Progress on the Parsons Project
The background to this story is an invitation from Peter Boettke to rewrite some of my student essays on Talcott Parsons from the 1970s and submit to his Austrian economics journal. Extracts from the papers can be found in a previous post.
This is the current plan, starting from an abstract and a draft table of contents. Hint, work out as precisely as you can what you want to say. Don't hope that what you want to say will become clear as you generate text without the aid of a draft TOC. That can be described as the inductive (accumulation of facts) method of writing, just accumulate text and see what turns up. The other thing is to have a clear idea of your readership, or at least a kind of "ideal type" of reader.
Abstract.
Three varieties of methodological individualism in the social sciences can be traced back to the seminal contribution of Karl Menger, (1) the praxeology of Ludwig Mises (2) the voluntarist theory of social action of Talcott Parsons and (3) the situational analysis of Karl Popper. This paper descibes the contribution made by Talcott Parsons in his first book The Structure of Social Action (1937) and identifies some flaws in his approach which undermined the value of his subsequent work.
Draft Table of Contents
1. The education of young Talcott.
2. Reinventing the Austrian wheel in The Structure of Social Action.
3. Subsequent retreat from MI in his theoretical framework.
4. The underlying flaws in his system which precipitated the retreat.
5. Implications for future bridging work between the branches of the human and social sciences.
I have to tell you more about Jack Birner because he has a great introduction to the methods of Menger in his contribution to the collection on Menger's legacy edited by Bruce Caldwell. That will be a separate post. He is also good on the similarities and differences of Hayek and Popper on evolution and psychology. See what google turns up on that.
Anyway after an excursion to the Fisher Library at the Uni of Syd I now have some more reference material, including some Neil Smelser who worked with Parsons to integrate sociology with economics. Boy, did they screw up bigtime!
Must dash possums! More later.
This is the current plan, starting from an abstract and a draft table of contents. Hint, work out as precisely as you can what you want to say. Don't hope that what you want to say will become clear as you generate text without the aid of a draft TOC. That can be described as the inductive (accumulation of facts) method of writing, just accumulate text and see what turns up. The other thing is to have a clear idea of your readership, or at least a kind of "ideal type" of reader.
Abstract.
Three varieties of methodological individualism in the social sciences can be traced back to the seminal contribution of Karl Menger, (1) the praxeology of Ludwig Mises (2) the voluntarist theory of social action of Talcott Parsons and (3) the situational analysis of Karl Popper. This paper descibes the contribution made by Talcott Parsons in his first book The Structure of Social Action (1937) and identifies some flaws in his approach which undermined the value of his subsequent work.
Draft Table of Contents
1. The education of young Talcott.
2. Reinventing the Austrian wheel in The Structure of Social Action.
3. Subsequent retreat from MI in his theoretical framework.
4. The underlying flaws in his system which precipitated the retreat.
5. Implications for future bridging work between the branches of the human and social sciences.
I have to tell you more about Jack Birner because he has a great introduction to the methods of Menger in his contribution to the collection on Menger's legacy edited by Bruce Caldwell. That will be a separate post. He is also good on the similarities and differences of Hayek and Popper on evolution and psychology. See what google turns up on that.
Anyway after an excursion to the Fisher Library at the Uni of Syd I now have some more reference material, including some Neil Smelser who worked with Parsons to integrate sociology with economics. Boy, did they screw up bigtime!
Must dash possums! More later.
posted by Rafe at
7:28 am
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