Ideology and Social Knowledge

Harold J. Bershady

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351513753
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book analyzes Talcott Parsons' largest-scale effort to overcome the relativism and subjectivism of the social sciences. Harold J. Bershady sets forth Parsons' version of the characteristics desirable for social knowledge, showing that Parsons deems the relativistic and subjectivistic arguments as powerful challenges to the validity of social knowledge. Bershady maintains that all Parsons' intellectual labors exhibit a deep and abiding concern for social knowledge. From his first major work in the 1930s to his later writings on social evolution, Parsons' theoretical aim has been to provide an unassailable answer to the question, "how is social knowledge possible?"Ideological criticisms of Parsons' work, Bershady argues, not only miss his awareness of ideological influences upon social thought, but also miss the logical and epistemological strands of his thinking. This book sheds light on the persistent importance of the work of a major theoretical sociologist of the twentieth century. It also brings into the open and discusses issues of deepest concern to the philosophy and methodology of all of the social sciences.

1
Introduction and Setting

I

The issues raised by the historical consciousness in the nineteenth century are no longer of much concern to us. Who remains troubled by the so-called “quicksands of history”? Does any one seek an “Archimedean point” from which the historical flux can be seen unhampered, all the varieties of men, their habits, meanings, relations, fully grasped in a single, all-embracing scheme? The very language of the questions is old-fashioned. Relativism, the challenge by which history, in whose name Marx, Dilthey, Croce, Mannheim and a host of others once shattered the claims of knowledge to a hard-won though abiding truth, is not of much interest to us anymore. We recall that relativism was an issue historically; we can even, if pressed, sketch the relativistic arguments; but very few of us are of the mood to respond to them. Our own troubles, a few failures or gaps of technique here and there, hardly leave us open to the anxiety of that time when each step taken seemed perilous—whether in pursuing knowledge or morality, politics or art—for no standard could be held authoritative against the welter of standards thrown up by history.

The last resurgence of interest in the relativity of history and culture, and it may well have been the very last, occurred in the period between the two World Wars. We can see now that this was not a renaissance of history, as some then thought; nothing fundamentally upsetting of our belief in the universality of reason was re-born. At worst, this belief was being temporarily shaken, but was not being replaced. Ortega y Gasset, writing on “History as a System”¹ in the mid 1930s, could say, “. . . until twenty years ago the state of this belief (in reason) had not suffered modification in its general outline, but . . . in the past few years it has changed most profoundly. So much is demonstrated by innumerable facts, facts that are only too well known and that it would be depressing to enunciate once more”. There is almost no-one left of Ortega’s generation to be depressed. And now these facts merely languish in our archives, their poignancy barely remembered. I, who am writing this almost two generations beyond Ortega’s, and therefore with the rest of my generation am accustomed to living in turmoil and amidst constant outbreaks of violence, can have only a remote sense of the shock and disillusion to which Ortega refers, a sense produced by living with the survivors of those facts, grandparents, parents and teachers, and having glimpsed their lives. The First World War, the revolutions, the political turmoil and economic depressions aroused a momentary, a twilight interest in history as our confidence in the abilities of our techniques to solve all problems faltered. But even as the writings of Karl Mannheim or Ruth Benedict confirmed to part of a generation of students thirty or forty years ago that no thoughts or standards were timeless, a critical literature arose which sought to restore the universality of reason and to deny the corrosion of the products of reason, and possibly reason itself, by history. Far more important, for many reason appears to have been vindicated practically, not theoretically, by the dazzling eruption of technique in all areas, splitting every problem into manageable proportions. The “American Challenge,” as this technical prowess has been called, reaches far beyond the techniques of organizing big-business or placing a man on the moon. Relativism has been vanquished well enough, and the proof of this is that almost no-one even remembers the effort to do so.

We are today obsessed with extending the conquests of science and technique everywhere without hesitation over everything—over society, over history, over the “mind,” behavior, language, politics, poetry, possibly over the workings of art itself. This obsession is not simply a matter of extending the reach of technology, whose scope is indeed gigantic and ever-growing. It is not technology to which I am referring, and I am not expressing that common technophobia so often coupled to a hazy yearning for a return to handicrafts. I am referring to technique, and I follow Ellul’s relativistic formulation of technique as “the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity. Its characteristics are new; the technique of the present has no common measure with that of the past.”²

Analysis; structure; the “universal” rules which govern relations between parts—these are the master terms taken for granted in the attitude towards all things studied and pursued today. The philosophers in the West who comment upon the knowledge, and occasionally the attitudes towards knowledge, of their own time are now inclined to give only passing attention to the skeptical and counter-skeptical ideas of the past. Some of the great arguments are of course reviewed: Hume’s destruction of various notions of causality; Kant’s analysis of the principle of causality as a necessary form of the understanding; the positivist conception of causality as a functional relation between variables; perhaps Poincare’s and Frank’s revision of Kant to the effect that the principle of causality is a convention—although this threatens to re-open the relativistic and skeptical issues. But this is often a scant preface. In the United States and England especially, the major topic is frequently introduced by referring to the current conception of causality in the theory of quanta as statistical regularity. For the major topic with which many of the younger philosophers now occupy their writings on the theory of knowledge will likely be the analysis of the logical structure of scientific explanation. Although it is true that there has been a recent flurry of books and essays on the philosophy of history, we can detect in this literature and in our responses to it a nostalgic if not a bored or futile attitude towards the philosophy of history in its nineteenth century sense. Do not either of these attitudes show the philosophy of history is practically dead, and this flurry to be not much more than a post-mortem of the philosophy of history, just as the attitudes of nostalgia and futility found in the novels depicting the life of various ethnic groups, and evoked in us as we read, tell us the life of these groups has already passed far beyond their depiction? In keeping with the times, the philosophical concern with history is now concentrated primarily upon the logic of historical explanation. Relativism? Skepticism? We have bypassed these things; they are of the past—curious and unsolved, but in any case, irrelevant problems. Our interests lie elsewhere. Philosophy follows life.

The brilliant achievements of science and technique in virtually every field, and the specialization of training by which such achievements are produced, have very nearly obliterated our consciousness of the relativity of standards which may serve to bring our own standards into question. Yet this consciousness is not quite destroyed. It survives in an attenuated form in the writings of some of those men and women who, rare in our time, are masters of more than one discipline, and are therefore brought to reflect upon the findings and assumptions of one discipline when these are compared with the findings and assumptions of another. The physicist who is also a historian of science, the philosopher turned anthropologist or sociologist, the artist who is occasionally a critic, the critic who is also a historian of art—here there will sometimes be a knowledge of the varied sensibilities to be found in history and divergent cultures, and perhaps also a response to the challenges such variety implies for the sensibility of our own time. There are three such challenges and responses which will figure prominently in what is to follow. I shall first briefly note them here.

There is the challenge historical and cultural variety is believed to make to the justification of the present. When the past is seen as a babble of irreconcilable voices, we are urged to give ourselves exclusively to the one voice we can truly understand, the voice of the present. We delude ourselves by thinking we can comprehend the past in terms other than those of our own time, and we risk losing the witting even sensuous grasp of the present by attempting to conceive the present in terms that are foreign to it. Our own time, the only time we in fact have, must be understood in and by its own terms.

There is the challenge historical and cultural variety is believed to make to our conception of humanity. When the past is seen as the demiurge of mankind, we are urged to find in history nothing less than the process which shapes humanity’s development. Historical Reason—that sinuous notion of the relationship of past to present, present to future—must be clarified and formulated, for it is only through historical reason that all mankind’s existence, and therefore our own existence too, can be apprehended, and each of mankind’s phases assessed.

There is finally the challenge historical and cultural variety is believed to make to knowledge itself. When the past is seen merely as variable, we are urged to dismantle history and culture by breaking them into parts whose relations may be comprehended by universal rules. This response, the so-called analytical view, is often taken in opposition to one or the other responses to history and culture referred to above. Against the view which seeks to justify the present, for example, certain proponents of the analytical view argue that no conceptual justice is rendered any object, past or present, simply by adding our voice to the babble, for we are still left with no way of deciding which of the voices, if any, is the true one. Being in the present we certainly hear its voice more fully than the voice of any other time; but this amplitude may serve only to acknowledge the present; it does not and cannot confer upon the present any superior justification. And against the view which seeks to conceive humanity’s development dialectically, certain proponents of the analytical view argue that this effort of conception involves analysis itself. For in seeking to formulate the principles of Historical Reason we must also define, distinguish, classify and oppose, and this is equally the method of analysis. Historical reason, therefore, cannot be distinguished from Analysis as a method of thought. All reason, so it is argued, is one. Being a method of thought, historical reason must not be confounded with the objects it seeks to analyze. Object and method are not the same things. Analysis progresses and reforms itself with every increment of knowledge, but history and culture show only enormous variation. It is our business to discern the structures underlying this variation, to identify the parts of which these structures are composed, and to formulate the laws which bind these parts to one another. By now “analysis” is indeed our business, so commonly pursued in various of its technical aspects that, with few exceptions, it is not an articulated view taken in response to history or theories of history but is a world view glazed upon our sights unconsciously by the mold of our own culture.³

Who are the exceptions? In France it is obviously Levi-Strauss whose recent writings, especially his debate with Sartre on the nature of historical reason, continue to interest many who are not anthropologists themselves. There is hardly a major journal of general commentary in the United States that has not by now carried a piece on Levi-Strauss. Levi-Strauss’s arguments and learning are formidable; his debate with Sartre, at least in the United States, is still considered fashionable; his writing, even in translation, is lucid; and he speaks in a distinctively contemporary idiom, referring with approval to computer methodologies, techniques of quantification, and the like.

In the United States the analytical view fashioned in conscious opposition to theories of history, or historical conceptions of knowledge, is pre-eminently the work of Talcott Parsons, although this seems to be virtually unrecognized. There have been, it is true, general pieces on Talcott Parsons written to inform a literate public of developments in contemporary sociological thought. And occasionally a conceptually-minded political scientist or economic historian will attempt to adopt one or another of Parsons’ schemes or terminologies to increase the rigor and sophistication of his own discipline. But whatever the reception to Parsons’ work has been either within his own discipline or outside it, whether his work has been received favorably or unfa-vorably, intelligently or bizarrely, there has been practically no comprehension of the great tasks Parsons has set himself. And this lack of comprehension is in fact a minor irony of our time. I do not intend by this statement to add my own voice to the growing chorus which bewails the state of contemporary American sociology—indeed, I am frequently uncertain which is the more depressing, the discipline or the complaints. But surely the narrowness of our own understanding is revealed when the work of one of the indefatigable advocates of the analytical study of man and history, a work which seizes with consuming passion the powerful challenges to knowledge issued by the nineteenth-century philosophy of history and is therefore in a direct, though Americanized, descent from the “classical” European sociology, is so frequently condemned. The purveyors of science among the sociologists find Parsons’ work too metaphysical or idealistic; whereas the critics among the sociologists—those especially who evince a concern with the interpretation of the history of modern society, and who hold up the earlier masters of sociology for us to emulate—find Parsons’ work insufficiently historical, too formal or abstract. Perhaps it is Parsons’ lack of ideological allegiance to either of these groups that accounts for their responses to his work—although I doubt this proposition captures much of anything that is involved. There is no question, however, that there are obstacles to the easy comprehension of Parsons’ work. There is the matter of Parsons’ tortuous, often elephantine style which makes access to his ideas a strenuous undertaking. Agreed. Yet, in the exposition to follow there will be exhibited many examples of Parsons’ writing that are perfectly clear. There is further the fact that Parsons has written voluminously, has produced many huge tomes in an impatient age—which is perhaps why his essays are appreciated more than his books. There is also the fact that Parsons’ works are heavily freighted with a scholarship to which graduate schools in sociology for the past thirty years have rarely given their students more than the most fleeting acquaintance at the very best. Of greatest importance, in my opinion, is the fact that the problems and issues of deepest concern to Parsons have in large part been ignored. Possibly there is the presumption that these problems have been long resolved, for most of the emphasis is now placed upon a detail of one or another problem, or upon a technique for elucidating that detail. Yet, there is hardly any explicit recognition of the full scale of the problems to which these details and techniques may be referred and interrelated. Thus the frameworks Parsons has constructed are rarely understood to be his response to the broader problems, whereas the appearance and re-appearance of these problems in his writings is frequently greeted with bafflement, alarm, hostility or silence.

I believe that Parsons’ work is a great though limited achievement, and it is my aim to define that achievement and to show its limits. However, the significance of Parsons’ work does not lie in its intellectual achievements alone, whatever the greatness of those achievements may be. For Parsons’ work may also be taken as an attempt to express and fix the presuppositions of a large part of our lives. Parsons’ work, in other words, is a philosophy of technique, of action; it provides an analysis of the categories underlying the transformative mentality which is at the very center of our worldwide technical culture. Parsons may not have deliberately intended this; nowhere in his work is there a recitation of the details of the technical outlook such as may be found, for example, in the glum catalogues provided by Juenger or Ellul. In Parsons’ work the technical details are for the most part tacitly assumed; they exist as an ambiance for which his work provides the organizing cognitive motif—just as, indeed, the details of technique are the encompassing situation we take for granted and in which we all act out our lives. To call the cognitive motif of this situation “analysis” is accurate enough, although this is an academic and, in present circumstances, a somewhat misleading way of putting it. In fact, the g...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition
• 1 Introduction and Setting
• 2 The First Epistemological Problems
• 3 The Relativity of Ideal-Types
• 4 The First Solution of the Epistemological Problems
• 5 Metaphysical Interlude
• 6 The Functional ‘Solution’ of the Scientific and Epistemological Problems
• 7 Of Thinking and Explaining the Composition of Large-Scale Societies and Their Evolution
• 8 Conclusion: On Unification of Social Knowledge
• Index