Talcott Parsons

12 Key excerpts on "Talcott Parsons"

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  The Systemic Approach in Sociology and Niklas Luhmann

  Expectations, Discussions, Doubts

  • Jiří Šubrt(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Emerald Publishing Limited

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 4

  A Dream of Integration of Theory and Society (Parsons)

  Talcott Parsons was quite probably the most important American sociologist of the twentieth century. Structural functionalism, the approach of which he was an exponent,1 is in various overviews of contemporary sociological theory most often associated with the theory of social systems, but this is not so simple and clear-cut, because Parsons’ theory has evolved somewhat, and early in his work Parsons was closer to a Weberian, individualistic position; only later did he strongly align himself with holism, which in the years after the Second World War was promoted by general systems theory.

  4.1. Talcott Parsons – His Life and Work

  Talcott Parsons was born on 13 December 1902 in Colorado Springs. His father, Edward Smith Parsons, was a Congregationalist minister and a professor, and his family followed the tradition of ascetic Protestantism. In 1920 Parsons began studying at Amherst College (Amherst, Massachusetts). Initially he wanted to become a doctor, so he studied biology, but his interest soon turned to economics. The institutional school was the dominant perspective at Amherst at that time, and through his study of institutional economics Parsons became acquainted with the ideas of such figures as Veblen, Commons, Sumner, and Cooley. Parsons completed his studies in 1924.

  That same year Parsons, like many of his American predecessors and peers, went to study in Europe and enrolled at the London School of Economics (LSE). While there he got to know many prominent intellectuals, among them R. H. Tawney, Morris Ginsberg, Bronislaw Malinowski, and Harold Laski. He attended Ginsberg’s lectures in sociology and Malinowski’s seminar in anthropology, where he became friends with E. E. Evans-Pritchard and other important figures in British social anthropology. This was the start of Parsons’ gradual academic reorientation.

  Parsons spent 1925–1926 in Heidelberg (Germany). There, five years after the death of Max Weber, he studied The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

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  Contemporary Sociological Thinkers and Theories

  • Sandro Segre(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  12

  Talcott Parsons (1902–1979)

  DOI: 10.4324/9781315573946-12

  Preliminary Remarks

  Talcott Parsons, one of the most influential and well-known twentieth century sociologists, is the author of an enormous body of works, which roused disputes and diverging interpretations. After some discussion of the conceptual aspect of his thought, we shall follow the conventional division of his work into different periods (Alexander 1983b : 46–8, 73–7, 119–20; Hamilton 1989 ; see also Gerhardt 2002 : 58). In support of the decision to adhere to this division, we refer to the differences emerging in epistemological assumptions, theoretical references, and the conceptual patterns in his thought, in particular, the concepts of action and voluntarism, as they are manifest in each period. The argumentation of the thesis of diversity, though adopted by several interpreters of Parsons, has been expounded by the supporters of this thesis in different ways and with argumentative references (see, for instance, Scott 1963 and Alexander’s critical remarks in this connection, 1983: 34, and 334–5). Other commentators prefer, instead, to emphasize the continuity of Parsons’s work. In their opinion, over the different decades covered by his production, there would have been a progressive theoretical improvement of a single constant conceptual nucleus (Muench 1982 ).

  We limit ourselves to arguing that different themes prevailed depending on Parsons’s production periods. A first period, in the 1930s, was characterized by an in-depth study of some European authors – as Durkheim, Pareto and Weber – Parsons greatly contributed to make known also in the United States through the publication of “The Structure of Social Action” (1937); several minor writings anticipate and accompany this major work (Camic 1991

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  The Emerald Guide to Talcott Parsons

  • John Scott(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Emerald Publishing Limited

    (Publisher)

  1

  Talcott Parsons AND AMERICAN SOCIOLOGY

  Once the best-known sociologist in the world, the American sociologist Talcott Parsons is now almost forgotten. His ideas on general theory and structural functionalism once dominated world sociology, being widely regarded as the only viable approach to the subject. Relatively few sociologists today have heard of him or think his ideas worth consideration. Those who remember his name tend to see him as old-fashioned, even misguided. His vision of general theory seems strange, kept alive only by a handful of committed adherents. Even during his lifetime, he was criticised for presenting complex and abstract ideas in unwieldy and incomprehensible texts, and these views are today often taken as grounds for disregarding his work.

  I have written this book in the conviction that Parsons has been wrongly criticised and unduly ignored. It is time to reassess his ideas, which properly understood offer a fruitful way of undertaking empirical work and moving towards robust explanations. This explains a recent upsurge of interest in Parsons’s sociology, most marked in Germany and the United States. New critical studies of his works have appeared, and the archives have been trawled to find previously unknown draft manuscripts that could be brought to a new audience. These publications make it possible to reconsider the significance and contemporary relevance of Parsons’s sociology. My presentation of Parsons’s views – the first, I believe, to accurately and clearly explain the development of his work without misleading simplification – is intended as a contribution to that reassessment and to introducing his theoretical project to a new generation.

  Very little is recorded about Parsons’s life and personal characteristics. He is known to have been rather short, prematurely bald, a chain smoker, and, in later life, somewhat portly. He was typically dressed in a crumpled tweed suit flecked with cigarette ash. His rich East Coast accent betrayed traces of his origins in the American West. He spoke slowly and hesitantly, with long pauses in which he sought the correct word or followed an incidental thought. Though modest and rather shy in personal situations, his passionate commitment to the vocation of sociology as a systematic, scientific discipline was apparent in discussion and writing. Students and colleagues regarded him as a genial and rather avuncular character whose teaching could inspire students through his quiet, untheatrical passion for the subject. His lectures – delivered from brief notes on a yellow legal pad – were marked by frequent digressions as he pursued his thoughts enthusiastically and with great determination. Indeed, his students would sometimes wonder where these thoughts would end up. He was, however, unfailingly supportive of his graduate students, treating them as intellectual equals and as contributors to his evolving ideas. His office door was invariably open for students to drop in for discussion on sociological matters. He enjoyed collaborative work and co-authored papers with many former students and colleagues, always giving them full recognition.

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  Debating Humanity : Towards a Philosophical Sociology

  • Daniel Chernilo(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  3 Adaptation Talcott Parsons For several decades, received sociological wisdom has been that Talcott Parsons ’ s structural functionalism offers a vision of the human being that is straightforwardly passive and role conforming. This assessment, which usually centres on a critical reading of Parsons ’ s ( 1970 [1951]) The Social System , is based on the claim that consensually established cultural values frame the pool of acceptable responses for individuals within any given social setting. Through processes of internalisation, institutionalisation and socialisation, members of society would all from a young age learn what is expected of them; in turn, society ’ s mechanisms for punishments and rewards would be institutionalised through an equally consensual and consistent pattern. 1 One problem of this line of critique is that, at best, it is only a partial representation of Parsons ’ s position; not least as he effectively disowned the central tenets of this intermediate theoretical framework soon after publication ( 1953 ). Yet the fact that his de fi nitive theoretical model of the four functions – the so-called AGIL – still has no apparent place for the active powers of agency does not help the case of Parsons ’ s defence. From a strictly sociological perspective, Parsons ’ s concept of the modern indivi-dual is little more than a residual category within his explicit project of conceptualising social relations as an emergent and autonomous domain, and modern societies as an evolutionary accomplishment of the human species as a whole ( 1971 ). While modern individualism became a salient ideological and cultural force in modernity as early as the seventeenth century (Macpherson 1964 ), for most of Parsons ’ s career ideas of the individual and the human are little more than a black box: they were expected to provide all the necessary elements, though inconsistently put 1 Canonically, this critique is available in Alvin Gouldner ( 1973 ), C.

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  Handbook of Social Theory

  • George Ritzer, Barry Smart, George Ritzer, Barry Smart(Authors)
  • 2001(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  13 Talcott Parsons: Conservative Apologist or Irreplaceable Icon? R O B E R T J . H O L T O N Talcott Parsons is one of the most important, yet also most controversial social theorists of the twentieth century. His career spanned the five decades from the late 1920s to the late 1970s. He is possibly best known for his postwar theories of normative order, for the construction of a grand theoretical edifice labelled structural functional-ism, and for a tendency to write impenetrable prose. Many of the critical commentaries on these aspects of Parsons’ work, however, lack a broader appreciation of the insights and subtle-ties of his work. These emerge, to take only three examples, from his early work on social action and economic life in the 1930s, his synthesis of social theory and psychoanalysis in the 1950s, as well as later work on the human condition published just before his death in 1979. Parsons’ project for social theory contrasts with many of the prevailing modes of theoretical endeavour as we enter the twenty-first century. Social theory today is typically fragmented in scope, anti-foundational in temper, riven with epistemological conflict and unsure of its relation-ship with social and political action. Parsons, by contrast, sought nothing less than the construc-tion of a unified map of the social. His irre-pressible usage of the vocabulary of structured systems, determinate input–output relations and boundary interchanges, in these endeavours, contrasts markedly with the anti-canonical iconoclasm of the present day. Parsons, by con-trast, is an iconic figure, offering an iconic style of social theory. This aspired to coherence not merely in its internal logic and architecture, but also in its account of the relationship between the social, the metaphysical and the natural worlds. These wider concerns reflect both his liberal Protestant origins, and early career ambitions to become a biological scientist.

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  Debating Humanity

  Towards a Philosophical Sociology

  • Daniel Chernilo(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Parsons consistently adopted an approach to scientific knowledge and theory construction that centred on ideas of a unified conceptual framework that builds through accumulation. 14 He clearly sees his own work as belonging within this fantastic pantheon of Western science and philosophy that includes the names that we mentioned above – from Kant to Freud and Einstein. And he makes this proposition in two 14 For all his sustained criticism of positivism as a form of reductionism, Parsons’s own approach to the advancement of science finds here its own positivist bent. But because positivism argues that ‘facts’ alone drive scientific knowledge forward, and it therefore fundamentally undervalues the role of theoretical work, Parsons remains ultimately a critic of positivism (1978: 354). 100 Talcott Parsons different capacities. As a sociologist, first, he is to sit alongside Weber in having made the idea of action central to our understanding of social life; second, and more generally, he is also to share a pride of place with Kant as the one who was able to generalise action theory and turn it into the paradigm that is able to include in an integrated way the advance- ments of all scientific disciplines. This we may see as Parsons’s ‘Comtean’ view of the contribution of sociology to scientific development: the phy- sical sciences were at the intellectual forefront during the seventeenth century, the biological sciences took up the baton in the eighteenth century, but now in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the turn has now arrived for action sciences: All students of human action have long been aware of the importance to human beings of the physical world, the organic world, and, though its status has been more controversial, the “transempirical” (telic) world, besides that of action itself in our technical sense. What is new in the present venture is the attempt to put their relations to action and to each other into a more systematic framework.

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  The Differentiation of Society

  • Niklas Luhmann, Stephen Holmes, Charles Larmore, Stephen Holmes, Charles Larmore(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Columbia University Press

    (Publisher)

  3 Talcott Parsons: The Future of a Theory Talcott Parsons left his lifework unfinished. The form in which we find it is the result of a continuous theoretical development that lasted for decades. His publications represent waystations in this process. In them Parsons was concerned with the broad perspec-tives he had achieved, the fascination of solid results, the changing interdisciplinary currents and contacts, and the themes that had met with criticism. But being the precipitate of a historical process, Parsons' theory did not find its best possible form. Readers find the internal consistency of his work a continual problem. This is true especially for critical analyses that, measuring his work against European traditions, look for the role of the subject or the individ-ual. There are various external reasons and avoidable misunder-standings which may be responsible for his writings being shoved aside in America and in Europe. A fair critique of his work would take a discouragingly great effort. Thus, there exists the danger that his work will be mummified and stored for later rediscovery, with-out proving fruitful to contemporary theoretical developments. Even if his work is one gigantic mistake, no one will even know why. But we can avoid this outcome. The operative concepts in his work are recognizable enough and are relatively easy to grasp when Talcott Parsons 48 used abstractly. The basic structures in his analysis of the general action system have been sufficiently clarified for us to see what remains obscure or left out. What Parsons himself always recom-mended for gaining insights into society—that we must pick out structures in order to know where problems lie and changes are taking place—also holds for his own work. A theory's underlying structures allow us to perceive what problems it needs to resolve. Thus, the future of Parsons' theory does not lie merely in its further internal development.

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  Classical Sociology

  • Bryan S Turner(Author)
  • 1999(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  Because Parsons was steeped in German scientific culture, he felt less anxi-ous than most in employing ‘science’ in his description of those disciplines which study action. Whether or not one agrees with Parsons’s version of sociology, I believe we have to respect Parsons as a committed scientist, whose own life was also shaped by the pattern variables he sought to describe in The Social System. Weber is reputed to have said that ‘much of what is sailing under the name of sociology is a swindle’ (Mayer, 1944: 87). In the case of Parsons, as with Durkheim, we are confronted by a man for whom sociology is a calling. With Parsons’s sociology we are offered not a swindle, but the genuine article. References Abercrombie, N., Hill, S. and Turner, B.S. (1980) The Dominant Ideology Thesis. London: Allen & Unwin. Adorno, T.W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D. J. and Sanford, R.N. (1950) The Authoritarian Personality. New York: Harper. Adriaansens, H.P.M. (1989) ‘Talcott Parsons and beyond: recollections of an outsider’, Theory, Culture & Society, 6(4): 613–21. 182 Classical Sociology Alexander, J.C. (1984) Theoretical Logic in Sociology, Vol. 4: The modern reconstruction of classical thought: Talcott Parsons. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Alexander, J.C. (ed.) (1985) Neofunctionalism. Beverly Hills: Sage. Alexander, J.C. (1987) Twenty Lectures: Sociological theory since World War II. New York: Columbia University Press. Alexander, J.C. (1988) ‘The new theoretical movement’, in N.J. Smelser (ed.), Handbook of Sociology. Newbury Park: Sage. pp. 77–101. Bendix, R. (1969) Max Weber, an Intellectual Portrait. London: Methuen. Bourricaud, F. (1981) The Sociology of Talcott Parsons. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Buxton, W. (1985) Talcott Parsons and the Capitalist Nation-State. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Camic, C. (1989) ‘Structure after fifty years ’, American Journal of sociology, 95: 38–107.

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  Key Thinkers in the Sociology of Religion

  • Richard K. Fenn(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Continuum

    (Publisher)

  Talcott Parsons Talcott Parsons (1902–1979) lived through two world wars and a major depression in the United States, but his work emphasizes the ways that social systems manage to achieve a certain amount of consistency in the patterns by which people work and play, raise children and worship or vote. In theory as well as in social life Parsons had an eye for what he called pattern consistency; indeed he looked for ways in which the stud-ies of Weber and Durkheim might converge on a single theory of action and the social structure of modern societies. At Harvard (1927–1974) for most of his professional life, Parsons has helped at least two genera-tions of students make signal contributions to the field of sociology. For Parsons, societies evolve along two main dimensions, space and time. As they do, religion emerges, develops, takes shape, performs functions, becomes more abstract as it covers more contingencies and situations, and finally emerges into a realm of its own in which, as a set of beliefs and values, it transcends the society. Once transcendent, religion gives the social order an enduring, open-ended present extend-ing into both the past and the future. The gods become less capricious, the sacred less eventful, history more teleological, and the cosmos provi-dential. Initially, the dimension of space is a tract of land, more or less unbounded, but always concretely specified: “traditionally established areas within which specific kin groups are conventionally entitled to hunt and gather” (Parsons 1966: 36). Small groups of hunters and gath-erers wandered over tracts of land which their ancestors had given or promised to them. The dimension of time was personified in the ances-tors, who lived at some point in the past before chronologies began and before time could be dated and counted. The ancestors could be superhuman and thus immortal, well beyond the passage of time, and

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  The Theory of Communicative Action

  Lifeworld and Systems, a Critique of Functionalist Reason, Volume 2

  • Jürgen Habermas, Thomas McCarthy(Authors)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Polity

    (Publisher)

  VII

  Talcott Parsons: Problems in Constructing a Theory of Society

  Owing in part to the writings of Talcott Parsons, Weber, Mead, and Durk-heim now count as undisputed classics in the history of sociological theory. It requires no explicit justification to deal with these authors today as if they were our contemporaries. However highly one may rank Parsons, his status as a classic is not so beyond dispute that any justification for taking his work as the reference point for the systematic discussion that follows would be superfluous.

  To begin with the obvious, none of his contemporaries developed a social theory of comparable complexity. The autobiographical account of his work that Parsons published in 1974 gives a first impression of the continuity and cumulative success of the efforts that this scholar devoted to constructing a single theory over the course of more than fifty years.1 The body of work he left us is without equal in its level of abstraction and differentiation, its social-theoretical scope and systematic quality, while at the same time it draws upon the literatures of specialized research. Interest in Parsons’ theory has been on the wane since the middle of the 1960s, and his later work was even pushed into the background for a time by hermeneutically and critically oriented approaches to social inquiry. Nevertheless, no theory of society can be taken seriously today if it does not at least situate itself with respect to Parsons. To deceive oneself on this point is to be held captive by questions of topicality rather than being sensitive to them. This holds as well for any neoMarxism that wants to bypass Parsons. Errors of this sort are usually corrected rather quickly in the history of scientific inquiry.

  Furthermore, among the productive theorists of society no one else has equaled Parsons’ intensity and persistence in conducting a dialogue with the classics and connecting up his own theory to them. One need not share his conviction that the convergence of the great theoretical traditions and agreement with them are a touchstone for the truth of one’s own theoretical approach,2 but the ability to appropriate and work up the best traditions is indeed a sign of a social theory’s powers of comprehension and assimilation—though such theories aim as well to establish a specific paradigm of society rooted in a collective selfunderstanding. From beginning to end, the theories of Durkheim, Weber, and Freud formed a reference system for Parsons which he used as a check on his own thought.3 Of course, along with this went not only the constant demarcation from philosophical empiricism, but a shield against Marx and Mead, against materialist and symbolic interactionist varieties of critical social theory receptive to Kant and Hegel.4 Moreover, the fact that Parsons remained, on the whole, closed to philosophy—with the exception of Whitehead’s influence on his earlier work, and the rather vague references to Kant in one of his later works5

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  The Art of Sociological Argument

  • Graham Crow(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  5 Talcott Parsons: sociology as systematic reflection Introduction and overview Talcott Parsons was born in America on 13 December 1902 and died of heart failure while revisiting Germany having just given a lecture on 8 May 1979. The fact that he continued to be engaged in academic activity right up to his death and well past normal retirement age is symptomatic of his prodigious energy that resulted in an astonishing intellectual output over the half century that followed his first scholarly publication. In a touching dedication to his wife Helen of his book The Social System Parsons described himself as ‘an incurable theorist’ (1951: v), and Rocher has remarked that ‘It would be difficult to find two words which better defined this man’s career and the role he has played in American sociol-ogy’ (1974: 1). Parsons’s influence reflects the enormous respect that many in his audiences have for his determination to engage with academic prob-lems with an unusual degree of persistence and rigour. This approach led him to look for solutions in unexpected places. His final visit to Germany was planned to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the award of his doctoral degree from Heidelberg (Hamilton 1983: 52), and it is instructive that Parsons had looked to Germany for an alternative source of ideas to the ‘Anglo-American economic thought’ (1991: 3) which he came to consider ‘way off the main track’ (in Camic 1991: xxii). A crash course in German allowed him to read Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism , the subject matter of which resonated with his upbringing in a staunchly Protestant household headed by his father, a Congregationalist minister (Wearne 1989: 11). It was typical of Parsons to look beyond conventional disciplinary boundaries in the development of his thinking, and he went on to draw on Freudian psychoanalysis and then on cybernetics in his restless search for intellectual satisfaction.

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  Social theory for beginners

  • Ransome, Paul, Paul Ransome(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Policy Press

    (Publisher)

  He began his academic career aged 18 at Amherst College in Massachusetts in 1920 where he took biology as his major subject. He spent a year at the London School of Economics in 1923/24 (where he would have met the influential Polish-born functionalist social anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski) before taking up a fellowship to study for his PhD at Heidelberg University in Germany in 1925. In 1927 aged 25 he moved to Harvard University where he remained for the rest of his career. The first Department of Sociology in Harvard was established in 1931 and Parsons became Professor of Sociology there in 1938 and Chairman of the Department in 1942. He retired in 1973 and died of heart failure in 1979 aged 77. Parsons published a very large number of books and articles during his long career (over 160 published items). The most important are: The Structure of Social Action (1937), The Social System (1951) and, with E. Shils, Toward a General Theory of Action (1962). General systems theory Talcott Parsons was through-and-through an advocate of the rationalist deductive approach to social theory. Drawing initially on the work particularly of Max Weber and Émile Durkheim (he also read Karl Marx, Werner Sombart and Thorstein Veblen but regarded their approach as insufficiently ‘scientific’), Parsons spent his whole career trying to develop a general theory of social action and of the social system by means of which, and within the limits of which, social action takes place. Parsons’ approach can be described as ‘synthesising’ in the sense that he draws together into a single grand design what he regarded as the key insights of the leading European social theorists. Developing what became known as general systems theory his objective was to devise a theoretical framework for making sense of all aspects of human social action within a single explanatory framework. The grand design would, he hoped, provide a blueprint for a universal sociological understanding of social action

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