revolution would be a typical example of "empirical finalism." Parsons' rejection of communist and fascist totalitarianism was both theoretically and intellectually an integral part of his theory of world history, where Parsons tended to regard the European Reformation as the most crucial event in "modern" world history and where he like Max Weber tended to highlight the crucial impact of Calvinist religiosity in the socio-political and socio-economic processes, which followed; this development Parsons maintained reached its most radical form in England during the seventeenth century and gave in effect birth to the special cultural mode, which has characterized the American (United States) value-system and history ever since. Although it was not intended, the Calvinist faith-system, though authoritarian in the beginning, released in its long-term institutional effects a fundamental democratic revolution in the world; a revolution Parsons maintained was steadily unfolding as a part of the interpenetration of Puritan values in the world at large.
American exceptionalism
Parsons defended the notion of American exceptionalism
American exceptionalism
American exceptionalism refers to the theory that the United States is qualitatively different from other countries. In this view, America's exceptionalism stems from its emergence from a revolution, becoming "the first new nation," and developing a uniquely American ideology, based on liberty,...
, and argued that because of a variety of historical circumstances, the impact of the Reformation
Protestant Reformation
The Protestant Reformation was a 16th-century split within Western Christianity initiated by Martin Luther, John Calvin and other early Protestants. The efforts of the self-described "reformers", who objected to the doctrines, rituals and ecclesiastical structure of the Roman Catholic Church, led...
had reached a certain intensity in the history of Great Britain. Puritan, essentially Calvinist value-patterns had become institutionalized within the internal situation there. The outcome was that Puritan radicalism was reflected in the religious radicalism of the Puritan sects, in the poetry of John Milton
John Milton
John Milton was an English poet, polemicist, a scholarly man of letters, and a civil servant for the Commonwealth of England under Oliver Cromwell...
, in the English Civil War
English Civil War
The English Civil War was a series of armed conflicts and political machinations between Parliamentarians and Royalists...
and in the process coming to a head in the Glorious Revolution
Glorious Revolution
The Glorious Revolution, also called the Revolution of 1688, is the overthrow of King James II of England by a union of English Parliamentarians with the Dutch stadtholder William III of Orange-Nassau...
of 1688. It was the radical fling of Puritan revolution which provided settlers in early seventeenth colonial America
Colonial America
The colonial history of the United States covers the history from the start of European settlement and especially the history of the thirteen colonies of Britain until they declared independence in 1776. In the late 16th century, England, France, Spain and the Netherlands launched major...
, and the Puritans who settled in America represented the radical wing with regard to ideals of individuality, egalitarianism
Egalitarianism
Egalitarianism is a trend of thought that favors equality of some sort among moral agents, whether persons or animals. Emphasis is placed upon the fact that equality contains the idea of equity of quality...
, skepticism toward state power and the zeal of the religious calling. These settlers established something unique in the world, under the religious zeal of Calvinist values.
Therefore a new kind of nation was born, the character of which became clear by the time of the American Revolution
American Revolution
The American Revolution was the political upheaval during the last half of the 18th century in which thirteen colonies in North America joined together to break free from the British Empire, combining to become the United States of America...
and in the American constitution
United States Constitution
The Constitution of the United States is the supreme law of the United States of America. It is the framework for the organization of the United States government and for the relationship of the federal government with the states, citizens, and all people within the United States.The first three...
of 1787, and the dynamics of which later was studied by Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis de Tocqueville
Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville was a French political thinker and historian best known for his Democracy in America and The Old Regime and the Revolution . In both of these works, he explored the effects of the rising equality of social conditions on the individual and the state in...
. The French Revolution
French Revolution
The French Revolution , sometimes distinguished as the 'Great French Revolution' , was a period of radical social and political upheaval in France and Europe. The absolute monarchy that had ruled France for centuries collapsed in three years...
was an attempt to copy the American model, but it was essentially a process that failed. Although America has changed in its social composition since 1787, it preserves, Parsons maintained, the basic revolutionary Calvinist value-pattern. This development has been further revealed in the pluralist and highly individualized America with its thick, network-oriented civil society
Civil society
Civil society is composed of the totality of many voluntary social relationships, civic and social organizations, and institutions that form the basis of a functioning society, as distinct from the force-backed structures of a state , the commercial institutions of the market, and private criminal...
, which is of crucial importance to America's success, and these factors have provided the United States with its historical lead in the industrialized process.
This momentum, Parsons maintained, has continued to place the United States in the leading position in the world, but as a historical process and not in "the nature of things". As Parsons argued, the "highly special feature of the modern Western social world, dependent on the peculiar circumstances of its history, and not the necessary universal result of social development as a whole."
Defender of Modernity
In contrast to many "radicals," Parsons was a defender of modernity, he believed that modern civilization with its technology and its constantly evolving institutions was ultimately strong, vibrant and essentially progressive. He acknowledged that the future of Mankind had no inherent guarantees, yet at the same time as Robert J. Holton and Bryan S. Turner
Bryan S. Turner (sociologist)
Bryan S. Turner is a British and Australian sociologist . He was born in January 1945 to working class parents in Birmingham, England. Turner has led a remarkably nomadic life having held university appointments in England, Scotland, Australia, Germany, Holland, Singapore and the United States...
have said: Parsons was not nostalgic; he did not believe in the past as a lost "golden age" rather he maintained that modernity generally had improved the conditions of Man although often in troublesome and painful ways, yet in sum mankind's condition has generally progressed. In this way he had faith in Man, not naively but still believing in human beings potentials. When asked at the Brown seminary in 1973, whether he was optimistic about the future, he answered, "Oh, I think I'm basically optimistic about the human prospects in the long run." Parsons pointed out that he was student at Heidelberg
Heidelberg
-Early history:Between 600,000 and 200,000 years ago, "Heidelberg Man" died at nearby Mauer. His jaw bone was discovered in 1907; with scientific dating, his remains were determined to be the earliest evidence of human life in Europe. In the 5th century BC, a Celtic fortress of refuge and place of...
at the height of the vogue of Oswald Spengler
Oswald Spengler
Oswald Manuel Arnold Gottfried Spengler was a German historian and philosopher whose interests also included mathematics, science, and art. He is best known for his book The Decline of the West , published in 1918, which puts forth a cyclical theory of the rise and decline of civilizations...
, the author of Der Untergang des Abenlandes "and he didn't give the West more than 50 years of continuing vitality after the time he wrote ... Well, its more than 50 years later now, and I don't think the West has just simply declined. He was wrong in thinking it was the end."
Harvard Department of Social Relations, 1946
At Harvard, Parsons was instrumental in forming the Department of Social Relations
Harvard Department of Social Relations
The Department of Social Relations for Interdisciplinary Social Science Studies, more commonly known as the "Department of Social Relations" was an interdisciplinary collaboration among three of the social science departments at Harvard University beginning in 1946...
, an interdisciplinary venture among sociology, anthropology, and psychology. The new department was officially created in January 1946 with Talcott Parsons as the chairman and with prominent figures at the faculty such as Samuel Stouffer, Clyde Kluckhohn
Clyde Kluckhohn
Clyde Kluckhohn , was an American anthropologist and social theorist, best known for his long-term ethnographic work among the Navajo and his contributions to the development of theory of culture within American anthropology.-Early life and education:...
, Henry Murray
Henry Murray
Henry Alexander Murray was an American psychologist who taught for over 30 years at Harvard University. He was Director of the Harvard Psychological Clinic in the School of Arts and Sciences after 1930 and colluded with Stanley Cobb, Bullard Professor of Neuropathology at the Medical School to...
and Gordon Allport
Gordon Allport
Gordon Willard Allport was an American psychologist. Allport was one of the first psychologists to focus on the study of the personality, and is often referred to as one of the founding figures of personality psychology...
. An appointment for Hartshorne was considered but came to a bloody end, when Hartshorne was killed in Germany by an unknown gunman while driving on the highway. His position went instead to George C. Homans
George C. Homans
George Casper Homans was an American sociologist, founder of behavioral sociology and the exchange theory.Homans is best known for his research in social behavior and his works including The Human Group, Social Behavior: Its Elementary Forms, his exchange theory and the many different propositions...
. The new department was galvanized by Parsons' idea of creating a theoretical and institutional base for a unified social science. During this period Parsons also became strongly interested in systems theory and cybernetics and began to adopt their basic ideas and concepts to the realm of social science, especially the work of Norbert Wiener
Norbert Wiener
Norbert Wiener was an American mathematician.A famous child prodigy, Wiener later became an early researcher in stochastic and noise processes, contributing work relevant to electronic engineering, electronic communication, and control systems.Wiener is regarded as the originator of cybernetics, a...
(1894–1964) had his attention.
Some of the students who arrived at the Department of Social Relations in the years after the Second World War were: David Aberle, Gardner Lindzey, Harold Garfinkel
Harold Garfinkel
Harold Garfinkel was a Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is known for establishing and developing ethnomethodology as a field of inquiry in sociology.-Biography:...
, Benton Johnson, Marian Johnson, Naspar Naegele, James Olds, Albert Cohen, Norman Birnbaum, Jackson Toby, Robert Bellah, Joseph Kahl, Joseph Berger, Morris Zelditch, Renee Fox
Renee Fox
Renée C. Fox is an American sociologist and writer. She graduated summa cum laude from Smith College and earned her Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard University in 1954. She was a member of the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania, 1969–1999 as Annenberg Professor of the Social Sciences...
, Tom O'Dea, Ezra Vogel
Ezra Vogel
Ezra Feivel Vogel is an Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences Emeritus at Harvard University and has written on Japan, China, and Asia.-Early life:...
, Clifford Geertz
Clifford Geertz
Clifford James Geertz was an American anthropologist who is remembered mostly for his strong support for and influence on the practice of symbolic anthropology, and who was considered "for three decades...the single most influential cultural anthropologist in the United States." He served until...
, Joseph Elder, Theodore Mills, Mark Field and Francis Sutton. Renee Fox
Renee Fox
Renée C. Fox is an American sociologist and writer. She graduated summa cum laude from Smith College and earned her Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard University in 1954. She was a member of the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania, 1969–1999 as Annenberg Professor of the Social Sciences...
, who arrived at Harvard in 1949, would become a very close, personal friend of the Parsons family. Joseph Berger, who also arrived at Harvard in 1949, after finishing his B.A. from Brooklyn College
Brooklyn College
Brooklyn College is a senior college of the City University of New York, located in Brooklyn, New York, United States.Established in 1930 by the New York City Board of Higher Education, the College had its beginnings as the Downtown Brooklyn branches of Hunter College and the City College of New...
, would become Parsons' research assistant in the year 1952-53 and would get involved in Parsons' research projects with Robert F. Bales.
According to Parsons' own account, it was during his conversations with Elton Mayo
Elton Mayo
George Elton Mayo was an Australian psychologist, sociologist and organization theorist.He lectured at the University of Queensland from 1911 to 1923 before moving to the University of Pennsylvania, but spent most of his career at Harvard Business School , where he was professor of industrial...
(1880–1949) that he realized it was necessary for him to take a serious look at the work of Freud. In the fall of 1938 Parsons began to offer a series of non-credit evening courses on Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...
. As time passed, Parsons developed a strong interest in psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis is a psychological theory developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis has expanded, been criticized and developed in different directions, mostly by some of Freud's former students, such as Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav...
. He volunteered to participate in non-therapeutic training at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute, where he began a didactic analysis with Dr. Grete Bibring in September 1946. Insight into psychoanalysis is significantly reflected in his later work, especially reflected in The Social System and in his general writing on psychological issues and on the theory of socialization. This influence was also to some extent apparent in his empirical analysis of fascism during the war. Beside the work of Freud, also Wolgang Koehler's study of the mentality of apes and Kurt Koffka
Kurt Koffka
Kurt Koffka was a German psychologist. He was born and educated in Berlin and earned his PhD there in 1909 as a student of Carl Stumpf...
's ideas of Gestalt Psychology
Gestalt psychology
Gestalt psychology or gestaltism is a theory of mind and brain of the Berlin School; the operational principle of gestalt psychology is that the brain is holistic, parallel, and analog, with self-organizing tendencies...
had Parsons attention.
The Social System and Toward a General Theory of Action
During the late 1940s and early 1950s Parsons worked very hard on producing some major theoretical statements. In 1951 Parsons published two major theoretical works, The Social System and Toward a General Theory of Action. The latter work which was coauthored with Edward Tolman, Edward Shils and several others, was the outcome of the so-called Carnegie Seminar, which had taken place in the period of September 1949 and January 1950. The Social System represented Parsons first major attempt to present his basic outline of a general theory of society, since The Structure of Social Action (1937) can be regarded as the work, where he discussed the basic methodological and meta-theoretical principles for such a theory. The Social system attempted to present a general social system theory build systematically from it most basic premises and hence, it featured the idea of an interaction situation based on need-dispositions and facilitated through the basic concepts of cognitive, cathectic and evaluative orientation. By the same token the work also became known for the place, where Parsons introduced his famous pattern variables, which in reality represented choices distributed along a Gemeinschaft versus Gesellschaft axis. However, the way Parsons' thought about the outline of the social system went through a rapid series of re-editing processes in the follow years although the basic core remained. During the early 1950s the idea of the AGIL model took stepwise place in Parsons mind. According to Parsons the key idea to the AGIL scheme was sparked during Parsons' work with Robert F. Bales on the study of motivational processes in small groups. Parsons carried this idea into the major work he coauthored with his student Neil Smelser
Neil Smelser
Neil Joseph Smelser is an emeritus professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He was an active researcher from 1958 to 1994. His research has been on collective behavior....
, which was published in 1956 with the title Economy and Society, where the first rudimentary model of the AGIL scheme was presented. The AGIL scheme reorganized the basic concepts of the pattern variables in a new way and presented the solution within a system-theoretical approach using the idea of a cybernetic hierarchy as an organizing principle. The real innovation in the AGIL model was the concept of the "latent function" or the pattern maintenance function, which became the crucial key to the whole cybernetic hierarchy.
During this theoretical development Parsons showed a persistent interest in symbol
Symbol
A symbol is something which represents an idea, a physical entity or a process but is distinct from it. The purpose of a symbol is to communicate meaning. For example, a red octagon may be a symbol for "STOP". On a map, a picture of a tent might represent a campsite. Numerals are symbols for...
ism. An important statement in this regard was Parsons' article "The theory of symbolism in relation to action." This article was stimulated by a series of informal discussion group meetings, which Parsons and several other colleagues in the spring of 1951 had conducted with philosopher and semiotician Charles W. Morris
Charles W. Morris
Charles W. Morris was an American semiotician and philosopher.-Background:A son of Charles William and Laura Morris, Charles William Morris was born on May 23, 1901...
. Parsons interest in symbolism went hand in hand with his interest in Freud's theory and the paper "The Superego and the Theory of Social Systems," written in May, 1951, for the meeting of the American Psychiatric Association can be regarded as a main statement of his own Freud interpretation but also as a statement how Parsons try to use Freud's pattern of symbolization as a way to structure the theory of social system and eventually a way in which to codify the cybernetic hierarchy of the AGIL system within the parameter of a system of symbolic differentiation. His discussion of Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...
also contains several layers of criticism, which reveal that Parsons use of Freud is selective rather than orthodox. Especially he highlights in his critique of Freud that "Freud introduced an unreal separation between the superego and the ego."
Subscriber to system-theory, early 1950s
Parsons was an early subscriber to system-theory. Parsons had from early on been fascinated by the writing of Walter B. Cannon and his concept of homeostasis, as well as of the writings of French physiologist Claude Bernard
Claude Bernard
Claude Bernard was a French physiologist. He was the first to define the term milieu intérieur . Historian of science I. Bernard Cohen of Harvard University called Bernard "one of the greatest of all men of science"...
. His interest in system-theory had been further stimulated through his contract with L.J. Henderson. Parsons called the concept of "system" for an indispensable master concept in the work of building theoretical paradigms for the social sciences. From 1952 to 1957 Parsons participated in an ongoing Conference on System Theory under the chairmanship of Dr. Roy Grinker in Chicago. During these conferences Parsons came into contact with several prominent intellectuals of the time and he was particularly impressed by the ideas of social insect biologist Alfred Emerson. Parsons was especially compelled by Emerson's idea that in the sociocultural world, the functional equivalent of the gene was that of the "symbol." Parsons also participated in two of the meetings of the famous Macy conferences
Macy conferences
The Macy Conferences were a set of meetings of scholars from various disciplines held in New York by the initiative of Warren McCulloch and the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation from 1946 to 1953...
on system theory (and on issues which today is classified as cognitive science
Cognitive science
Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary scientific study of mind and its processes. It examines what cognition is, what it does and how it works. It includes research on how information is processed , represented, and transformed in behaviour, nervous system or machine...
), which took place in New York in the period from 1946–1953 and include scientists like John von Neumann
John von Neumann
John von Neumann was a Hungarian-American mathematician and polymath who made major contributions to a vast number of fields, including set theory, functional analysis, quantum mechanics, ergodic theory, geometry, fluid dynamics, economics and game theory, computer science, numerical analysis,...
. Parsons read widely in system theory at the time and read especially some of the works by Norbert Wiener
Norbert Wiener
Norbert Wiener was an American mathematician.A famous child prodigy, Wiener later became an early researcher in stochastic and noise processes, contributing work relevant to electronic engineering, electronic communication, and control systems.Wiener is regarded as the originator of cybernetics, a...
and William Ross Ashby
William Ross Ashby
W. Ross Ashby was an English psychiatrist and a pioneer in cybernetics, the study of complex systems. His first name was not used: he was known as Ross Ashby....
who also were part of the core participants in the Macy Conferences. Around the same time Parsons also benefited from conversations with political scientist Karl Deutsch
Karl Deutsch
Karl Wolfgang Deutsch was a Czech social and political scientist from a German speaking family. His work focused on the study of war and peace, nationalism, co-operation and communication...
over the concept of system theory. In one conference, the Fourth Conference of the problems of consciousness
Consciousness
Consciousness is a term that refers to the relationship between the mind and the world with which it interacts. It has been defined as: subjectivity, awareness, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind...
, taking place in March 1953 at Princeton and sponsored by the Macy Foundation, Parsons would give a presentation on "Conscious and Symbolic Processes" and embark in an intensive group discussion which included exchange with child psychologist Jean Piaget
Jean Piaget
Jean Piaget was a French-speaking Swiss developmental psychologist and philosopher known for his epistemological studies with children. His theory of cognitive development and epistemological view are together called "genetic epistemology"....
. Among the other participants in the Conference were Mary A.B. Brazier, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann
Frieda Fromm-Reichmann
Frieda Fromm-Reichmann was a German psychiatrist and contemporary of Sigmund Freud who emigrated to America during World War II.-Life and work:...
, Nathaniel Kleitman
Nathaniel Kleitman
Nathaniel Kleitman was Professor Emeritus in Physiology at the University of Chicago. Author of the seminal 1939 book Sleep and Wakefulness, he is recognized as the father of American sleep research...
, Margaret Mead
Margaret Mead
Margaret Mead was an American cultural anthropologist, who was frequently a featured writer and speaker in the mass media throughout the 1960s and 1970s....
and Gregory Zilboorg
Gregory Zilboorg
Gregory Zilboorg was a psychoanalyst and historian of psychiatry who is remembered for situating psychiatry within a broad sociological and humanistic context in his many writings and lectures....
. During the Conference Parsons would defend the thesis that consciousness
Consciousness
Consciousness is a term that refers to the relationship between the mind and the world with which it interacts. It has been defined as: subjectivity, awareness, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind...
was essentially a social action phenomenon and not primarily a "biological" one. During the conference Parsons criticized Jean Piaget
Jean Piaget
Jean Piaget was a French-speaking Swiss developmental psychologist and philosopher known for his epistemological studies with children. His theory of cognitive development and epistemological view are together called "genetic epistemology"....
for not sufficiently separating cultural factors from a physiologistic concept of "energy."
The McCarthy era, 1952
During the McCarthy era, on April 1, 1952, J. Edgar Hoover
J. Edgar Hoover
John Edgar Hoover was the first Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation of the United States. Appointed director of the Bureau of Investigation—predecessor to the FBI—in 1924, he was instrumental in founding the FBI in 1935, where he remained director until his death in 1972...
received a personal letter from an informant who reported on Communist activities at Harvard. During a later interview the informant claimed that "Professor Talcott Parsons ... was probably the leader of an inner group" of Communist sympathizers at Harvard. The informant reported that the old department under Sorokin had been conservative and consisted of "loyal Americans of good character," but that the new department of Social Relation had turned into a decisive left wing place as a result of "Parsons' manipulations and machinations." Based on this evidence Hoover granted on October 27, 1952, Boston FBI authorization to initiate a security-type investigation on Parsons. In February 1954, Parsons' colleague Samuel Stouffer wrote to Parsons, who was located in England and informed him that he, Stouffer, had been denied access to classified documents and a part of the stated reason was that Stouffer knew Communists, including Talcott Parsons "who was a member of the Communist Party." Parsons immediately wrote a sworn affidavit in defense of Stouffer, where he also defended himself against the charges. In the affidavit Parsons wrote, "This allegation is so preposterous that I cannot understand how any reasonable person could come to the conclusion that I was a member of the Communist Party or ever had been." In a personal letter to Stouffer, Parsons wrote, "I will fight for you against this evil with everything there is in me: I am in it with you to the death." The charges against Parsons resulted in Parsons being unable to participate in a UNESCO conference and it was not until January 1955 that he was acquitted of the charges.
Since the late 1930s Parsons had continued to show great interest in psychology
Psychology
Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...
and in psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis is a psychological theory developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis has expanded, been criticized and developed in different directions, mostly by some of Freud's former students, such as Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav...
. In the academic year of 1955-56, he taught a seminar at Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute
Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute
The Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute is a psychoanalytic research, training, education facility that is affiliated with the American Psychoanalytic Association and the International Psychoanalytic Association...
entitled "Sociology and Psychoanalysis." In 1956, he published a major work entitled Family, Socialization and Interaction Process which explored the way in which psychology (and psychoanalysis) bounce into the theories of motivation
Motivation
Motivation is the driving force by which humans achieve their goals. Motivation is said to be intrinsic or extrinsic. The term is generally used for humans but it can also be used to describe the causes for animal behavior as well. This article refers to human motivation...
and socialization
Socialization
Socialization is a term used by sociologists, social psychologists, anthropologists, political scientists and educationalists to refer to the process of inheriting and disseminating norms, customs and ideologies...
, as well into the question of kinship, which for Parsons established the fundamental axis for that subsystem he later would call "the social community." This work contained articles written by Parsons alone as well as articles written in collaboration with Robert F. Bales, James Olds
James Olds
James Olds was an American psychologist who co-discovered the reward center of the brain with Peter Milner while he was a postdoctoral fellow at McGill University in 1954...
, Morris Zelditch, Jr., and Philip E. Slater. The work included a theory of personality
Personality psychology
Personality psychology is a branch of psychology that studies personality and individual differences. Its areas of focus include:* Constructing a coherent picture of the individual and his or her major psychological processes...
as well as studies of role-differentiation. The strongest intellectual stimuli in this period, Parsons most likely got from brain-researcher James Olds
James Olds
James Olds was an American psychologist who co-discovered the reward center of the brain with Peter Milner while he was a postdoctoral fellow at McGill University in 1954...
, who was one of the founders of neuroscience
Neuroscience
Neuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system. Traditionally, neuroscience has been seen as a branch of biology. However, it is currently an interdisciplinary science that collaborates with other fields such as chemistry, computer science, engineering, linguistics, mathematics,...
and Olds' book from 1955 on the question of learning and motivation is strongly influenced from his conversations with Parsons. Some of the ideas in the book Parsons had submitted in an intellectual brain-storm in an informal "work group," which he had organized which consisted in part of Joseph Berger, William Caudill, Frank E. Jones, Kaspar D. Naegele, Theodore M. Mills and Bengt G. Rundblad. In addition professor Albert J. Reiss from the Vanderbilt University had submitted his critical commentary. During the mid-1950s, Parsons also had extensive discussions with Olds about the motivational structure of psychosomatic problems and Parsons' concept of psychosomatic problems at the time was strongly influence by readings and direct conversations with Franz Alexander
Franz Alexander
Franz Gabriel Alexander was a Hungarian-American psychoanalyst and physician, who is considered one of the founders of psychosomatic medicine and psychoanalytic criminology.- Life :...
(a psychoanalyst (originally associated with Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute) who was a pioneer of psychosomatic medicine), Roy Grinker and John Spiegel.
In 1955, Francois Bourricaud was preparing a reader of some of Parsons work for a French audience and Parsons who wrote a preface for the book called "Au lecteur francais", also went over Bourricaud's introduction very carefully. In his correspondence with Bourricaud, Parsons insisted that he did not necessarily treat values as the only let alone "the primary empirical reference point" of the action system, since so many other factors was involved in the actual historical pattern of an action situation.
Center of Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, 1957-58
Parsons spent the year 1957-58 at the center of Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto, California
Palo Alto, California
Palo Alto is a California charter city located in the northwest corner of Santa Clara County, in the San Francisco Bay Area of California, United States. The city shares its borders with East Palo Alto, Mountain View, Los Altos, Los Altos Hills, Stanford, Portola Valley, and Menlo Park. It is...
where he, for the first time in his life, met Kenneth Burke
Kenneth Burke
Kenneth Duva Burke was a major American literary theorist and philosopher. Burke's primary interests were in rhetoric and aesthetics.-Personal history:...
whose flamboyant, explosive temperament made a great impression on Parsons. The two men became close friends. Parsons explained in a letter the impression Burke had left on him: "The big thing to me is that Burke more than anyone else has helped me to fill a major gap in my own theoretical interests, in the field of the analysis of expressive symbolism."
Another scholar Parsons met while at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Bahvioral Sciences at Palo Alto was Alfred L. Kroeber
Alfred L. Kroeber
Alfred Louis Kroeber was an American anthropologist. He was the first professor appointed to the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, and played an integral role in the early days of its Museum of Anthropology, where he served as director from 1909 through...
who at the time was the "dean of American anthropologists." Kroeber who had received his Ph.D. at Columbia and who had worked with the Arapaho Indians, was about 81 years old when he met Parsons. Parsons had the greatest admiration of Kroeber and called him "my favorite elder statesman." While in Palo Alto, Kroeber suggested to Parsons that they wrote a joint statement together, which purpose it was to clarify the distinction between cultural and social systems, which in those day was the subject of endless debates. In October 1958, Parsons and Kroeber published their joint statement in a small article, which became highly influential. Parsons and Kroeber declared in the article that it was important to keep a clear distinction between the two concepts and to avoid a methodology by which the one would be reduced to the other.
Discussion of Parsons' writings, late 1950s
During the academic year of 1955-56, a group of faculty members at Cornell University
Cornell University
Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...
met regularly and discussed Parsons' writings. In the next academic year a series of seven widely attended public seminars followed culminating in a session at which Parsons himself answered his critics. The discussions in these seminars was summed up in a joined publication edited by Max Black entitled The Social Theories of Talcott Parsons: A Critical Examination and included an essay by Parsons called "The point of view of the author." The scholars included in the volume were Edward C. Devereux, Jr., Robin M. Williams, Jr., Chandler Morse, Alfred L. Baldwin, Urie Bronfenbrenner
Urie Bronfenbrenner
Urie Bronfenbrenner was a Russian American psychologist, known for developing his Ecological Systems Theory, and as a co-founder of the Head Start program in the United States for disadvantaged pre-school children....
, Henry A. Landsberger, William Foote Whyte
William Foote Whyte
William Foote Whyte was a sociologist chiefly known for his ethnological study in urban sociology, Street Corner Society...
, Max Black
Max Black
Max Black was a British-American philosopher, who was a leading influential figure in analytic philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century. He made contributions to the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mathematics and science, and the philosophy of art, also publishing studies...
and Andrew Hacker. The contributions converted many angles including personality theory, organizational theory and various methodological discussions. Parsons' essay is particularly notable because it, together with another essay published in 1960 and called "Pattern Variables Revisited," represents one of the most full-scale account of the basic elements of his theoretical strategy and the general principles behind his approach to theory building. The essay also included although in meta-theoretical terms a criticism of the theoretical foundations for the so-called "conflict theory
Conflict theory
Conflict theories are perspectives in social science that emphasize the social, political or material inequality of a social group, that critique the broad socio-political system, or that otherwise detract from structural functionalism and ideological conservativism...
".
Starting from the late 1950s and culminating during the student rebellion in the 1960s and its aftermath, Parsons' theory was relentlessly attacked from scholars and intellectuals of the left. A massive campaign took form in which Parsons' theory through various channels of criticism was cried out to be
- inherently conservative, if not reactionary and fascist. Gouldner went so far as claiming that Parsons had been an opponent of the New Deal. Parsons' theory was further regarded as
- completely unable to reflect social change, human suffering, poverty, deprivation and conflict. Theda SkocpolTheda SkocpolTheda Skocpol is an American sociologist and political scientist at Harvard University. She served from 2005 to 2007 as Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. She is influential in sociology as an advocate of the historical-institutional and comparative approaches, and well-known in...
was of the belief that Apartheid system in South Africa was the ultimate proof that Parsons' theory was "wrong." At the same time, - Parsons idea of the individual was seen as completely "oversocialized," "repressive," or subjugated in normative "conformity," if not downright fascist.
- In addition, Jürgen HabermasJürgen HabermasJürgen Habermas is a German sociologist and philosopher in the tradition of critical theory and pragmatism. He is perhaps best known for his theory on the concepts of 'communicative rationality' and the 'public sphere'...
and countless others were of the belief that Parsons' system-theory and his action-theory was inherently opposed, indeed, hostile to each other and that Parsons' system theory was especially "mechanical," "positivistic," "anti-individualistic," "anti-voluntaristic" "de-humanizing" by the sheer nature of its intrinsic theoretical context. By the same token, - Parsons' evolutionary theory was regarded as "uni-linear," "mechanical," "biologistic," and nothing but an ode to would-system status-qua or simply an ill-concealed instruction manual for "the capitalist nation-state."
The first manifestations of this branch of criticism would be intellectuals like Lewis Coser, Ralf Dahrendorf
Ralf Dahrendorf
Ralf Gustav Dahrendorf, Baron Dahrendorf, KBE, FBA was a German-British sociologist, philosopher, political scientist and liberal politician....
, David Lockwood, John Rex, C.W. Mills, Tom Bottomore and Alvin Gouldner among other.
Early 1960s
Parsons voted for John F. Kennedy
John F. Kennedy
John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy , often referred to by his initials JFK, was the 35th President of the United States, serving from 1961 until his assassination in 1963....
on November 8, 1960; since 1923 with one exception Parsons would vote for Democrats all his life. He discussed the Kennedy election widely in his correspondence at the time. Parsons was especially interested in the symbolic implications involved in the fact of Kennedy's Catholic background for the implications for United States as an integral community. (It was the first time a Catholic became President of the United States). In a letter to Robert Bellah, he wrote: "I am sure you have been greatly intrigued by the involvement of the religious issue in our election." Parsons who described himself as a "Stevenson Democrat," was especially enthusiastic about that his favored politician Adlai Stevenson had been appointed Ambassador to the United Nation. Parsons had persistently voted for Stevenson in both of the years he had run for election and was greatly disappointed that Stevenson twice was rejected by the American voters.
In the early 1960s it became obvious that Parsons' ideas had a great impact on much of the theories of modernization
Modernization
In the social sciences, modernization or modernisation refers to a model of an evolutionary transition from a 'pre-modern' or 'traditional' to a 'modern' society. The teleology of modernization is described in social evolutionism theories, existing as a template that has been generally followed by...
at the time. His influence was very extensive yet at the same time the concrete adoption of his theory was often quite selective, half-hearted, superficial and at times utterly confused. In this way, many of the modernization theorists never used the full power of Parsons theory but concentrated on some formalist formula, which often was taken out of context with the deeper meaning by which Parsons originally had introduced them. Nonetheless, works such as Gabriel A. Almond and James S. Coleman, The Politics of the Developing Areas, as well as works by Karl W. Deutsch, S.N. Eisenstadt, Seymour Martin Lipset
Seymour Martin Lipset
Seymour Martin Lipset was an American political sociologist, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, and the Hazel Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University. His major work was in the fields of political sociology, trade union organization, social stratification, public opinion, and...
, Samuel Huntington
Samuel Huntington
Samuel Huntington may refer to:* Samuel Huntington , American jurist, statesman, and revolutionary leader* Samuel H. Huntington , American jurist* Samuel P. Huntington , American political scientist...
, David E. Apter, Lucian W. Pye, Sidney Verba
Sidney Verba
Sidney Verba is an American political scientist, librarian and library administrator. His academic interests are mainly American and comparative politics. He was the Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor at Harvard University. He also served Harvard as the director of the Harvard University...
and Chalmer Johnson among others were was importantly influenced by Talcott Parsons in some way or another. Indeed, it was the intensive influence of Parsons ideas in Political Sociology, which originally made a scholar like William Buxton interested in Parsons work. In addition, a scholar like David Easton
David Easton
David Easton is a Canadian political scientist who was born in Toronto, Ontario, went to the United States in 1943, and is currently Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Irvine.He is a former President of the American Political...
would claim that in the history of Political Science, the two scholars who had made any serious attempt to construct a general theory for Political Science on the issue of political support were was himself and Talcott Parsons.
One of the scholars Parsons corresponded extensively with during his lifetime and whose opinion he highly valued was Robert N. Bellah
Robert N. Bellah
Robert Neelly Bellah is an American sociologist, now the Elliott Professor of Sociology, Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. Bellah is best known for his work related to "American civil religion"...
. Parsons' discussion with Bellah would cover a wide range of topics including the theology of Paul Tillich
Paul Tillich
Paul Johannes Tillich was a German-American theologian and Christian existentialist philosopher. Tillich was one of the most influential Protestant theologians of the 20th century...
. The correspondence would continue when Bellah in the early fall of 1960 went to Japan in order to study Japanese religion and ideology. In August 1960, Parsons sent Bellah a draft of his paper on "The Religious Background of the American Value System" and ask for his commentary. In a letter to Bellah of September 30, 1960, Parsons discussed his reading of Perry Miller
Perry Miller
Perry G. Miller was an American intellectual historian and Harvard University professor. He was an authority on American Puritanism, and a founder of the field of American Studies. Alfred Kazin referred to him as "the master of American intellectual history"...
's An Errand into the Wilderness. Parsons wrote that Miller's discussion of the role of Calvinism
Calvinism
Calvinism is a Protestant theological system and an approach to the Christian life...
"in the early New England theology
New England theology
New England theology, in the technical sense of these words, designates a special school of theology which grew up among the Congregationalists of New England, originating in the year 1732, when Jonathan Edwards began his constructive theological work, culminating a little before the American Civil...
... is a first rate and fit beautifully with the broad position I have taken." Perry Miller
Perry Miller
Perry G. Miller was an American intellectual historian and Harvard University professor. He was an authority on American Puritanism, and a founder of the field of American Studies. Alfred Kazin referred to him as "the master of American intellectual history"...
(1905–1963) was a literary Harvard historian whose books such as The New England Mind established new standards for the writing of American cultural and religious history. Miller remain one of Parsons most favoured historians throughout his life. Indeed, religion
Religion
Religion is a collection of cultural systems, belief systems, and worldviews that establishes symbols that relate humanity to spirituality and, sometimes, to moral values. Many religions have narratives, symbols, traditions and sacred histories that are intended to give meaning to life or to...
had always a special place in Parsons heart, although his son in an interview maintained that he didn't really think that his father was "religious." Throughout his life Parsons interacted with a broad range of intellectuals and others who took a deep interest in religious belief systems, doctrines and institutions. One notable person among these people who Parsons interacted with in this regard was Maria Augusta Neal who was a Catholic sister of Notre Dame de Namur, who would send Parsons countless of her manuscripts and invite him to Conferences and intellectual events in the Catholic Church. Maria Augusta Neal received her Ph.D. from Harvard under Parsons supervision in 1963 and would eventually became professor at Emmanuel College in Boston. Maria Augusta Neal was great enthusiastic about the Second Vatican Council and became known for the National Sisters Survey, which aimed at improving women's right in the Catholic Church.
Parsons and Winston White wrote together an article called "The Link Between Character and Society," which was published in 1961. Parsons and White's article was a critical discussion of David Riesman
David Riesman
David Riesman , was a sociologist, attorney, and educator....
's The Lonely Crowd, which had been published a decade earlier and which had turned into an unexpected bestseller reaching 1 million sold copies in 1977. Riesman was a prominent member of the American academic left influenced by Erich Fromm
Erich Fromm
Erich Seligmann Fromm was a Jewish German-American social psychologist, psychoanalyst, sociologist, humanistic philosopher, and democratic socialist. He was associated with what became known as the Frankfurt School of critical theory.-Life:Erich Fromm was born on March 23, 1900, at Frankfurt am...
and the Frankfurt School
Frankfurt School
The Frankfurt School refers to a school of neo-Marxist interdisciplinary social theory, particularly associated with the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt am Main...
. In reality, Riesman's book was an academic attempt to give credit to the concept of "mass society
Mass society
Mass society is a description associated with society in the modern, industrial era. "Guided by the structural-functional approach and drawing on the ideas of Tönnies, Durkheim, and Weber, understands modernity as the emergence of a mass society...
" and especially to the idea of an America suffocated in social conformity. Riesman had essentially argued that at the emerging of highly advanced capitalism
Capitalism
Capitalism is an economic system that became dominant in the Western world following the demise of feudalism. There is no consensus on the precise definition nor on how the term should be used as a historical category...
, the America basic value-system and its socializing roles had change from an "inner-directed" toward an "other-directed" pattern of value-orientation. Parsons and White challenged Riesman's idea and argued that there had been no change away from an inner-directed personality structure. While noticing that Riesman's "other-directness" look like a caricature of Cooley's looking-glass self, they argued that the framework of "institutional individualism" as the basic code-structure of America's normative system had essentially not changed. What had happen, however, was that the industrialized process and its increased pattern of societal differentiation had changed the family's generalized symbolic function in society and had allowed for a greater permissiveness in the way the child related to his parents. This, however, Parsons and White argued was not the prelude to greater "otherdirectness" but a more complicated way by which inner-directed pattern situated itself in the social environment.
Political power and the concept of Influence, 1963
1963 became a notable year in Parsons's theoretical development because it was the year when he published two important articles; one on political power
Political power
Political power is a type of power held by a group in a society which allows administration of some or all of public resources, including labour, and wealth. There are many ways to obtain possession of such power. At the nation-state level political legitimacy for political power is held by the...
and one on the concept of influence
Social influence
Social influence occurs when an individual's thoughts, feelings or actions are affected by other people. Social influence takes many forms and can be seen in conformity, socialization, peer pressure, obedience, leadership, persuasion, sales, and marketing...
. The two articles represented Parsons's first published attempt to work out the idea of Generalized Symbolic Media as an integral part of the exchange processes within the AGIL system. This was a theoretical development, which Parsons had worked on ever since the publication of Economy and Society (1956). The prime model for the generalized symbolic media was money
Money
Money is any object or record that is generally accepted as payment for goods and services and repayment of debts in a given country or socio-economic context. The main functions of money are distinguished as: a medium of exchange; a unit of account; a store of value; and, occasionally in the past,...
and Parsons was reflecting on the question whether the functional characteristics of money represented an exclusive uniqueness of the economic system or whether it was possible to identify other generalized symbolic media in other subsystems as well. Although each medium had unique characteristics, Parsons claimed that power (for the political system
Political system
A political system is a system of politics and government. It is usually compared to the legal system, economic system, cultural system, and other social systems...
) and influence
Social influence
Social influence occurs when an individual's thoughts, feelings or actions are affected by other people. Social influence takes many forms and can be seen in conformity, socialization, peer pressure, obedience, leadership, persuasion, sales, and marketing...
(for the societal community) had institutional functions, which essentially was structurally similar to the general systemic function of money. Utilizing Roman Jakobson
Roman Jakobson
Roman Osipovich Jakobson was a Russian linguist and literary theorist.As a pioneer of the structural analysis of language, which became the dominant trend of twentieth-century linguistics, Jakobson was among the most influential linguists of the century...
's idea of "code" and "message," Parsons divided the components of the media into a question of value-principle versus coordination standards for the "code-structure" and the question of factor versus product control within those social process which carried the "message" components. In this way, while "utility" could be regarded as the value-principle for the economy
Economy
An economy consists of the economic system of a country or other area; the labor, capital and land resources; and the manufacturing, trade, distribution, and consumption of goods and services of that area...
(medium: money), "effectiveness" was the value-principle for the political system
Political system
A political system is a system of politics and government. It is usually compared to the legal system, economic system, cultural system, and other social systems...
(medium: political power
Political power
Political power is a type of power held by a group in a society which allows administration of some or all of public resources, including labour, and wealth. There are many ways to obtain possession of such power. At the nation-state level political legitimacy for political power is held by the...
) and solidarity for the societal community (medium: influence
Social influence
Social influence occurs when an individual's thoughts, feelings or actions are affected by other people. Social influence takes many forms and can be seen in conformity, socialization, peer pressure, obedience, leadership, persuasion, sales, and marketing...
). Parsons would eventually chose the concept of value-commitment as the generalized symbolic medium for the fiduciary system with integrity
Integrity
Integrity is a concept of consistency of actions, values, methods, measures, principles, expectations, and outcomes. In ethics, integrity is regarded as the honesty and truthfulness or accuracy of one's actions...
as the value-principle.
In August 1963 Parsons got a new research assistant, Victor Lidz, who would become an important collaborator and colleague. In 1964 Parsons flew to Heidelberg in Germany in order to celebrate the 100th birthday of Max Weber
Max Weber
Karl Emil Maximilian "Max" Weber was a German sociologist and political economist who profoundly influenced social theory, social research, and the discipline of sociology itself...
and discuss Weber's work with Jürgen Habermas, Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse was a German Jewish philosopher, sociologist and political theorist, associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory...
and others. Parsons delivered his paper "Evaluation and Objectivity in Social Science: An Interpretation of Max Weber's Contribution." The meeting became in reality a clash between pro-Weberian scholars and the representatives for the Frankfurther School. Before leaving for Germany Parsons discussed the upcoming meeting with Reinhard Bendix
Reinhard Bendix
Reinhard Bendix was a German American sociologist.Born in Berlin, Germany, he briefly belonged to Neu beginnen and Hashomer Hatzair, groups that resisted the Nazis. In 1938 he emigrated to the United States. He received his B.S., M.A., and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, and subsequently...
and commented that "I am afraid I will be something of a Daniel in the Lion's den." Bendix wrote back and told Parsons that Marcuse in his ears sounded very much like Christoph Steding (who was a Nazi philosopher).
Parsons conducted a persistent correspondence with noted scholar Benjamin Nelson, with whom he shared a common interest in the rise and destiny of civilizations, a correspondence which only ceased with Nelson's death in 1977. The two scholars also shared a common enthusiasm for the work of Max Weber and the two scholars would generally agree on the main interpretative approach to the study of Weber. Benjamin Nelson had participated in the Weber Centennial in Heidelberg and during the conference Nelson had got into a violent argument with Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse
Herbert Marcuse was a German Jewish philosopher, sociologist and political theorist, associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory...
, whom he accused to tarnish Weber's name. In reading the written version of Nelson' s contribution to the Weber Centennial, Parsons wrote, "I cannot let the occasion pass without a word of congratulations which is strong enough so that if it were concert I should shout bravo." In several letters Nelson would keep Parsons informed of the often turbulent leftist environment of Herbert Marcuse. In the letter of September 1967, Nelson would tell Parsons how much he enjoyed reading Parsons' essay on "Kinship and the associational Aspect of Social Structure." Also, among the scholars on whom Parsons and Nelson would share internal commentaries was the work of Jürgen Habermas
Jürgen Habermas
Jürgen Habermas is a German sociologist and philosopher in the tradition of critical theory and pragmatism. He is perhaps best known for his theory on the concepts of 'communicative rationality' and the 'public sphere'...
.
Mark Gould was educated at Reed College
Reed College
Reed College is a private, independent, liberal arts college located in southeast Portland, Oregon. Founded in 1908, Reed is a residential college with a campus located in Portland's Eastmoreland neighborhood, featuring architecture based on the Tudor-Gothic style, and a forested canyon wilderness...
in Portland, Oregon
Portland, Oregon
Portland is a city located in the Pacific Northwest, near the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers in the U.S. state of Oregon. As of the 2010 Census, it had a population of 583,776, making it the 29th most populous city in the United States...
, at the time a center for political radicalism. At Reed, Gould's theoretical interest was sparked by Professor Howard Jolly's exegesis of Parsons. Gould decided that he wanted to study with Parsons and arrived at Harvard in the fall of 1967 and entered Parsons' office, at their first meeting, with hair down to his shoulders, with a wild beard and dressed in the colorful manners of the late sixties. Gould would become Parsons' research assistant by the summer of 1968. Parsons was opposed to the Vietnam War
Vietnam War
The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War and was fought between North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of...
, yet he was disturbed by what he considered the anti-intellectual tendency in the student rebellion, where serious debate often was substituted by handy slogans by Marx
Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement...
, Mao
Mao Zedong
Mao Zedong, also transliterated as Mao Tse-tung , and commonly referred to as Chairman Mao , was a Chinese Communist revolutionary, guerrilla warfare strategist, Marxist political philosopher, and leader of the Chinese Revolution...
and Fidel Castro
Fidel Castro
Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz is a Cuban revolutionary and politician, having held the position of Prime Minister of Cuba from 1959 to 1976, and then President from 1976 to 2008. He also served as the First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba from the party's foundation in 1961 until 2011...
. Gould, who was thrown out by the state police from University Hall (at Harvard) early in the morning on April 10, 1969, often had heated discussions with Parsons about politics and society in Parsons' office, yet as Gould insisted these dialogues were always theoretically fruitful.
1960s: Toward a concept of the societal community: Ethnicity, kinship and diffuse solidarity
Talcott Parsons had for years corresponded with his former graduate student David M. Schneider
David M. Schneider
David Murray Schneider was an American cultural anthropologist, best known for his studies of kinship and as a major proponent of the symbolic anthropology approach to cultural anthropology. He received his B.S. in 1940 and his M.S. from Cornell University in 1941...
who had taught at the University of California Berkeley before he in 1960 accepted a position as professor in Anthropology at the University of Chicago
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...
. Schneider had received his Ph.D. at Harvard in Social Anthropology in 1949 and had become a leading expert in the American kinship system. Schneider had in 1968 published American Kinship: A cultural account, which became a classic within the field and he had sent Parsons a copy of the copy-edited manuscript before publication. Parsons was highly appreciative of Schneider's work and Schneider became in many ways a crucial bouncing-point for Parsons' own attempt to understand the fundamental elements of the American kinship system, which for him was a key to understand the factor of ethnicity and especially to build up the theoretical foundation of his concept of the societal community, which by the beginning of the early 1970s had begun to become a strong priority in the number of theoretical projects, which occupied his intellectual life. Among other things Parsons borrowed the term "diffuse enduring solidarity" from Schneider as a major concept for his own considerations regarding the theoretical construction of the concept of the societal community. In the spring of 1968 Parsons and Schneider discussed Clifford Geertz
Clifford Geertz
Clifford James Geertz was an American anthropologist who is remembered mostly for his strong support for and influence on the practice of symbolic anthropology, and who was considered "for three decades...the single most influential cultural anthropologist in the United States." He served until...
's article on religion as a cultural system in regard to which Parsons wrote a review article. Parsons, who was a close friend of Geertz, was puzzled over Geertz's article. In a letter to David Schneider, Parsons spoke about "the rather sharp strictures on what he (Geertz) calls the extremely narrow intellectual tradition with special reference to Weber, but also to Durkheim. My basic point is in this respect, he greatly overstated his case seeming to argue that this intellectual tradition was by now irrelevant." David Schneider wrote back to Parsons, "So much, so often, as I read Cliff's stuff I cannot get a clear consistent picture of just what the religious system consist in instead only how it is said to work."
In a letter of July 1968 to Gene Tanke of the University of California Press, Parsons offers a critical note on the state of Psychoanalytical theory and writes: "The use of psychoanalytical theory in interpretation of social and historical subject matter is somewhat hazardous enterprise, and a good deal of nosense has been written in the name of such attempts." Around 1969, Parsons was approached by the prestigious Encyclopedia of the History of Idea about writing an entrance in the encyclopedia on the topic of the "Sociology of Knowledge." Parsons accepted and wrote one of his most powerful essays entitled "The Sociology of Knowledge and the History of Ideas" during the period of 1969-1970. In this essay Parsons discussed how the Sociology of knowledge
Sociology of knowledge
The Sociology of knowledge is the study of the relationship between human thought and the social context within which it arises, and of the effects prevailing ideas have on societies...
as a modern intellectual discipline had emerged out of the dynamics of European intellectual history reaching a kind of cutting point in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher from Königsberg , researching, lecturing and writing on philosophy and anthropology at the end of the 18th Century Enlightenment....
and further explored by Hegel yet reaching its first "classical" formulation in the writing of Karl Mannheim
Karl Mannheim
Karl Mannheim , or Károly Mannheim in the original writing of his name, was a Jewish Hungarian-born sociologist, influential in the first half of the 20th century and one of the founding fathers of classical sociology and a founder of the sociology of knowledge.-Life:Mannheim studied in Budapest,...
, whose brilliance Parsons acknowledged yet also found himself in opposition to, since Mannheim never betrayed German historicism, whose antipositivistic epistemology was largely rejected in the more positivistic world of American social science. For various reasons the editors of the encyclopedia turned down Parsons essay since it didn't fit the general format of their volume, so Parsons essay was not published before 2006. Parsons had several conversations with Daniel Bell
Daniel Bell
Daniel Bell was an American sociologist, writer, editor, and professor emeritus at Harvard University, best known for his seminal contributions to the study of post-industrialism...
on a "Post-industrial society", some of which were conducted over lunch at William James Hall. After reading an early version of Bell's magnum opus
Masterpiece
Masterpiece in modern usage refers to a creation that has been given much critical praise, especially one that is considered the greatest work of a person's career or to a work of outstanding creativity, skill or workmanship....
, "The Coming of the Post-Industrial Society", Parsons wrote a letter to Daniel Bell dated November 30, 1971, where he offered his criticism. Among his many critical points, Parsons stressed especially that Bell's discussion of technology tended to "separate off culture" and treat these two categories "as what I would call culture minus the cognitive component."
Early 1970s: System-theoretical considerations about biological and social systems
In his later years Parsons became increasingly interested in working out the higher conceptual parameters of the human condition, which in part led him toward rethinking questions of cultural and social evolution and the "nature" of telic systems, the latter which he especially discussed with Robert Bellah, Victor Lidz, Reene Fox, Willy de Craemer and others. As a part of this pattern, Parsons became increasingly interested in clarifying the relationship between biological and social theory. Parsons was the initiator of the first Daedalus conference on "Some Relations between biological and social theory" sponsored by the American Academy of Arts and Science. Parsons wrote a memorandum dated September 16, 1971, where he spelled out the intellectual framework for the conference. As Parsons explained in the memo, the basic goal of the conference was to establish a conceptual fundament for a theory of living systems
Living systems
Living systems are open self-organizing living things that interact with their environment. These systems are maintained by flows of information, energy and matter....
. The first conference was held on January 7, 1972. Among the participants beside Parsons and Victor Lidz were Ernst Mayr
Ernst Mayr
Ernst Walter Mayr was one of the 20th century's leading evolutionary biologists. He was also a renowned taxonomist, tropical explorer, ornithologist, historian of science, and naturalist...
, Seymour Kety, Gerald Holton
Gerald Holton
Gerald Holton is Mallinckrodt Research Professor of Physics and Research Professor of the History of Science, Emeritus, at Harvard University.Born 1922 in Berlin, he grew up in Vienna before emigrating in 1938...
, A. Hunter Dupree
A. Hunter Dupree
Anderson Hunter Dupree is a distinguished American historian and one of the pioneer historians of the history of science and technology in the United States.-Early Education and Education:...
, and William Wimsatt
William Wimsatt
William Wimsatt may refer to:* William C. Wimsatt , philosopher and teacher* William Kurtz Wimsatt, Jr. , American professor of English* William Upski Wimsatt , graffiti artist, author, and activist...
. A second Daedalus Conference on Living Systems was held on March 1–2, 1974 and included Edward O. Wilson, who at the time was about to publish his famous work on sociobiology
Sociobiology
Sociobiology is a field of scientific study which is based on the assumption that social behavior has resulted from evolution and attempts to explain and examine social behavior within that context. Often considered a branch of biology and sociology, it also draws from ethology, anthropology,...
. Other new participants were John T. Bonner, Karl H. Pribram
Karl H. Pribram
Karl H. Pribram is a professor at Georgetown University, in the United States, and an emeritus professor of psychology and psychiatry at Stanford University and Radford University...
, Eric Lennenberg and Stephen J. Gould.
Early 1970s
Parsons began in the fall of 1972 to conduct a seminar on "Law and Sociology" with Lon L. Fuller
Lon L. Fuller
-Selected secondary bibliography:* Robert S Summers .* W. J. Witteveen and Wibren van der Burg .-External links:* from Harvard University Library*...
who was well known for his work The Morality of Law (1964). The seminar and his conversations with Fuller stimulated Parsons to write one of this most influential articles "Law as an Intellectual Stepchild." In this article Parsons discusses among other things Roberto Mangabeira Unger
Roberto Mangabeira Unger
Roberto Mangabeira Unger is a philosopher and politician. He has written widely on social, political, legal, and economic theory, much of which has laid the philosophical and theoretical groundwork for reimagining and remaking the social and political order...
's Law in Modern Society (1976). Another indication of Parsons interest in law is reflected in his students, hence Parsons' student John Akula writes his dissertation in Sociology on the topic Law and the Development of Citizenship (1973). In September 1972 Parsons participates in a Conference in Salzburg on "The Social Consequences of Modernization in Socialist Countries." Among the other participants in this conference is Alex Inkeles, Ezra Vogel, and Ralf Dahrendorf
Ralf Dahrendorf
Ralf Gustav Dahrendorf, Baron Dahrendorf, KBE, FBA was a German-British sociologist, philosopher, political scientist and liberal politician....
.
In 1972 Parsons wrote two reviews articles, where he discussed the work of Reinhard Bendix
Reinhard Bendix
Reinhard Bendix was a German American sociologist.Born in Berlin, Germany, he briefly belonged to Neu beginnen and Hashomer Hatzair, groups that resisted the Nazis. In 1938 he emigrated to the United States. He received his B.S., M.A., and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, and subsequently...
, which provides a clear statement on Parsons' approach to the study of Max Weber
Max Weber
Karl Emil Maximilian "Max" Weber was a German sociologist and political economist who profoundly influenced social theory, social research, and the discipline of sociology itself...
. Bendix was an emigrant scholar who had become well known for his Weber-interpretations. In the first review article, Parsons analyzed Bendix's work entitled Embattled Reason. Parsons basically praised the work's attempt to defend the basic values of cognitive rationality, a defense Parsons unconditionally shared and he agree with Bendix that the question of cognitive rationality was primarily a cultural issue and not a category, which could be reduced from biologial, economic and social factors. However, Parsons did have problems with the way Bendix had proceed with his task and he especially felt that Bendix had misrepresented the work of Freud and Durkheim. Parsons found that the real reason behind this case of misrepresentation lied in the way Bendix tended to conceive the question of systematic theorizing under the concept of "reductionism." Parsons further found that Bendix approach suffered from a "conspicuous hostility" toward the idea of evolution
Evolution
Evolution is any change across successive generations in the heritable characteristics of biological populations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organisation, including species, individual organisms and molecules such as DNA and proteins.Life on Earth...
. It was true Parsons assessed that Max Weber
Max Weber
Karl Emil Maximilian "Max" Weber was a German sociologist and political economist who profoundly influenced social theory, social research, and the discipline of sociology itself...
rejected the one-linear evolutionary approaches of Karl Marx
Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement...
and Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer was an English philosopher, biologist, sociologist, and prominent classical liberal political theorist of the Victorian era....
but it didn't follow that Weber rejected the question of evolution as a generalized question. In his second review article, which was a commentary of Reinhard Bendix
Reinhard Bendix
Reinhard Bendix was a German American sociologist.Born in Berlin, Germany, he briefly belonged to Neu beginnen and Hashomer Hatzair, groups that resisted the Nazis. In 1938 he emigrated to the United States. He received his B.S., M.A., and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, and subsequently...
and Guenther Roth, Scholarship and Partisanship: Essays on Max Weber, Parsons continued his line of criticism. Parsons was especially concerned with a statement by Bendix, where Bendix claimed that Weber was a subscriber to Karl Marx
Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement...
's notion that ideas were "the epiphenomena of the organization of production." Parsons strongly rejected this assessment. As he said: "I should contend that certainly the intellectual "mature" Weber never was an "hypothetical" Marxist." Somewhere behind these attitudes of Bendix, Parsons detected a discomport on Bendix behalf to move out of an "idiographic" mode of theorizing.
In 1973 Parsons published The American University, which he had coauthored together with Gerald M. Platt. The idea had originally emerged then Martin Meyerson and Stephen Graubard of the American Academy of the Art and Sciences in 1969 asked Parsons to undertake a monographic study of the American University System. The work on the book went on for years and was first finished in June 1972. From the theoretical point of view the book had several functions, one important one was to substantiate Parsons' concept of the educational revolution, which was a crucial component in his theory of the rise of the modern world. What was equally intellectually compelling, however, was undoubtedly Parsons' discussion of "the cognitive complex", which aimed at explaining how cognitive rationality and learning operated as an interpenetrative zone on the level of the general action-system in society. In retrospect the categories of "the cognitive complex" serve as a theoretical foundation for an understanding of what has been called the modern knowledge-based society.
Retired from Harvard, 1973
He retired from Harvard in 1973, but continued his writing, teaching and other activities in the same rapid pace as before. Parsons also continued his extensive correspondence with a wide group of colleagues and intellectuals. He taught at the University of Pennsylvania
University of Pennsylvania
The University of Pennsylvania is a private, Ivy League university located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Penn is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States,Penn is the fourth-oldest using the founding dates claimed by each institution...
, Brown University
Brown University
Brown University is a private, Ivy League university located in Providence, Rhode Island, United States. Founded in 1764 prior to American independence from the British Empire as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations early in the reign of King George III ,...
, Rutgers University
Rutgers University
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey , is the largest institution for higher education in New Jersey, United States. It was originally chartered as Queen's College in 1766. It is the eighth-oldest college in the United States and one of the nine Colonial colleges founded before the American...
, the University of Chicago
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...
and the University of California at Berkeley. At Parsons' retirement banquet held on May 18, 1973, Robert K. Merton was asked to preside, while John Riley, Bernard Barber, Jesse Pitts, Neil J. Smelser and John Akula were asked to share their experiences of the man with the audience.
One scholar who became important in Parsons' later years was professor Martin U. Martel of Brown University
Brown University
Brown University is a private, Ivy League university located in Providence, Rhode Island, United States. Founded in 1764 prior to American independence from the British Empire as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations early in the reign of King George III ,...
. Martel and Parsons made contact in the early 1970s, the occasion was a discussion of an article, which Martel had written about Talcott Parsons' work. Martel arranged a series of seminars at Brown University in 1973-74, where Parsons spoke about his life and work and answered question from students and faculty. Among the participants at the seminars were Martin U. Martel, Robert M. Marsh, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, C. Parker Wolf, Albert F. Wessen, A. Hunter Dupree, Philip L. Quinn, Adrian Hayes and Mark A. Shields. In February–May 1974, Parsons also gave the Culver lectures at Brown and spoke on the issue "The Evolution of Society." These lectures as well as the seminars were videotaped.
Late in life Parsons began to work out a new level of the AGIL model, which he called "A Paradigm of the Human Condition." This new level of the AGIL model crystallized in the summer of 1974 and the ideas of the new paradigm he worked out with a variety of people but especially with Victor Lidz, Renee Fox and Harold Bershady. The new meta-paradigm featured the environment of the general action system, which include the physical system, the biological system and what Parsons called the telic system; the latter system represented the sphere of ultimate values in a sheer metaphysical sense. Parsons also worked toward a more comprehensive understanding of the code-structure of social systems and on the logic of the cybernetic pattern of control facilitating the AGIL model, where he among many things worked out a bulk of notes, he called "Thoughts on the linking of systems" and another memo he called "money and time." He had also extensive discussions with Larry Brownstein and Adrian Hayes concerning the possibility of a mathematical formalization of Parsons' theory.
Parsons had during his lifetime worked intensively with questions of medical sociology
Medical sociology
Medical sociology is the sociological analysis of medical organizations and institutions; the production of knowledges and selection of methods, the actions and interactions of healthcare professionals, and the social or cultural effects of medical practice...
, the medical profession, psychiatry
Psychiatry
Psychiatry is the medical specialty devoted to the study and treatment of mental disorders. These mental disorders include various affective, behavioural, cognitive and perceptual abnormalities...
, psychosomatic problems and related issues with the questions of health
Health
Health is the level of functional or metabolic efficiency of a living being. In humans, it is the general condition of a person's mind, body and spirit, usually meaning to be free from illness, injury or pain...
and illness
Illness
Illness is a state of poor health. Illness is sometimes considered another word for disease. Others maintain that fine distinctions exist...
. Most of all Parsons had become known for his concept of "the Sick role
Sick role
Sick role is a term used in medical sociology concerning the social aspects of falling ill and the privileges and obligations that accompany it. It is a concept created by American sociologist Talcott Parsons in 1951.-Concept:...
." This field of social research was an issue, which Parsons constantly developed through elaboration and self-criticism. Parsons participated at the World Congress of Sociology in Toronto in August 1974, where he presented a paper called "The sick role revisited: a response to critics and an updating in terms of the theory of action," which was published under a slightly different title in 1975. In his essay Parsons highlighted that his concept of "sick role" never was meant to confine this category to "deviant behavior," although as he stated it: "its negative valuation should not be forgotten." It was also important to keep a certain focus on the "motivatedness" of illness, since there always is a factor of unconscious motivation in the therapeutic aspects of the sick role.
In 1975 Robert N. Bellah
Robert N. Bellah
Robert Neelly Bellah is an American sociologist, now the Elliott Professor of Sociology, Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. Bellah is best known for his work related to "American civil religion"...
published his book called The Broken Covenant. "The Covenant" Bellah speaks about refers to the sermon delivered by John Winthrop
John Winthrop
John Winthrop was a wealthy English Puritan lawyer, and one of the leading figures in the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the first major settlement in New England after Plymouth Colony. Winthrop led the first large wave of migrants from England in 1630, and served as governor for 12 of...
(1587–1649) to this flock on board his ship 'Arbella' on the evening of the landing in Massachusetts Bay
Massachusetts Bay
The Massachusetts Bay, also called Mass Bay, is one of the largest bays of the Atlantic Ocean which forms the distinctive shape of the coastline of the U.S. state of Massachusetts. Its waters extend 65 miles into the Atlantic Ocean. Massachusetts Bay includes the Boston Harbor, Dorchester Bay,...
in the year 1630. In his sermon Winthrop declared that the Puritan colonists emigrating to the New World was part of a special pact (Covenant) with God to create a holy community. Winthrop used the phrases: "For we must consider that we shall be a city on the hill. The eyes of all people are upon us." Parsons disagreed strongly with Bellah's analysis in The Broken Covenant and insisted that "the covenant" was not broken. Parsons later used a major part of his influential article, "Law as an Intellectual Stepchild" to discuss Bellah's position in The Broken Covenant. Parsons found that Bellah unduly trivialized the discussion of the tension and problems involved in questions of individual interests and collective interests on the level of total society by reducing them to the concept of "capitalism." Parsons find that Bellah in his characterization of the negative aspects of American society is compelled by a charismatic based optimalism and he declared that Bellah's position in The Broken Covenant is that of moral absolutism
Moral absolutism
Moral absolutism is an ethical view that certain actions are absolutely right or wrong, regardless of other contexts such as their consequences or the intentions behind them. Thus stealing, for instance, might be considered to be always immoral, even if done to promote some other good , and even if...
.
In 1975 Parsons responded to an article by Jonathan H. Turner
Jonathan H. Turner
Jonathan H. Turner is a professor of sociology at University of California, Riverside.After receiving his PhD from Cornell University in 1968, since the academic year 1969-1970 he has been at UCR. He has been Faculty Research Lecturer at UCR, and in the profession, he has been president of the...
called "Parsons as a symbolic interactionist." In his response Parsons acknowledged that action theory
Action theory
Action theory is an area in philosophy concerned with theories about the processes causing willful human bodily movements of more or less complex kind. This area of thought has attracted the strong interest of philosophers ever since Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics...
and symbolic interactionism
Symbolic interactionism
Symbolic Interaction, also known as interactionism, is a sociological theory that places emphasis on micro-scale social interaction to provide subjective meaning in human behavior, the social process and pragmatism.-History:...
should not be regarded as two separate, antagonistic positions; in contrast they have overlapping structures of conceptualization. Parsons regarded symbolic interactionism and the theory of George Herbert Mead
George Herbert Mead
George Herbert Mead was an American philosopher, sociologist and psychologist, primarily affiliated with the University of Chicago, where he was one of several distinguished pragmatists. He is regarded as one of the founders of social psychology and the American sociological tradition in general.-...
as valuable contributions to action theory specifying certain aspects of the theory of the personality of the individual. Parsons, however, criticized the symbolic interactionism of Herbert Blumer
Herbert Blumer
Herbert George Blumer was an American sociologist. Continuing the work of George Herbert Mead, he named and developed the topic of symbolic interactionism. According to Blumer himself, his main post-graduate scholarly interests were symbolic interactionism and methodological problems...
, since in Blumer's theory there is no end to the openness of action. Parsons regarded Blumer as the mirror image of Claude Lévi-Strauss
Claude Lévi-Strauss
Claude Lévi-Strauss was a French anthropologist and ethnologist, and has been called, along with James George Frazer, the "father of modern anthropology"....
who tended to stress the quasi-determined nature of macro-structural systems. Action theory
Action theory
Action theory is an area in philosophy concerned with theories about the processes causing willful human bodily movements of more or less complex kind. This area of thought has attracted the strong interest of philosophers ever since Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics...
, Parsons maintained, represented a middle ground between these two extremes.
In 1976 Parsons was asked to contribute to a volume celebrating the eightieth years birthday of Jean Piaget
Jean Piaget
Jean Piaget was a French-speaking Swiss developmental psychologist and philosopher known for his epistemological studies with children. His theory of cognitive development and epistemological view are together called "genetic epistemology"....
. Parsons contributed with an essay called "A few considerations on the place of rationality in Modern Culture and Society." Parsons characterized Piaget as the most eminent contributor to cognitive theory in the Twenty Century. However, in his article, he also argued that the future study of cognition
Cognition
In science, cognition refers to mental processes. These processes include attention, remembering, producing and understanding language, solving problems, and making decisions. Cognition is studied in various disciplines such as psychology, philosophy, linguistics, and computer science...
had to go beyond its narrow encounter with psychology
Psychology
Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...
and aim at a higher understanding of how cognition as a human intellectual force was entangled in the processes of social and cultural institutionalization.
In 1978, when James Grier Miller
James Grier Miller
James Grier Miller was an American biologist, a pioneer of systems science, who originated the modern use of the term "behavioral science", founded and directed the multi-disciplinary Mental Health Research Institute at the University of Michigan, and originated the living systems theory.-...
published his famous work Living Systems, Parsons was approached by Contemporary Sociology who asked him to write a review article on Miller's work. Parsons had already complained in a letter to A. Hunter Dupree
A. Hunter Dupree
Anderson Hunter Dupree is a distinguished American historian and one of the pioneer historians of the history of science and technology in the United States.-Early Education and Education:...
that American intellectual life suffered from a deep-seated tradition of empiricism
Empiricism
Empiricism is a theory of knowledge that asserts that knowledge comes only or primarily via sensory experience. One of several views of epistemology, the study of human knowledge, along with rationalism, idealism and historicism, empiricism emphasizes the role of experience and evidence,...
and he saw Miller's book the latest confirmation of that tradition. In his review article called "Concrete and "Abstrated" systems, he generally praised the hercules task behind Miller's work but he criticized Miller for getting caught in the effort of hierarchize concrete systems while underplaying the importance of structural categories in theory building. Parsons was also concerned about Miller's lack of any clear-cut discrimination between cultural and non-cultural systems.
In Japan, 1978
Japan was a country where from early on there was a keen interest in Talcott Parsons' work. As early as 1958 a Japanese translation of Economy and Society appeared. Also The Structure of Social Action was translated into Japanese. In the same way, The Social System was translated into Japanese by Tsutomu Sato in 1974. Indeed, already Ryozo Takeda had in 1952 in his Shakaigaku no Kozo (The Framework of Sociology) introduced Japanese scholars to some of Parsons' ideas. Parsons visited Japan for the first time in 1972, where he gave a lecture on November 25 to the Japanese Sociological Association entitled "Some Reflections on Post-Industrial Society." The lecture was published in The Japanese Sociological Review. At the same time Parsons participated in an international symposium on "New Problems of Advanced Societies," that was held in Tokyo and two short articles written by Parsons appeared in the proceedings of the symposium in 1973. Ken'ichi Tominaga (born, 1931), a leading figure in Japanese Sociology and professor at the University of Tokyo
University of Tokyo
, abbreviated as , is a major research university located in Tokyo, Japan. The University has 10 faculties with a total of around 30,000 students, 2,100 of whom are foreign. Its five campuses are in Hongō, Komaba, Kashiwa, Shirokane and Nakano. It is considered to be the most prestigious university...
was asked by Victor Lidz to contribute to a two-volume collection of Essays in honor of Talcott Parsons. Ken'ichi Tominaga wrote an essays on the industrial growth model of Japan using Parsons' AGIL Model.
In 1977, professor Washio Kurata, who just had been elected Dean of the Faculty of Sociology of Kwansei Gakuin University
Kwansei Gakuin University
, colloquially abbreviated to , is a non-denominational Christian private and coeducational university located in Nishinomiya, Sanda, Osaka City, and Tokyo, Japan....
wrote to Parsons and invited him to visit Japan during the 1978-79 academic year. In the early spring Parsons accepted Kurata's invitation and on October 20, 1978 Parsons arrived in airport of Osaka, accompanied by his wife and was greeted royally by a large entourage.
Parsons began weekly lectures at Kwansei Gakuin's sociology department from October 23 to December 15. Parsons gave his first public lecture to a huge mass of undergraduates speaking on the issue of "The Development of Contemporary Sociology," while professor Hideichiro Nakano served as an interpreter. On November 17–18, when the Sengari Seminar House was opened, Parsons was invited as the key speaker at the event and gave two lectures, one entitled "On the Crisis of Modern Society" and the other on "Modern Society and Religion." Among those present at this event were Ken'ichi Tominaga, Mutsundo Atarashi, Kazuo Muto and Hideichiro Nakano.
On November 25 Parsons lectured at Kobe University
Kobe University
Shindai is one of the leading universities in Japan. It can be seen in the several rankings such as shown below.-General Rankings:The university is ranked 10th in 2010 in the ranking "Truly Strong Universities" by Toyo Keizai...
. This lecture was organized by Hiroshi Mannari and Parsons lectured on the topic of organization theory to faculty and graduate students from the department of economics, management and sociology. Also faculty members from Kyoto and Osaka Universities were present. The lecture was published the following year. On November 30-December 1, Parsons participated in the Tsukuba (University) Conference in Tokyo, where Parsons spoke on "Enter the New Society: The Problem of the Relationship of Work and Leisure in Relation to Economic and Cultural Values." On December 5, Parsons gave a lecture at Kyoto University on the topic "A Sociologist Looks at Contemporary U.S. Society."
At a special lecture at Osaka on December 12, Parsons spoke at the suggestion of Tominaga on the topic "Social System Theory and Organization Theory" to the Japanese Sociological Association. Earlier the same day Parsons had a discussion with Professor Ken'ichi Tominaga at Iwanami Shoten, which was published in the journal SHISO.
On December 14, Kwansei Gakuin University granted Parsons an honorary doctor degree. A number of his lectures was collected into a volume by Dean Kurata and published in 1983. The Parsons` flew back to the US in mid-December 1978. As a sign of friendship Hideichiro Nakano sent Parsons a Buddha mask. Parsons had especially been captivated by certain aspects of Zen Buddhism. He told his friends that after his experience in Japan he was going to reconsider certain aspects of his interpretation of the origination of modern civilizations.
The end, 1979
Parsons died of a stroke on May 8, 1979 in Munich while on a trip to Germany, where he was celebrating the 50th anniversary of his Heidelberg degree. The day before he died he gave a lecture on the declining significance of social class for an audience of German intellectuals, including Jürgen Habermas
Jürgen Habermas
Jürgen Habermas is a German sociologist and philosopher in the tradition of critical theory and pragmatism. He is perhaps best known for his theory on the concepts of 'communicative rationality' and the 'public sphere'...
, Niklas Luhmann
Niklas Luhmann
Niklas Luhmann was a German sociologist, and a prominent thinker in sociological systems theory.-Biography:...
, Richard Munch and Wolfgang Schluchter. This is simply not true. These prominent German sociologists may have been in Parsons's presence during the celebrations of his doctorate in Heidelberg, but they were not in Munich! Habermas and Schluchter came to Munich for the funeral service at the occasion of his cremation. Leon Mayhew is wrong (Horst J. Helle).
Parsons was a strong advocate for the professionalization of sociology and its expansion within American academia. He was elected president of the American Sociological Association
American Sociological Association
The American Sociological Association , founded in 1905 as the American Sociological Society , is a non-profit organization dedicated to advancing the discipline and profession of sociology by serving sociologists in their work and promoting their contributions to serve society.The ASA holds its...
in 1949 and served as secretary from 1960–1965.
His son Charles Parsons
Charles Parsons (philosopher)
Charles Dacre Parsons is a distinguished figure in the philosophy of mathematics.He is a son of social scientist Talcott Parsons. A specialist in the philosophy of mathematics and logic, Parsons earned his Ph.D. at Harvard University in 1961, under the direction of Burton Dreben and Willard Van...
is a distinguished figure in philosophy of mathematics and an expert in Immanuel Kant. His daughter Anne Parsons committed suicide in June 1964 at the age of 33.
Work
Parsons produced a general theoretical system for the analysis of society
Society
A society, or a human society, is a group of people related to each other through persistent relations, or a large social grouping sharing the same geographical or virtual territory, subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations...
, which he called 'theory of action' based on the methodological and epistemological principle of "analytical realism" and on the ontological assumption of "voluntaristic action." Parsons concept of analytical realism can be regarded as a kind of compromise between nominalist and realist
Philosophical realism
Contemporary philosophical realism is the belief that our reality, or some aspect of it, is ontologically independent of our conceptual schemes, linguistic practices, beliefs, etc....
views on the nature of reality and human knowledge. Parsons assesses that we (as scientists and humans) relate to objective reality but only through a particular encounter of such reality, and that our general intellectual understanding is only feasible through conceptual schemes and theories. Our interaction with objective reality on an intellectual level should always be understood as an approach. Parsons often explicated the meaning of analytical realism by quoting a statement by L.J. Henderson: "A fact is a statement about experience in terms of a conceptual scheme."
Generally, Parsons maintained that his inspiration regarding analytical realism had been Lawrence Joseph Henderson
Lawrence Joseph Henderson
Lawrence Joseph Henderson was a physiologist, chemist, biologist, philosopher, and sociologist. He became one of the leading biochemists of the first decades of the 20th century.Lawrence Henderson graduated from Harvard College in 1898 and from Harvard Medical School in 1902, receiving the M. D...
and A.N. Whitehead although it is possible the idea originated much earlier. It is important in this regard that Parsons' "analytical realism" insist on the reference to an objective reality since Parsons at several occasions highlighted that his concept of "analytical realism" was importantly different from the "fictionalism" of Hans Vaihiger (Hans Vaihinger). As Parsons specify this: "We must start with the assertion that all knowledge which purports to be valid in anything like the scientific sense presumes both the reality of object known and of a knower. I think we can go beyond that and say that there must be a community of knowers who are able to communicate with each other. Without such a presupposition it would seem difficult to avoid the pitfall of solipsism. The so-called natural sciences do not, however, impute the "status of knowing subjects" to the objects with which they deal."
The Structure of Social Action
The Structure of Social Action, (SSA) Parsons' most famous work took form piece by piece. Its central figure was Weber and the other key figures in the discussion was added little by little as the central idea took form. One work, which became important for shaping Parsons idea of the central argument in SSA was when he unexpected around 1932 came over Élie Halévy
Élie Halévy
Élie Halévy was a French philosopher and historian who wrote studies of the British utilitarians, a history of 19th-century England and the acclaimed book of essays, Era of Tyrannies.-Biography:...
, La Formation du Radicalisme Philosophique, (1901–1904) a 3 volume work, which he read in French. About Halévy work Parsons explained, "Well, Halévy was just a different world ... and helped me to really get in to many clarifications of the assumptions distinctive to the main line of British
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
utilitarian thought
Utilitarianism
Utilitarianism is an ethical theory holding that the proper course of action is the one that maximizes the overall "happiness", by whatever means necessary. It is thus a form of consequentialism, meaning that the moral worth of an action is determined only by its resulting outcome, and that one can...
; assumptions about the 'natural identity of interest', and so on. I still think it is one of the true masterpieces in intellectual history." Parsons first achieved significant recognition with the publication of The Structure of Social Action (1937), his first grand synthesis, combining the ideas of Durkheim, Max Weber
Max Weber
Karl Emil Maximilian "Max" Weber was a German sociologist and political economist who profoundly influenced social theory, social research, and the discipline of sociology itself...
, and Pareto
Vilfredo Pareto
Vilfredo Federico Damaso Pareto , born Wilfried Fritz Pareto, was an Italian engineer, sociologist, economist, political scientist and philosopher. He made several important contributions to economics, particularly in the study of income distribution and in the analysis of individuals' choices....
, among others.
Parsons' action theory
Parsons' action theory can be characterized as an attempt to maintain the scientific rigour of positivism, while acknowledging the necessity of the "subjective dimension" of human action incorporated in hermeneutic types of sociological theories. It is cardinal in Parsons' general theoretical and methodological view that human action must be understood in conjunction with the motivational component of the human act. In this way social science must consider the question of ends, purpose and ideals in its analysis of human action. Parsons' strong reaction to behavioristic theory as well as to sheer materialistic approaches derives from the attempt of these theoretical positions to eliminate ends, purpose and ideals as factors of analysis. Parsons already in his college student term-papers at Amherst criticized attempts to reduce human life to psychological, biological or materialist forces. What was essential in human life, Parsons maintained, was how the factor of culture
Culture
Culture is a term that has many different inter-related meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions...
was codified. Culture, however, was to Parsons an independent variable in that it could not be "deducted" from any other factor of the social system. This methodological intention is given the most elaborate presentation in The Structure of Social Action, which was Parsons' first basic discussion of the methodological foundation of the social sciences. Some of the themes reaching a high point in The Structure of Social Action were presented in a compelling essay published two years earlier with the title: "The Place of Ultimate Values in Sociological Theory."
Relations to cybernetics and system theory
Parsons developed his ideas during a period when systems theory
Systems theory
Systems theory is the transdisciplinary study of systems in general, with the goal of elucidating principles that can be applied to all types of systems at all nesting levels in all fields of research...
and cybernetics
Cybernetics
Cybernetics is the interdisciplinary study of the structure of regulatory systems. Cybernetics is closely related to information theory, control theory and systems theory, at least in its first-order form...
were very much on the front burner of social and behavioral science. In using systems thinking, he postulated that the relevant systems treated in social and behavioral science were "open," meaning that they were embedded in an environment consisting of other systems. For social and behavioral science, the largest system is "the action system," consisting of interrelated behaviors of human beings, embedded in a physical-organic environment.
As Parsons developed his theory it became increasingly bound to the fields of cybernetics and system theory, but also to Alfred E. Emerson's concept of "homeostasis
Homeostasis
Homeostasis is the property of a system that regulates its internal environment and tends to maintain a stable, constant condition of properties like temperature or pH...
" and Ernst Mayr
Ernst Mayr
Ernst Walter Mayr was one of the 20th century's leading evolutionary biologists. He was also a renowned taxonomist, tropical explorer, ornithologist, historian of science, and naturalist...
's concept of "teleonomic processes." On the meta-theoretical level Parson attempted to balance psychologist phenomenology and idealism on the one hand and pure types of what Parsons called the utilitarian-positivistic complex, on the other hand. The theory includes a general theory of social evolution
Social evolution
Social evolution is a subdiscipline of evolutionary biology that is concerned with social behaviors that have fitness consequences for individuals other than the actor...
and a concrete interpretation of the major drives of world-history. In Parsons' theory of history and evolution, the constitutive-cognitive symbolization of the cybernetic hierarchy of action-systemic levels has in principle the same function as genetic information in DNA's control of biological evolution, except this factor of meta-systemic control does not "determine" any outcome, but rather defines the orientational boundaries of the real pathfinder, which is action itself. Parsons compares also the constitutive level of society with Noam Chomsky's concept of "deep structure." As Parsons writes, "The deep structures do not as such articulate any sentences which could convey coherent meaning. The surface structures constitute the level at which this occurs. The connecting link between them is a set of rules of transformation, to use Chomsky's own phase." These transformative processes and entities are generally (at least on one level of empirical analysis) performed or actualized by myths and religions but also philosophies, art-systems, or even semiotic consumer behavior might in principle perform this function.
A unified concept of social science
Parsons' theory reflects a vision of a unified concept of social science and indeed, of living systems
Living systems
Living systems are open self-organizing living things that interact with their environment. These systems are maintained by flows of information, energy and matter....
in general. Parsons' approach differs in essence from Niklas Luhmann's theory because Parsons rejects the idea that systems can be autopoietic short of the actual action-system of individual actors. Systems have immanent capacities but only as an outcome of the institutionalized processes of action-systems, which in the final analysis consists of the historical effort of individual actors. While Niklas Luhmann
Niklas Luhmann
Niklas Luhmann was a German sociologist, and a prominent thinker in sociological systems theory.-Biography:...
became caught up in sheer systemic immanence, Parsons insisted that the question of autocatalytic and homeostatic processes on the one hand, and the question about the actor as the ultimate "first mover" on the other, was not mutually exclusive. Homeostatic processes might be necessary if and when they occur but action is necessitating.
It is only within this perspective of the ultimate reference in action that Parsons' dictum that higher order cybernetic systems during the course of history will tend to control social forms organized on the lower levels of the cybernetic hierarchy, should be understood. For Parsons the highest levels of the cybernetic hierarchy as far as the general action level is concerned is what Parsons calls the constitutive part of the Cultural system (the L of the L). However, within the interactional processes of the system specially attention should be made to the cultural-expressivistic axis (the L-G line in the AGIL). By the term "constitutive," Parsons generally referred to very highly codified cultural values especially religious elements (but other interpretation of the term "constitutive" is possible). Cultural systems Parsons maintained had an independent status from that of the normative and orientational pattern of the social system; the one system cannot be reduced to the other. For example, the question of the "cultural capital" of a social system as a sheer historical entity (that is, in its function as a "fiduciary system"), is not identical with the higher cultural values of that system; that is, the cultural system is embodied with a meta-structural logic there cannot be reduced to any given social system or cannot be viewed as a materialist (or behavioralist) deduction from the "necessities" of the social system (or from the "necessities" of its economy). Within this context, culture would have an independent power of transition, not only as factors of actual socio-cultural units (like Western civilization or China) but also in the way original cultural bases would tend to "universalize" through interpenetration and spread over large numbers of social systems as with classical Greece and Israel, where the original social bases had died but where the cultural system survived as an independently "working" cultural pattern, as in the case of Greek philosophy or in the case of Christianity as a modified derivation from its original seed-bed in ancient Israel.
Parsons and Habermas
The difference between Parsons and Jürgen Habermas
Jürgen Habermas
Jürgen Habermas is a German sociologist and philosopher in the tradition of critical theory and pragmatism. He is perhaps best known for his theory on the concepts of 'communicative rationality' and the 'public sphere'...
lies essentially in how Habermas uses Parsons' theory to establish the basic propositions of his own. Habermas takes the division between Parsons' separation between the "outer" and the "inner" dimensions of the social system and labels them "system" (outer dimension (A-G)) and "lifeworld" (inner dimension (I-L)). The problem with this model from Parsons' point of view is a) that conflict within the social system can in reality emerge from any relational point and not simply from the system-lifeworld dichotomy, and b) by relating the system-lifeworld model to some kind of "liberation"-epic, Habermas produces the Utopian notion that the potentiality of conflict within the social system has some kind of "final solution," which produces a misleading concept of the nature of systemic conflict.
General theory
It is important to highlight that Parsons discriminates between two "meanings" or modes of the term "general theory." For some purposes he speaks about general theory as those aspects of theoretical concerns for the field of the social sciences, where the focus is on the most "constitutive" elements of cognitive concern for the basic theoretical systematization of a given field. Within these concerns Parsons would include the basic conceptual scheme for the given field, including its highest order of theoretical relations and naturally also the necessary specification of this system's axiomatic, epistemological and methodological foundations from the point of view of logical implications. All these elements would signify the quest for a general theory on the highest level of theoretical concern. However, the term general theory also referred to a more fully operational system, which was a system, where the implications of the conceptual scheme was "spelled out" on lower levels of cognitive structuralization, that is, levels standing closer to a perceived "empirical object." In his speech to the American Sociological Society in 1947, he spoke of five of such levels. These levels were the following:
- The General Theory level, which primarily took form as a theory of social systems.
- The theory of motivation of social behavior, which especially addressed questions of the dynamics of the social system and which naturally presupposed theories of motivation, personality and socialization.
- The theoretical bases of systematic comparative analysis of social structure, which for example would involved a study of concrete cultures in concrete systems on various levels of generalization.
- Special theories around particular empirical problem areas.
- The "fitting" of these theories to specific empirical research techniques, such as statistics, survey techniques and so on.
During his life Parsons would work on developing all five fields of theoretical concerns but he would pay special attention to the development on the highest "constitutive" level, since the rest of the building would stand or fall on the solidity of the highest level.
Contrary to prevailing myths Parsons never thought that modern societies exist in some kind of perfect harmony with their norms or that most modern societies necessary were characterized by some high level of consensus or a "happy" institutional integration. Parsons highlighted two things in this regard. a) It is almost logically impossible that there can be any "perfect fit" or perfect consensus situation in the basic normative structure of complex modern societies because the basic value-pattern of modern societies are generally differentiated in such a way so some of the basic normative categories will exist in inherent conflict with each other if not actually, then at least potentially. For example, both freedom and equality is generally viewed as fundamental and in a sense non-negotiable values of modern societies. Each represents a kind of ultimate imperative about what the higher values of humanity is all about. However, as Parsons emphasizes there does not exist any simple answer to the priority of freedom versus equality or any simple solution to how they possibly can be mediated if at all. Therefore all modern societies are faced with the inherent conflict prevailing between these two values of which there is no "eternal solution" as such. For this reason alone, there cannot exist any perfect match between motivational pattern, normative solutions and the prevailing value-pattern in any modern society. Parsons would also maintain that the never-ending "dispute" between "left" and "right" had something to do with the fact that they both defend ultimately "justified" human values (or ideals), which each on their own terms are indispensable as values but these fundamental values will always exist in an endless conflictual position to each other. b) As a general token Parsons always maintained that the integration of normative pattern in society always is problematic and the level of integration reached are in principle always far from harmonious and perfect. If some "harmonious pattern" does emerge, then it is related to specific historical circumstances, it is not a general law of the social systems.
AGIL paradigm
The heuristic scheme Parsons used to analyze systems and subsystems is called the "AGIL Paradigm
AGIL Paradigm
The AGIL paradigm is a sociological scheme created by American sociologist Talcott Parsons in the 1950s. It is a systematic depiction of certain societal functions, which every society must meet to be able to maintain stable social life...
", "AGIL scheme". To survive or maintain equilibrium with respect to its environment, any system must to some degree adapt to that environment (Adaptation), attain its goals (Goal Attainment), integrate its components (Integration), and maintain its latent pattern (Latency Pattern Maintenance), a sort of cultural template. These concepts can be abbreviated as AGIL. These are called the system's functional imperatives. It is important to understand that Parsons AGIL model is an analytical scheme for the sake of theoretical "production," it is not any simply "copy" or any direct historical "summary" of empirical reality. Also the scheme itself doesn't explain "anything" as little as the periodical table in the natural sciences explains anything in and by itself. The AGIL scheme is a tool for explanations and no better than the quality of those theories and explanation by which it is processed.
In the case of the analysis of a social action system, the AGIL Paradigm
AGIL Paradigm
The AGIL paradigm is a sociological scheme created by American sociologist Talcott Parsons in the 1950s. It is a systematic depiction of certain societal functions, which every society must meet to be able to maintain stable social life...
, according to Parsons, yields four interrelated and interpenetrating subsystems: the behavioral systems of its members (A), the personality systems of those members (G), the social system (as such) (I) and the cultural system of that society (L). To analyze a society as a social system (the I subsystem of action), people are posited to enact roles associated with positions. These positions and roles become differentiated to some extent and in a modern society are associated with things such as occupational, political, judicial and educational roles.
Considering the interrelation of these specialized roles, as well as functionally differentiated collectivities (e.g., firms, political parties), the society can be analyzed as a complex system of interrelated functional subsystems, namely:
The pure AGIL model for all living systems:
- (A) Adaptation.
- (G) Goal Attainment.
- (I) Integration.
- (L) Pattern maintenance. (L stand for "Latent function").
The Social system level:
- The economy — social adaptation to its action and non-action environmental systems
- The polity — collective goal attainment
- The societal community — the integration of its diverse social components
- The fiduciary system — processes that function to reproduce historical culture in its "direct" social embeddedness.
The General Action Level:
- The behavioral organism (or system). (In later version, the foci for generalized "intelligence.").
- The personality system.
- The social system.
- The cultural system. (See cultural level).
The cultural level:
- Cognitive symbolization.
- Expressive symbolization.
- Evaluative symbolization. (Sometimes called: moral-evaluative symbolization).
- Constitutive symbolization.
The Generalized Symbolic media:
Social System level:
- (A) Economic system: Money.
- (G) Political system: Political power.
- (I) The Societal Community: Influence.
- (L) The Fiduciary system (cultural tradition): Value-commitment.
Parsons elaborated upon the idea that each of these systems also developed some specialized symbolic mechanisms of interaction analogous to money in the economy, e.g.., influence in the social community. Various processes of "interchange" among the subsystems of the social system were postulated.
Parsons' use of social systems analysis based on the AGIL scheme was established in his work Economy and Society (with N. Smelser, 1956) and has prevailed in all his work ever since. However, the AGIL system does only exist in a "rudimentary" form in the beginning and is then gradually elaborated and expanded in the decades which followed. A brief introduction to Parsons' AGIL scheme can be found in chapter 2 of The American University (with G. Platt, 1973). There is, however, no single place in Parsons writing where the total AGIL system is visually displayed or explained—the complete system have to be reconstructed from multiple places in his writing. The system displayed in "The American University" is only the most basic elements and should not be mistaken for the whole system.
Social evolutionism
Parsons contributed to the field of social evolutionism and neoevolutionism
Neoevolutionism
Neoevolutionism is a social theory that tries to explain the evolution of societies by drawing on Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and discarding some dogmas of the previous social evolutionism...
. He divided evolution into four sub-processes:
- differentiation, which creates functional subsystems of the main system, as discussed above;
- adaptation, where those systems evolve into more efficient versions;
- inclusion of elements previously excluded from the given systems; and
- generalization of values, increasing the legitimization of the increasingly complex system.
Furthermore, Parsons explored these sub-processes within three stages of evolution:
- primitive,
- archaic and
- modern
Parsons viewed Western civilisation
Western culture
Western culture, sometimes equated with Western civilization or European civilization, refers to cultures of European origin and is used very broadly to refer to a heritage of social norms, ethical values, traditional customs, religious beliefs, political systems, and specific artifacts and...
as the pinnacle of modern societies, and out of all western cultures he declared the United States as the most dynamically developed.
Parsons' late work focused on a new theoretical synthesis around four functions common (he claimed) to all systems of action—from the behavioral to the cultural, and a set of symbolic media that enable communication across them. His attempt to structure the world of action according to a scheme that focused on order was unacceptable for American sociologists, who were at that time retreating from the grand pretensions of the 1960s to a more empirical, grounded approach.
Pattern variables
Parsons asserted that there were two dimensions to societies: instrumental and expressive. By this he meant that there are qualitative differences between kinds of social interaction.
He observed that people can have personalized and formally detached relationships based on the roles that they play. The characteristics that were associated with each kind of interaction he called the pattern variables.
An interaction can be characterized by one identifier of each contrastive pair:
- affectivity - affective neutrality
- self-orientation - collectivity-orientation
- universalism - particularism
- ascription - achievement
- specificity - diffusity
Influences
For many years Parsons was the best-known sociologist in the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
, and indeed one of the most influential and most controversial sociologists in the world. His work was very influential well into the 1960s, particularly in the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
, until it met with extensive criticism and was generally dismissed by the 1970s. Currently, interest in Parsons is increasing worldwide. Despite the traditional view that Parsons' theories are unsatisfactory if not inaccessible, prominent attempts to revive Parsonian thinking have been made by Parsonsian sociologists and social scientists like Jeffrey Alexander, Bryan S. Turner
Bryan S. Turner (sociologist)
Bryan S. Turner is a British and Australian sociologist . He was born in January 1945 to working class parents in Birmingham, England. Turner has led a remarkably nomadic life having held university appointments in England, Scotland, Australia, Germany, Holland, Singapore and the United States...
, Victor Lidz, Giuseppe Sciortino, Helmut Staubmann, David Sciulli, Richard Münch
Richard Münch
Richard Heinrich Ludwig Münch , better known as Richard Münch, was a German actor, best known for portraying Alfred Jodl in Patton...
, Roland Robertson
Roland Robertson
Roland Robertson is a sociologist and theorist of globalization, who lectures at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, United Kingdom.Robertson's theories have focused significantly on a more phenomenological and psycho-social approach than that of more materialist oriented theorists such as...
, A. Javier Trevino, Mark Gould, Thomas J. Fararo, Harold J. Bershady, Reneé Fox, Leon Mayhew, Jens Beckert, Harald Wenzel, Bernard Barber, Robert Holton, Frank J. Lechner, Rudolf Stichweh, Mathieu Deflem, Wolfgang Schluchter, Riccardo Prandini, Akira Tokuyasu, Kiyomitsu Yui, Kazuyoshi Takagi and Ken'chi Tominaga, the latter a towering figure in Japanese sociology. On the issue of studying Parsons' biographical and historical data scholars such as William Buxton, Uta Gerhardt
Uta Gerhardt
Uta Gerhardt is a German sociologist and professor emeritus at the University of Heidelberg.She studied sociology, philosophy and history at the universities of Frankfurt am Main and Berlin. In 1969, she obtained a Ph.D. at the University of Konstanz. The focus of her work is on medical sociology,...
, Charles Camic, Lawrence T. Nichols, and Jens Kaalhauge Nielsen have been most prominent. The key centers of Parsons interest today beside the US are Germany, Japan, Italy, and the United Kingdom.
Parsons had a seminal influence and early mentorship of many American and international scholars among them Ralf Dahrendorf
Ralf Dahrendorf
Ralf Gustav Dahrendorf, Baron Dahrendorf, KBE, FBA was a German-British sociologist, philosopher, political scientist and liberal politician....
, Alain Touraine
Alain Touraine
Alain Touraine is a French sociologist born in Hermanville-sur-Mer. He is research director at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, where he founded the Centre d'étude des mouvements sociaux . He is best known for being the originator of the term "post-industrial society"...
, Niklas Luhmann
Niklas Luhmann
Niklas Luhmann was a German sociologist, and a prominent thinker in sociological systems theory.-Biography:...
and Jürgen Habermas
Jürgen Habermas
Jürgen Habermas is a German sociologist and philosopher in the tradition of critical theory and pragmatism. He is perhaps best known for his theory on the concepts of 'communicative rationality' and the 'public sphere'...
.
Publications (Books)
- 1937, The Structure of Social Action
- 1939, Action, Situation and Normative Pattern (Published by Lidz & Staubmann in German in 2004).
- 1951, The Social System
- 1951, Toward a General Theory of Action - with Shils, Tolman, Stouffer and Kluckhohn et al.
- 1953, Working Papers in the Theory of Action - with Robert F. Bales and Edward A. Shils.
- 1954, Essays in Sociological Theory
- 1955, Family, Socialization and Interaction Process - Robert F. Bales and James Olds.
- 1956, Economy and Society - with N. Smelser
- 1960, Structure and Process in Modern Societies
- 1961, Theories of Society - with Edward ShilsEdward ShilsEdward Shils was a Distinguished Service Professor in the Committee on Social Thought and in Sociology at the University of Chicago and reputedly an influential sociologist. He was known for his research on the role of intellectuals and their relations to power and public policy...
, Kaspar D. Naegele and Jesse R. PittsJesse R. PittsJesse Richard Pitts , was an American sociologist specializing in deviance and social control, family sociology, sociological theory, French society, and criminology. He is considered one of the leading disciples of Talcott Parsons, dean of American sociologists for much of the 20th century... - 1964, Social Structure and Personality
- 1966, Societies: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives online edition
- 1967, Sociological Theory and Modern Society
- 1969, Politics and Social Structure
- 1971, The System of Modern Societies
- 1973, The American University - with Gerald Platt
- 1977, Social Systems and the Evolution of Action Theory
- 1977, The Evolution of Societies
- 1978, Action Theory and the Human Condition
- 1978, The Theory of Social Action: the Correspondence of Alfred Schutz and Talcott Parsons Edited by R. Gatthoff.
- 1983. The Structure and Change of the Social System Edited by Washio Kurata (lectures from Parsons' second visit to Japan).
- 1986, Social Science: A Basic National Resource Edited by S.Z. Klausner & Victor Lidz. (Written around 1948).
- 1991, The Early Essays (Essays from the late 1920s and the 1930s). Edited by Charles Camic.
- 1993, On National Socialism (Essays from the late 1930s and the 1940s). Edited by Uta Gerhardt.
- 2007, American Society: Toward a Theory of Societal Community Edited by Giuseppe Sciortino. Paradigm ISBN 978-1-59451-227-8.
Edited volumes
- Talcott Parsons and Kenneth B. Clark (eds.) The Negro American. Beacon Press, 1967.
- Talcott Parsons (ed.) Knowledge and Society - American Sociology. New York: Basic Books, 1968. (A collection of essays with an introduction by Talcott Parsons).
- Talcott Parsons and Victor M. Lidz (eds:) Readings in Premodern Societies. Englewood Cliffs, Prentice-Hall, 1972.
Translations by Parsons
- Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. (1905) Translated by Parsons in 1930. (It was the first English translation of Weber's "main" work ever).
- Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. (1921–22) Translated by Parsons together with Alexander Morell Henderson in 1947.
Ph.D. dissertations supervised by Parsons
- Charles Dean Ackerman, Three Studies of the Affinal Collectivity. Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1965.
- John Akula, Law and the Development of Citizenship. Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1973.
- Robert Freed Bales, The 'Fixation Factor' in Alcohol Addiction: An Hypothesis Derived from a Comparative Study of Irish and Jewish Norms. Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1944.
- Bernard Barber, Mass apathy and voluntary social participation in the United States. Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1949.
- Rainer Carl Baum, Values and 'Uneven' Political Development in Imperial Germany. Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1968.
- Robert Bellah, Tokugawa Religion. Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1955.
- Joseph Berger, Relations between Performance, Rewards and Action-Opportunities in Small Groups. Ph.D. dissertation. Harvard University, 1958.
- Norman Birnbaum, Social Structure and the German Reformation. Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1958.
- Frank Bonilla, Students in Politics: Three Generations of Political Action in a Latin American University. Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1959.
- Ai-Li Sung Chin, Interdependence of Roles in Transitional China: A Structural Aanalysis of Attitudes in Contemporary Chinese Literature. Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1951.
- Albert K. Cohen, Juvenile Delinquency and the Social Structure. Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1951.
- Arthur Kent Davis, Thorstein Veblen's Social Theory. Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1941.
- Kingsley Davis, A Structural Analysis of Kinship: Prolegomena to the Sociology of Kinship. Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1936.
- Edward C. Devereux, The Sociology of Gambling: a Sociological Study of Lotteries and Horse Racing in Contemporary America. Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1950.
- Andrew George Effrat, Sanctions and Organizational Taxonomies: A Working Paper in Parsonian Theory. Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1970.
- Joseph Walter Elder, Industrialism in Hindu Society: A Case Study in Social Change. Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1959.
- Mark G. Field, The Medical Profession in the Soviet Society: a Study in Bureaucratization and Control. Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1955.
- Renée Claire Fox, A Sociological Study of Stress: Physician Patient on a Research Wards. Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1954.
- Harold GarfinkelHarold GarfinkelHarold Garfinkel was a Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is known for establishing and developing ethnomethodology as a field of inquiry in sociology.-Biography:...
, The Perception of the Other: A Study in Social Order. Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1952. - Dean N. Gerstein, Heroin in Motion. Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1975.
- Mark Gould, Revolution in the Development of Capitalism: the Coming of the English Revolution. Ph.D. dissertation. Harvard University, 1979. (Published in 1989).
- Benton Johnson, A Framework for the Analysis of Religious Action with Special Reference to Holiness and Non-Holiness Groups. Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1953.
- Harry M. Johnson, The Fall of France: An Essay of the Social Structure of France Between Two Wars. Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1949.
- Miriam Massey Johnson, Instrumental and Expressive Components in the Personalities of Women. Ph.D. dissertation. Harvard University, 1955.
- Bennetta Jules-Rosette, African Apostles. Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1973. (Published in 1975).
- Christine Kayser, Calvinism and German Politics. Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1961.
- Edward O. Laumann, Prestige and Association in an Urban Community; an Analysis of an Urban Stratification System. Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1965.
- Marion J. Levy, Jr., The Family Revolution and the Problem of Industrialization in China. Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1947.
- Charles W. Lidz, Law, Morality and Social Order. Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1974.
- Victor M. Lidz, The Functioning of Secular Moral Culture: Steps toward a Systematic Analysis. Ph.D. Dissertation. Harvard University, 1976.
- David Little, The Logic of Order: An Examination of the Sources of Puritan-Angelican Controversy and of Their Relations to Prevailing Legal Conceptions of Corporation in the Late 16th and Early 17th Century in England. Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1963.
- Johannes J. Loubser, Puritanism and Religious Liberty: Change in the Normative Order in Massachusetts, 1630-1850. Ph.D. dissertation. Harvard University, 1965.
- Leon H. Mayhew, Law and Equal Opportunity: a Study of the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination. Ph.D. dissertation. Harvard University, 1964.
- Robert K. MertonRobert K. MertonRobert King Merton was a distinguished American sociologist. He spent most of his career teaching at Columbia University, where he attained the rank of University Professor...
, Science, Technology and Society in Seventeenth Century England. Ph.D. dissertation, 1935. - Theodore Mason Mills, A Method of Content Analysis for the Study of Small Groups. Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1952.
- Wilbert Ellis Moore, Slavery, Abolition, and the Ethical Valuation of the Individual. Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1940.
- Kaspar D. Naegele, Hostility and Aggression in Middle Class American Families. Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1951.
- Sister Marie Augusta Neal, Values and Interest in Social Change. Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1963.
- Thomas F. O'Dea, Mormon Values: the Significance of a Religious Outlook for Social Action. Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1953.
- Jesse R. Pitts, The Bourgeois Family and French Economic Retardation. Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1957.
- John Winchell Riley, Jr., Social Leisure. Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1937.
- Guy Arthur-Auguste Rocher, The Relations Between Church and State in New France During the Seventeenth Century. Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1958.
- Neil J. Smelser, Revolution in Industry and Family: an Application of Social Theory to the British Cotton Industry, 1770-1840. Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1958.
- Emile Benoit Smullyan, French Sociological Theory and its Critics. Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1938.
- Bartlett Hicks Stoodley, The Theoretical System of Sigmund Freud and Social Motivation. Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1949.
- Francis X. Sutton, The Radical Marxist. Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1950.
- Edward A. Tiryakian, The Evaluation of Occupations in a Developing Country: The Philippines. Ph.D. Dissertation, Harvard University, 1956.
- Jackson Toby, Educational Maladjustment as a Predisposing Factor in Criminal Careers: A Comparative Study of Ethnic Groups. Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1950.
- Paul Tufari, Authority and Affection in the Ascetic's Status Group: St. Basil's Definition of Monasticism. Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1965.
- Erza F. Vogel, The Marital Relationship of Parents to the Emotionally Disturbed Child. Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1958.
- Robin Murphy Williams, Farmers on Local Planning Committees in three Kentucky Counties. Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1943.
- Logan Wilson, The Academic Man: an Inquiry into the Social Organization of the University. Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1939.
- Morris Zelditch, Jr. Authority and Solidarity in Three Southwestern Communities. Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1955.
Works on Parsons
- Hans P.M. Adriaansens, Talcott Parsons and the Conceptual dilemma. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980.
- James V. Aidala, Schemas of Social Evolution: An Examination of the theories of Gerhard Lenski and Talcott Parsons. MA-thesis, advisor: Martin U. Martel, Brown University, 1976.
- Jeffrey C. Alexander, The Modern Reconstruction of Classical Thought: Talcott Parsons. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983.
- Jeffrey C. Alexander, Neofunctionalism. Beverly Hills: Sage, 1985.
- Jeffrey C. Alexander, Twenty Lectures: Sociological Theory Since World War II. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987.
- Jeffrey C. Alexander, Neofunctionalism and After. Wiley, 1998.
- José Almaraz, La theoría de Talcott Parsons: la problemática de la constitución metodológica del objecto. Madrid: Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas, 1981.
- Bernard Barber & Uta Gerhardt (eds.) Agenda for Sociology: Classic Sources and Current Uses of Talcott Parsons' Work. Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1999.
- Harold J. Bershady, Ideology and Social Knowledge. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1973.
- Max Black (ed.) The Social Theories of Talcott Parsons: A Critical Examination. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1961.
- Margarete Blasche, Gesellschaftsbegriff und Sozialisationsprozess in den Theorien von Emile Durkheim und Talcott Parsons. Doctoral dissertation, Friedrich-Alexander Universität Erlangen, 1973.
- Matteo Bortolini, L'immunità necessaria: Talcott Parsons e la sociologia della modernità. Meltemi, Roma, 2005.
- Sigrid Brandt, Religiöses Handeln in moderner Welt: Talcott Parsons' Religions-soziologie im Rahmen seiner allgemeinen Handlungs- und Systemtheorie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1993.
- Larry Brownstein, Talcott Parsons' General Action Scheme. MA: Schenkman, 1982.
- Francois Bourricaud, The Sociology of Talcott Parsons. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981. (French, 1977).
- William Buxton, Talcott Parsons and the Capitalist Nation-State. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985.
- Francois Chazel, La théorie analytique de la société dans l´æuvre de Talcott Parsons. (Doctoral dissertation), soutenue à l'Université de Paris V en mars 1972. (Published by Mouton (Paris) in 1974).
- Reinhard Damm, Systemtheorie und Recht: Zur Normentheorie Talcott Parsons. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1976.
- Michael Ebert, Talcott Parsons - Seine theoretischen Instrumente in der medizinsoziologischen Analyse der Arzt-Patienten Beziehung. (Dissertation, Heinrich Heine Universität Düsseldorf). Aachen: Shaker, 2003.
- Thomas J. Fararo, Social Action Systems: foundation and synthesis in sociological theory. Greenwood Publishers, 2001.
- Renée Claire Fox, Victor M. Lidz and Harold J. Bershady (eds.) After Parsons: A Theory of Social Action for the Twenty-First Century. Russell Sage Foundation, 2005.
- Nikolai GenovNikolai GenovNikolai Genov is a Bulgarian sociologist and since 2002 professor for sociology at the Eastern Europe Institute / Institute of Sociology at the Free University of Berlin. He received a Ph.D. degree from the University of Leipzig in 1975 and a Sc.D...
, Tolkut Parsunz i teoretichnata sotsiologiaa. Sofia: Idz-vo na Bulgarskata akademii na naukite, 1982. - Uta GerhardtUta GerhardtUta Gerhardt is a German sociologist and professor emeritus at the University of Heidelberg.She studied sociology, philosophy and history at the universities of Frankfurt am Main and Berlin. In 1969, she obtained a Ph.D. at the University of Konstanz. The focus of her work is on medical sociology,...
, Talcott Parsons: An Intellectual Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. ISBN 0-521-81022-1 - G.C. Hallen, Martin U. Martel, Rajeshwar Prasad and Michael V. Belok (ed.) Essays on the Sociology of Parsons: a felicitation volume in honor of Talcott Parsons. Meerut: Indian Journal of Social Research, 1977.
- Christopher Hart (ed.) Talcott Parsons: A Collection of Essays in Honour of Talcott Parsons. Chester: Midrash, 2009. ISBN 97890598145
- Christopher Hart (ed.) Talcott Parsons: Theory, Development, and Applications. Essays Examining the Relevance of Parsonian Theory in the 21st Century. Kingswinford: Midrash Publishing 2008. (Japanese version in preparation).
- Adrian C. Hayes, A semi-formal explication of Talcott Parsons' general theory of action and evolutionary perspective. Advisor: Martin U. Martel. Doctor dissertation at Brown University, 1976.
- Stephan Hein, Konturen des Rationalen: zu einem Grundmotiv im Theoriewerk von Talcott Parsons. Konstanz: UVK Verlagsgesellschaft, 2009.
- Manuel Herrera Gómez, La cultura de la sociedad en Talcott Parsons. Universidad de Navarra, 2005.
- Robert J. Holton & Bryan S. TurnerBryan S. Turner (sociologist)Bryan S. Turner is a British and Australian sociologist . He was born in January 1945 to working class parents in Birmingham, England. Turner has led a remarkably nomadic life having held university appointments in England, Scotland, Australia, Germany, Holland, Singapore and the United States...
, Talcott Parsons on Economy and Society. London: Routledge, 1986. - Jens Jetzkowitz and Carsten Stark (Hrsg.) Soziologischer Functionalismus: zur Methodologie einer Theorietradition.VS Verlag, 2003.
- Benton Johnson, Functionalism in Modern Sociology: Understanding Talcott Parsons. Morristown, NJ, 1976.
- Elizabeth Suzanne Kassab, The theory of Social Action in the Schutz-Parsons debate." Editions Universitaries Fribourg Suisse, 1991.
- Paul Kellermann, Kritik einer Soziologie der Ordnung. Organismus und System bei Comte, Spencer und Parsons. Freiburg: Rombach, 1967.
- A.H.M. Kerkhoff, De samenleving in schema's: een inleiding in het sociologische denken van Talcott Parsons. Budel: Damon, 2007.
- Kwang-ki Kim, Order and Agency: Talcott Parsons, Erving Goffman and Harold Garfinkel. State University of New York Press, 2002.
- Tanja Kohlpoth, Systemtheorie und struktur-individualistischer Ansatz in den International Beziehungen. Kassel University Press, 1999.
- Tanja Kohlpoth, Gesellschaftsbild und Soziologische Theorie: Talcott Parsons' Funktionalismus im Kontext der gesellschaftlichen Entwicklung der USA in den 1950s and 1960s. Kassel University Press, June 2006. (Dissertation: Advisors: Eike Henning & Werner Ruf.)
- Jan Künzler, Medien und Gesellschaft: die Medienkonzepte von Talcott Parsons, Jürgen Habermas und Niklas Luhmann. Stuttgart: F. Enke, 1989.
- P.N. Lackey, Invitation to Talcott Parsons' Theory. Houdton: Cap and Gown Press, 1987.
- Bernd M. Lindenberg, Vorüberlegungen zu einer Theorie der modernen Industriegesellschaft: Kant, Weber und Parsons in systemtheoretischer Perspektive. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1984.
- Jan J. Loubser, Rainer C. Baum, Andrew Effrat and Victor Lidz (eds.) Explorations in General Theory in Social Science. 2 volumes. New York: The Free Press, 1976.
- Herrera Gómez Manuel, La cultura de la sociedad en Talcott Parsons. Cizur Menor, Navarra: Thomas Aranzadi, 2005.
- Alberto Marinelli, Struttura dell'ordine e funzione del diritto: saggio su Parsons. Milano, Italy: F. Angeli, 1988.
- Bernhard Miebach, Strukturalistische Handlungstheorie: Zur Verhältnis von soziologischer Theorie und empirischer Forschung in Werk Talcott Parsons. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1984.
- Laurence S. Moss and Andrew Savchenko (eds.) Talcott Parsons: Economic Sociologist of the 20th Century. Blackwell, 2006.
- Hans-Peter Müller, Talcott Parsons. Utb, 2004.
- Richard Münch, Theory of Action: Towards a New Synthesis Going Beyond Parsons. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987.
- Helmut Nolte, Psychoanalyse und Soziologie: Die Systemtheorien Sigmund Freuds und Talcott Parsons. Huber, Bern, 1970.
- Michael Opielka, Gemeinschaft in Gesellschaft: Soziologie nach Hegel und Parsons. VS Verlag, 2004.
- R. Prandini (ed.) Talcott Parsons. Milano: Bruno Mondatori, 1998.
- Sven Paschke, Talcott Parsons - Theoretische Ansatze Und Ihr Bezug Zur Wirklichkeit." Grin Verlag, 2007.
- Gabriele Pollini & Giuseppe Sciortino (eds). Parsons' The Structure of Social Action and Contemporary Debates. Milano, Italy: FrancoAngeli, 2001.
- Tuk-Sang Pyun, Science, social science, and society: natural images in Talcott Parsons' social theory. Doctoral dissertation. Department of the History of Science, Harvard University, 2002.
- Stan Rifkin, The Parsons Game: The First Simulation of Talcott Parsons' General Theory of Action. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. The George Washington University, Washington, DC., 2004.
- Roland Robertson & Bryan S. TurnerBryan S. Turner (sociologist)Bryan S. Turner is a British and Australian sociologist . He was born in January 1945 to working class parents in Birmingham, England. Turner has led a remarkably nomadic life having held university appointments in England, Scotland, Australia, Germany, Holland, Singapore and the United States...
(eds). Talcott Parsons: Theorist of Modernity. London: Sage Publications, 1991. - Guy Rocher, Talcott Parsons and American Sociology. London: Nelson, 1974.
- Segre Sandro, Talcott Parsons: Un'introduzione. Carocci, 2009.
- Karl-Heinz Saurwein, Ökonomie und soziologische Theoriekonstruction: Zur Bedeutung ökonomischer Theorieelemente in the Socialtheorie Talcott Parsons. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1988.
- Stephen P. Savage, The Theories of Talcott Parsons: The Social Relations of Action. London: Macmillan, 1981.
- Wolfgang Schluchter (ed.) Verhaten, Handeln, und System: Talcott Parsons' Beitrag zur der Socialwissenschaften. Frankfurt am Main: Schurkamp Verlag, 1980.
- Wolfgang Schluchter, Grundlegungen der Soziologie: eine Theoriegeschichte. Bind 2, Mohr Siebeck Tübingen, 2007.
- Michael Schmid, Sozialtheorie und soziales System: Versuche über Talcott Parsons. Neubiberg: Institut für Soziologie und Gesellschaftspolitik, Universität der Bundeswehr, Fakultät für Pädagogik, 1989.
- Thomas Schwinn, Jenseit von Subjecivismus und Objektivismus: Max Weber, Alfred Schütz und Talcott Parsons. Berlin: Dunker & Humblot, 1993.
- Mark Shields, Vision and Logic in Social Evolutionary Theory: A Comparative Study of Talcott Parsons and Jurgen Habermas. Advisor: Martin U. Martel. Ph.D. dissertation, Brown University, 1985.
- Helmut Staubmann, Die Kommunikation von Gefühlen: Ein Beitrag zur Soziologie der Ästhetic aud der Grundlage von Talcott Parsons' Allgemeiner Theorie des Handelns. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1995.
- Helmut Staubman and Harald Wenzel (eds.),Talcott Parsons: Zur Aktualität eines Theorieprogramms. Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag, 2000.
- Helmut Staubmann (ed.) Action Theory: Methodological Studies. LIT-Verlag Berlin-Hamburg-Münster, 2006.
- Helmut Staubmann and Victor Lidz (eds). Talcott Parsons: Actor, Situation, and Normative Pattern: An Essay in the Theory of Social Action. Wien: LIT, 2009.
- Alexander Stingl, Between Discursivity and Sensus Communis: Kant, Kantianism and the Social Media Theory of Talcott Parsons. Inaugural-Dissertation, der Friedrich-Alexander-Universität, Erlangen-Nürnberg, 2008.
- Alexander Stingl, The Biological Vernacular in Kant, James, Weber and Parsons. Lampeter: Edward Mellen Press, 2009.
- Jiñ Subrt (ed.) Talcott Parsons a jeho prinos soudobé sociologické teori. (Talcott Parsons and his Contribution to Contemporary Sociological Theory). Praha: Karolinum, 2006.
- Kazuyoski Takagi, The Theoretical System of Talcott Parsons. 1986. (Japanese).
- Ken'ichi Tominaga, Shakai hendô riron (The theory of Social Change). 1965. (Tominaga's doctoral dissertation contains an extensive discussion of Parsons).
- A. Javier Trevinõ (ed.), Talcott Parsons Today: His Theory and Legacy in Contemporary Sociology. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2001.
- Herman Turk & Richard L. Simpson (eds.) Institutions and Social Exchange: The Sociologies of Talcott Parsons and George C. Homans.Indianapolis & New York: The Bobbs-Merill Co., 1971.
- Bruce C. Wearne, The Theory and Scholarship of Talcott Parsons to 1951: A Critical Commentary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
- Harald Wenzel, Die Ordnung des Handelns - Talcott Parsons' Theorie des allgemeinen Handlungssystems. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1990.
- Kiyomitsu Yui, Development of Voluntaristic Theory of Action in American Sociology. (Japanese) Ph.D. dissertation, Kobe University, 1992.
- Kiyomitsu Yui, Parsons and Sociology Today. Sekaisisosha, Kyoto, 2002.
- Kiyomitsu Yui, Invitation to Parsons Renaissance. Keisoshobo, Tokyo, 2004.
- Norbert Zander, Methodologische Prinzipen der Soziologie von Talcott Parsons: Wege zur Soziologie. Doctoral dissertation, Universität Gesamthochschule Duisberg, 1988.
External links