Modern Reconstruction of Classical Thought

Talcott Parsons

Jeffrey Alexander

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317808602
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In this volume the author maintains that sociology must learn to combine the insights of both Durkheim and Marx and that it can only do so on the presuppositional ground that Weber set forth. Alexander maintains that the idealist and materialist traditions must be transformed into analytic dimensions of multidimensional and synthetic theory. This volume focusses on the writing of Talcott Parsons, the only modern thinker who can be considered a true peer of the classical founders, and examines his own profoundly ambivalent attempt to carry out this analytic transformation.

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Chapter One

THEORETICAL CONTROVERSY AND THE PROBLEMATICS OF PARSONIAN INTERPRETATION

No matter how intellectually refined its argument, there is undoubtedly a charismatic power that adheres to the work of a great social thinker, a quality that raises to a heightened pitch the normal level of confusion and irrationality produced by generalized conflict in the social sciences. In defense against such a powerful intellectual center, there emerges alongside the usual thrusts and parries of serious theoretical combat an antagonistic tradition of misinformed, often trivial, sometimes grossly distorted commentary that attempts to present itself, and is partly accepted, as critical truth. At the same time, the attractive power of this center is such that those who follow the thinker prove unable to present an objective critical evaluation of his intellectual contributions. Only with the passage of time, as the center loses its immediate power, can a perspective that is both critical and appreciative be attained and the thinker’s permanent contributions to intellectual tradition be properly assessed.

We can observe this tortuous path of assimilation in the reception of each of the theorists examined in the preceding volumes of this study. Marx’s work, of course, immediately polarized the European intellectual community, creating a band of zealous “Marxist” followers on the one side, and a skeptical, anti-Marxist academic audience on the other. Only as this initial dichotomization subsided were Marx’s insights incorporated into the mainstream of intellectual work and, at the same time, were revisionist “Marxists” finally able to present openings—albeit highly camouflaged ones—to established “bourgeois” theory, creating in the process the kind of cross-cuttings in general theoretical logic I described in volume 2, chapter 10.^1† Because of the depressed condition of postwar German scholarship, the reception of Max Weber’s work follows this pattern less precisely, although one can clearly detect what might be called the epigoni phenomenon in the Weberianism of the succeeding decades.² An entire generation would elapse before Weber’s basic insights could be incorporated into the intellectual tradition, before the profound revisionism could emerge that inevitably separated many of Weber’s most important insights from the overarching, systematic conceptual framework upon which Weber himself had insisted.

But this process seems particularly striking, and particularly relevant to the present discussion, in the case of Durkheim. As a forceful figure intellectually and personally, Durkheim created a powerful sociological school which followed “Durkheimian” theory in a manner that greatly extended its scope and application. While in fact highly revisionist, these Durkheimians were ostensibly merely loyal expositors. As a result, these immediate followers did little to articulate the foundations of Durkheim’s thought or to clarify its critical weaknesses.³ At the same time, “Durkheimianism” was subject to a barrage of what was often distorted and tendentious criticism, directed not only toward Durkheim’s theoretical conceptions but in addition to his ideological involvement in the reconstruction of the French republic.⁴ Only in the late 1930s and 1940s, with the work of sociologists like Parsons, Merton, and Gurvitch, and anthropologists like Radcliffe-Brown, Evans-Pritchard, and Lévi-Strauss, and, indeed, after the decline of almost all literalistic “Durkheimianism,” was the attempt begun to reappropriate Durkheim’s theoretical work. And only in the 1970s was the debate about his ideological perspective sufficiently separated from reductive argument and from the sterile radical-conservative dichotomy to enable the more humanitarian and progressive impetus of his work to be understood.^5†

This dynamic of theoretical assimilation is particularly relevant when we consider Talcott Parsons, for as the only contemporary theorist among our four subjects his work remains stuck in the middle of this unfolding process. Among sociological theorists after the classical period, Parsons’ theoretical contributions alone rank with those of Marx, Durkheim, and Weber. This contention underlies all of my ensuing analysis, whether favorable or critical. Yet today, more than ever, Parsons’ status as a major figure is widely disputed. For the quarter century following the Second World War his intellectual prestige increased enormously, and a large number of distinguished followers—revisionist “Parsonians”—emerged to clarify his theory’s anomalies, to extend its scope and range of application. In the mid-1960s, however, Parsons’ intellectual fortunes suffered an abrupt reversal, and the fifteen years following have witnessed an intensification of self-consciously “anti-Parsonian” criticism, pursued along ideological as well as theoretical lines. According to much of this criticism, the earlier sociological tribute to Parsons was thoroughly misguided: his work not only falls far short of classical status but is probably unworthy of further theoretical consideration.

Intellectual distinction, however, is not identical with universal popularity.^6† To the contrary, it is the very breadth of the controversy surrounding Parsons’ work that underscores its general and long-range significance. Marx and Durkheim sparked similarly virulent debate. This Parsons controversy has taken two forms. On the most generalized level, it is not an exaggeration to observe that over the last forty years major theoretical debate in Western sociology has been mediated through Parsons’ theories; further, every major theoretical innovation—exchange theory, ethnomethodology, conflict theory, even certain forms of revisionist Marxism—has been initiated through a reinterpretation of one segment or another of Parsons’ theoretical corpus.^7† Long, complex, often casuistic arguments have been launched over the validity of “Parsonianism” as a theoretical alternative to Marxism, Weberianism, Durkheimianism, symbolic interactionism, and phenomenology, despite the fact that the polemics of such “interpretive” readings have usually remained implicit.^8† On a more specific level, controversy within most of the principal empirical subfields of sociology has, at one point or another, focused on a particular set of “Parsonian” propositions, whether or not such alleged configurations accurately represented Parsons’ own thinking.^9†

Surely, then, these critical barbs are also bouquets of a peculiar sort. In fact, lurking beneath the surface of even the most antagonistic critique there persists theoretical homage to Parsons’ stature. In the midst of condemning Parsons as the high priest of sociological conservatism, Friedrichs describes him “as one of the most sophisticated minds that American sociology has produced.”¹⁰ While devoting the major portion of his magnum opus to what he views as the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the Parsonian effort, Gouldner simultaneously calls our attention to “the intrinsic significance of Parsons’ theory as theory.”¹¹

There is no other work by an academic sociologist today that is as relevant to the entire galaxy of important theoretical issues.… If he himself does not directly deal with every important theoretical problem, he brings us to its threshold.… [H]e was and still remains the intellectual anchor of academic sociological theory in the modern world.¹²

When, therefore, Turner writes that “while few appear to agree with all aspects of ‘Parsonian theory’ rarely has anyone quarreled with the assertion that he has been the dominant figure of this century,” he has got hold of an important and neglected part of the truth.¹³ Social scientists have quarreled, and bitterly, over Parsons’ ultimate significance, but it is precisely the intensity of this quarrel that lends credibility to the claim for Parsons’ permanent relevance.

Further evidence for this claim can be found in recent indications that a more balanced sort of critical assessment is in the process of emerging, as thinkers of different theoretical and political traditions have returned to Parsons’ work and argued for the legitimacy or centrality of its central concerns. Most of this trend has thus far occurred outside the United States, outside, that is, the area of the most immediate and personal confrontation over Parsons’ work. In England, Percy Cohen’s Modern Social Theory constitutes a critical appreciation of Parsons’ thought that deftly steers among the land mines of postwar debate; Ken Menzies’ Talcott Parsons and the Social Image of Man, while supporting the individualist critique of Parsonianism, is singularly successful in isolating Parsons’ theoretical concerns from his empirical and ideological ones; in Social Order, Reform, and Revolution, Bob Jessop launches a radical socialist critique of the liberal approach to social change on the basis of a sophisticated reinterpretation of Parsonian systems theory; Dick Atkinson directs his radical critique of “orthodox sociology” at the troika of Parsons, Marx, and Weber, who “may all be thought of as founding fathers of sociology”; and Stephen Savage concludes his ambitious Althusserian interpolation by praising Parsons for having “sought to answer questions where others had not even seen the possibility of a question.”¹⁴ In Quebec, Guy Rocher has produced a plausible, sympathetic reading of the systems aspect of Parsons’ work, carefully separating it from its anti-socialist animus which Rocher himself does not share.¹⁵ In France, François Bourricaud has published a major interpretive account that retrieves and restates key elements of Parsons’ work in important new ways; François Chazel has written an appreciative if still somewhat conventionally distorted account of Parsons’ central position in Western sociology; Alain Tourraine has incorporated much of Parsonian functionalism, as a counterweight to Marxism, into his analysis of the “production of society”; and the so-called “structuralist Marxism” of Althusser, Poulantzas, and Godelier has borrowed heavily from Parsons’ functionalist conceptualization in its revision of Marxian theory.^16† In Germany, Niklas Luhmann has tried to re-create a Parsonianism more attentive to contingency if, paradoxically, even more dependent on “systems”; Wolfgang Schluchter has attempted to reconceptualize Weber’s historical rationalization theory in what are fundamentally Parsonian concepts; Richard Münch has written a series of powerful interpretive essays which seek to reestablish the neo-Kantian vitality of Parsons’ work; and Jürgen Habermas, who in most respects is in sharp dialogue with each of these German colleagues, has made extensive use of Parsons’ systems and evolutionary theories, warning his fellow Marxists that “although the interest in Parsons’ theory has slackened since the mid-1960’s…no social theory can be taken seriously today which does not—at the very least—clarify its relationship to Parsons’” and suggesting that “whoever deludes himself about this fact allows himself to be captured by contemporary issues instead of rationally confronting them.”^17† In Holland, Hans P. M. Adriaansens’ sophisticated overview of Parsons’ corpus tries to demonstrate that “it offers the prospect of systematization of the present chaotic state of social scientific theory with all its schools, movements and perspectives and their utterly vague relations one to the other.”¹⁸

Finally, some of this rapprochement has been expressed within the United States. In bracketing the ideological question, Harold Bershady’s Ideology and Social Knowledge produces new insight into the epistemological foundations of Parsons’ meta-methodology. By stepping outside the either/or dichotomy of the recent literature of polemic and defense, Jonathan Turner has demonstrated a significant overlap between Parsons’ propositions and those of his critics’—conflict, exchange, and symbolic interactionist theory. And the radical political economist Herbert L. Gintis has synthesized elements of Parsons and Marx in presenting a framework for an anticapitalist approach to welfare economics.^19†

In short, although the perspective provided by the passage of time is simply not available for any contemporary examination of Parsons’ work, we can already see emerging a pattern of evaluation that bears a remarkable similarity to the vicissitudes experienced by Durkheim’s corpus. It seems likely that the dialectic of acceptance, critique, revision, and assimilation will also be the fate of Parsons.

What follows here is a contribution to this assimilative and revisionist task. I will argue that Parsons’ most fundamental theoretical contributions have been badly misunderstood—by recent critics, by long-time Parsonians, and even by those who have begun the long-term work of theoretical sifting and winnowing. Like the theories of the classical sociologists who preceded him, Parsons has suffered from the interpretive errors of conflation and reduction, errors which, as we have seen in earlier volumes, permeate contemporary theoretical logic. Indeed, his work has been even more vulnerable to such misinterpretation precisely because it has been so intimately interwoven with recent debate.^20†

Critics and supporters alike have conflated the autonomy of different levels of Parsons’ thought. Judging from purely positivist standards, a host of commentators have focused exclusively on the most specific, empirical strand of his work, refuting or verifying “Parsonianism” on the basis of carefully planned “crucial experiments.”²¹ At the other extreme, Parsons’ interpreters have often dismissed the empirical, or “objective,” segment of his work as negligible, arguing from a sociology-of-knowledge perspective that the only really significant level of his theory is the ideological. Accordingly, such critics reduce the other segments of Parsons’ formulations to reflexes of his political or social position.²²

Between these two extremes of reductionism, interpreters have purported to explain Parsons’ theory by conflating it with more intermediate levels of the sociological continuum. Some relate the objectionable aspects of Parsons’ theory to his methodological choices. If Parsons had only been more of a positivist, his critics argue, hi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface: Theoretical Thought and Its Vicissitudes: The Achievements and Limitations of Classical Sociology
• Chapter One: Theoretical Controversy and the Problematics of Parsonian Interpretation
• Chapter Two: The Early Period: Interpretation and the Presuppositional Movement toward Multidimensionality
• Chapter Three: The Middle Period: Specifying the Multidimensional Argument
• Chapter Four: The Later Period (1): The Interchange Model and Parsons' Final Approach to Multidimensional Theory
• Chapter Five: The Later Period (2): Socialization, Social Change, and the Systemic and Historical Bases of Individual Freedom
• Chapter Six: The Methodological Error (1): Neopositivism and the Formalization of Parsons' Theory
• Chapter Seven: The Methodological Error (2): The Neopositivist Strategy and the Conflation of Presuppositional Logic with Specific Commitments
• Chapter Eight: The Presuppositional Error (1): Sociological Idealism and the Attack on Instrumental Order in the Early and Middle Work
• Chapter Nine: The Presuppositional Error (2): Idealist Reduction in the Later Writings
• Chapter Ten: Conclusion: Paradigm Revision and “Parsonianism”
• Appendix: Conflation and Reduction in the Interpretation of Parsonian Theory
• Notes
• Works of Parsons
• Author-Citation Index
• Subject Index