The rise and fall of Talcott Parsons

Talcott Parsons (1902-1979) was the towering figure in American sociology through the 1950s and 1960s. Then it seems that he has faded into something approaching obscurity despite the stranglehold that he and his students (who became colleagues) seemed to have on the subject for at least two decades.

Peter Boettke is keen to build bridges from economics to sociology to work towards a more unified body of social science and that is an aim that he shares with Parsons.

In the 1970s I did some serious reading on Parsons as a part of a Masters qualifying program in Sociology at the Uni of NSW. This resulted in two or three assignments which I lately dug out and scanned in case they have some use, which it seems they do because Peter would like to see them revised and submitted for possible publication in his Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics.

This is the working draft of the abstract and the contents.

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 actionof 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.

Contents
1. The education of young Talcott.
2. Reinventing the Austrian wheel in The Structure of Social Action.
3. Subsequent retreat from individualism 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.

Below is a partially edited version of two of the old papers.

By the way, let me know if there is a way to fold posts on Blogger, I don't like posts that go on and on, and even when this paper is cut down it is going to be rather substantial.


TALCOTT PARSONS AND "THE STRUCTURE OF SOCIAL ACTION"

Parsons discovered his theoretical problems through contact with several key influences, most of whom were dead. The important intellectual figures were Kant, Malinowski, Weber, Marshall, Pareto, Durkheim and Whitehead, then later Freud and more recently the US biologist Emerson. Kant's Critique was one of the courses which Parsons had to 'make do with' in his disorganised second year at Amherst. He discovered Malinowski in London and he found Weber's work in Heidelberg.

When he returned to Amherst he was persuaded by Richard Miriam to go on to Harvard to strengthen his understanding of economics and Miriam arranged an instructorial appointment there in the fall of 1927. At Harvard F W Taussig and Joseph Schumpeter helped Parsons with his study of Alfred Marshall and L J Henderson introduced him to Pareto. As he began to outline his voluntarist theory of action, which involved the convergence of Marshall, Pareto and Weber, he found that more attention had to be paid to Durkheim but he had no teachers in this venture which involved unlearning much that he had picked up from Ginsberg and Malinowski.

PART II: PARSONS' APOLOGY FOR SYSTEMATIC THEORY.

"Returning to this country I found behaviorism so rampant that anyone who believed in the scientific validity of the interpretation of subjective states of mind was often held to be fatuously naive. Also rampant was what I called 'empiricism', namely the idea that scientific knowledge was a total reflection of the 'reality out there' and even selection was alleged to be illegitimate".

Parsons' first problem was to defend systematic theory against various forms of empiricism which emphasised the accumulation of facts as the proper occupation of a scientist. At the same time he attempted to justify what he called analytical realism against theorists who looked upon theories as merely convenient fictions. Against the empiricists Parsons claimed that there could be no worthwhile fact gathering without some reference to theory, and against the 'convenient fiction' or instrumental view he maintained that "at least some of the general concepts of science are not fictional but adequately 'grasp' aspects of the objective external world".

Parson's congenial attitude to theory was shaped by the course on Kant which he took as an undergraduate and it was reinforced by his Continental travels. His position with regard to fact and theory was a marked advance on the various forms of empiricism which he attacked. He never claimed that facts do not matter and he has always insisted that theory should not become divorced from facts. For Parsons, theory is required to organise facts and to provide a guide to fact finding.

"... the scientific importance of a change in knowledge of fact consists precisely in its having consequences for a system of theory"..

And with regard to empirical work:

"The primary question will be, what theoretical reasons did he have for being interested in these particular problems rather than others, and what did the results of his investigations contribute to the sol­ution of his theoretical problems?"

SECTION III: THE STRUCTURE OF SOCIAL ACTION.

This section outlines the substantial contribution which Parsons made to sociological theory in his first major work, The Structure of Social Action (TSA, 1937). This will involve a reconstruction of the problem situation as Parsons saw it.

The problem was the failure of three systems provide an adequate general theory of action. A satisfactory theory had to provide a frame of reference to analyse the puzzling co-existence of social order with voluntarism or indeterminism, and it had to provide a frame of reference to analyse the emergence of complex systems whose function could not be reduced to the laws explaining the function of the parts, while explaining the interpenetration which exists between the factors controlling the whole and the factors controlling the parts.

The three systems which had failed were:
I) Utilitarianism and economic theory which involved a rationalistic, individualistic theory of social behaviour.
II) Positivism, which involved the reduction of human behaviour to laws of physics and biology.
III) Idealism, theories which interpreted social phenomena as emanations from the realm of cultural values.

THE INADEQUACY OF THE UTILITARIAN SCHEME.

"The theoretical action system characterised by these four features, atomism, rationality, empiricism and randomness of ends will be called in the present study the utilitarian system of social theory".

Parsons analysed the deficiencies of this theory at length and two main criticisms emerged. First, this scheme could not account for ritualistic activities which did not seem to serve any rational purpose (as 'rational purpose' was defined within the system). Parsons commented "Their negative valuation of ritual was one of the few points on which the Puritans and the men of the humanistic renaissance could agree".

Second , and more important, the theory gave no explanation of social order or the coordination of individual acts into organised social systems. "For the failure to state anything positive about the relations of ends to each other can then have only one meaning - that there are no significant relations, that is, that ends are random in the statistical sense"

Such a theory could give no answer to the Hobbesian problem of order.

THE INADEQUACY OF THE POSITIVISTIC SCHEME.

Positivism attempts to overcome the utilitarian dilemma by providing a scientific explanation for the coordination of ends.

"If ends mere not random, it was because it must be possible for the actor to base his choice of ends on scientific knowledge of some empirical reality...Then action becomes determined entirely by its conditions...The active role of the actor is reduced to one of the understanding of his situation and forecasting of its future course of development".

But what sort of information would be used by the calcuIator/actor for his forecasting? According to Parsons' interpretation:
"...the explanation of action lies in the conditions of the action objectively rather than subjectively considered, most practical purposes may be taken to mean in the factors of hereditary and environment in the analytical sense of biological theory".

But Parsons was not prepared to accept this because it ignored the emergent properties of complex systems, particularly the ethical elements which he believed entered as a creative factor in human action.

"The orientation of ethics (as opposed to science) is essentially active. Its centre of gravity lies in the creative role of the actor, his ends. Freedom of choice is basic to ethics; whatever determinism is accepted lies in the field of the consequences of having made a given choice".

THE BREAKDOWN OF IDEALISM.

Idealism presented answers to some of the problems left unsolved by utilitarianism and positivism but it did this by verbal sleight of hand, introducing the Geist or spirit of the culture to explain human action as an emanation. This solved the problem of order without using physical reduction but it involved reduction of a different kind. As a general theory of action, explanation of human behaviour as a manifestation of the Geist is hardly better than an explanation in terms of physics and biology. What was worse from Parsons' point of view as a systematic theorist was the idealist doctrine that generalisations could not be made about societies or cultures. Every social situation had to be considered in its concrete uniqueness.

Parsons followed Weber in his reaction against two idealist doctrines which Parsons calls objectivism and intuitionism. Both schools agree that general laws cannot be used in the human sciences but they disagree as to the reasons.

Objectivism or 'particularism' is the view that the historical and social sciences should only concern themselves with the detailed facts of particular human acts and not attempt to build up any general theories. (This is remarkably similar to the empiricist approach to the growth of knowledge in general, although empiricism is often presented as a polar opposite to idealism). Along with this goes the idea that the subject matter of the social sciences has certain peculiarities which make generalisations about it impossible, and so in so far as general concepts are supposed to be rational, then historical reality is 'irrational'. Against this Weber argued that we cannot make sense out of history and human behaviour unless; there is some pattern in it, and the necessary pattern is provided by human motivation which we comprehend by sympathetic understanding. In other words, we have access to the subjective aspect of human action and this concept of intuitive understanding he called verstehen.

Intuitionism involves an extension of the role of verstehen, to grasp the nature of cultural totalities in all their uniqueness and individuality. Objectivism stresses the need to carefully build up a picture of the historical reality. In contrast, intuitionism places emphasis on the "flash of insight". Weber replied that both ignore the need for general principles in formal analysis. In addition he considered that the intuitionist confuses the psychological problem of the origin of ideas with the methodological problem of testing them to find how well they fit the facts.

Weber went on to build up a sophisticated methodology including three elements which Parsons adopted. These are:

I) general concepts are required in the social sciences as well as in the natural sciences.

2) verstehen, the faculty of sympathetic understanding, is required to cope with the subjective aspects of action.

3) if action is to be understandable there must be an element of rationality in it. There must be some comprehensible relationship between ends and means.

Parsons was not completely satisfied with Weber's methodology because he thought there was even less difference between the natural and social sciences than Weber allowed. Parsons instead proposed to make a distinction between analytical and historical sciences, which cuts across the boundaries usually placed between the natural and social sciences.

Parsons was also critical of Weber's tendency to admit or imply that general concepts such as his system of 'ideal types' were useful fictions. This almost allowed his methodology to lapse back into the errors of objectivism and intuitionism.

So the "action frame of reference" for Parsons consists of a situation where the key elements are the physical aspects of the situation, the values internalised by the actors, the aims of the actors and the decisions that they make on the basis of their plans and their interpretation of the situation.


SECTION IV: DEVELOPMENTS SINCE THE STRUCTURE OF SOCIAL ACTION

Since his first book Parsons set out to correct what may have appeared to be an excessively individualistic approach implied in the voluntarist theory of action because he believed that "...the structure of social systems cannot he derived from the actor/situation frame of reference." Part of this venture was his 'pattern variable' scheme which he envisaged as an attempt to provide the social sciences with a language to play the part that mathematics played in physics.

"What we need is not a science purified of theoretical contamination but one with the nearest possible approach to an equivalent of the role of mathematical analysis in physics".

In accordance with his basic interest in the emergence and the interpenetration of systems he set out to analyse social action systems in terms of a heirarchy, starting with the organism, then the personality, then the social system, and finally the cultural system. Within this scheme he sought the key to social order in the process of socialisation. With socialisation Freud was a vitally important influence on Parsons work in "The Structure of Social Action and he undertook a course in lay psychoanalysis. He wanted to find how the organism could be converted into a personality which would interact smoothly with the prevailing structures social system. At the same time he wanted an explanation of the failure of socialisation if and when it occurred.

"There must be some mechanism by which the behavior of individuals is motivated to conform with institutional expectations, even though personality structure as such does not give an adequately effective background for it."

This led him to a new definition of sociology: "Sociological theory, then, is for us that aspect of the theory of social systems which is concerned with the phenomena of the institutionalisation of the pattern of value-orientation in the social system".

He sorted out four levels of generality of normative culture which have to be internalised if the social order is to be maintained. These are related to the hierarchy mentioned above (organism, personality, social system, culture). At the apex there are the ultimate values of the culture. These provide legitimation of the normative rules which operate in society. At the level of the groups within society there are goals which are pursued and the fundamental structural unit is the individual in a role. In other words, the individual has a repertoire of roles which he uses in pursuit of goals. The means which may be used in pursuit of these goals are regulated by norms and these are sanctioned by the ultimate values.

Apart from his theoretical work he has always been concerned with social and political issues. These interests emerge in papers such as "The Problem of Controlled Institutional Change" which was concerned with ways and means of introducing democracy into the body politic after the military defeat of Germany.

He happily describes himself, throughout his adult life, as a "typical American 'egghead' intellectual, a New Dealer and Fair Dealer, and in general inclined to support the Democratic Party, on its liberal side".

Second article on Parsons


Ssomething may be gained by investigating where he went wrong after making such a promising start in his first book. To summarise, he did not have the benefit of an articulated theory of "metaphysical research programs", consequently he lapsed into essentialism and holism, under the influence of a defective view of the role of mathematics in physics.

After The Structure of Social Action Parsons maintained his interest in systematic or general theory since "It is scarcely too much to say that the most important single index of the state of maturity of a science is the state of its systematic theory". And an integral part of his theory has been the concept of system.

"The concept of system as a guiding conceptual scheme is of the first importance as an organising principle and a guide to research. It may thus be said that the concept of a theory of system is the most strategic tool for working toward the attainment of a system of theory."

He introduced the concept of system into sociology under the influence of Pareto, Whitehead, Cannon and Henderson because it seemed to be a Good Thing in classical mechanics and physiology. This may seem a strange procedure for a man who described himself as a participant in the war of independence of social sciences with regard to biology but Parsons always leaned upon the physical sciences for ideas about the methodology of theory construction. The Structure of Social Action contains many references to the tendency for a theoretical system to become "logically closed" in the manner of classical mechanics and more recently he stated that we need a science "with the nearest possible approach to an equivalent of the role of mathematical analysis in physics'

"At the end of this road...lies the ideal state scientifically speaking, where most actual operational hypotheses of empirical research are directly derived from a general system of theory....Most emphatically I wish to say that the general theory on which I have placed such emphasis can only be justified in so far as it "spells out" on the research level, providing the more generalised conceptual basis for the frames of reference, problem statements and hypotheses, and many of the operational concepts of research."

So the main function of the general theory is to provide general categories and to provide a language. Explanation and prediction do not occur among the nine functions. Presumably these are left to the empiri­cal generalisations at level IV and general theory has to be spelled out through middle range theories by providing "the more generalised conceptual basis for the frame of reference" mentioned above. Parsons insisted that special theories (scientific theories in the usual sense of the term) cannot be developed without the prior articulation of a highly integrated conceptual scheme or general theory.

"To make empirical generalisation the central focus of theory in a science is to put the cart before the horse.' In proportion as a generalised theoretical system is really perfected, and, what necessarily goes with it, empirical research and knowledge of fact builds up, it becomes possible to attain more and more comprehensive empirical generalizations. Indeed it can be said that any system of sound empirical generalisations implies a generalised theoretical system."

It seems that the subsequent failure of development in the Parsons Program may be related to something that was defective in his conception of the relationship between the "generalized theoretical system" or the metaphysical framework, and the testable scientific theories that it is supposed to sponsor.


ISOMORPHISMS AND HOLISM

It seems that at the time of writing (in the mid 1970s) Parsons' general systems theory was not a useful part of the scientific enterprise, at least of that enterprise that involves testable theories. This section examines two other areas where Parsons appeared to be confused. First the matter of isomorphisms.

The mainspring of general systems theory building (including the work of Rashevsky and von Bertalanffy) is the idea that isomorphisms can be found between theories in different fields i.e. in biology and sociology, or in personality, society and culture. If isomorphisms cannot be found then the general systems venture is a failure. If they are found the issue is still in doubt because the data may have been selected or organised to fit the isomorphic model. And even if this is not the case, Brodbeck has argued that isomorphisms are not very exciting anyway.

Parsons appeared to be unsure where he stood on the issue of isomorphisms. At one stage he announced, as a result of some importance, that the five pattern variables which he developed to analyse social structures can "when rephrased in accord with the psychological perspective, be identified as fundamental points of reference for the structure of personality also". Baldwin examined this claim and found that the attempt to develop the correspondence between stages of development and the sectors of society had only served to obscure some genuine contributions that Parsons had to make to the theory of socialisation. In reply Parsons simply backed off "the reason why the term 'isomorphism' is a dubious one, is that each of these two systems...is grounded in different exigencies". Precisely. But where does this leave us with the use of the pattern variable scheme to organise both the personality system and the social structure? More conceptual boxes?

Parsons' holism is apparent in the following statement regarding the problem of dynamic analysis.

"The ideal solution is the possession of a logically complete system of dynamic generalisations which can state all the elements of reciprocal interdependence between all the variables of the system. The ideal has, in the formal sense, been attained only in the systems of differential equations of analytical mechanics. All other sciences are limited to a more "primitive" level of systematic theoretical analysis..."

"It is thus the functional reference of all particular conditions and process (sic) to the state of the total system as a going concern which provide the logical equivalent of simultaneous equations in a fully developed system of analytical theory."

Repeatedly Parsons cast his eye towards analytical mechanics for a paradigm of dynamic analysis and his idea of the role of theory apparently came from physics.

"A science of physics without higher mathematics would be the real equivalent of the empiricists' ideal for social science. This shows quite clearly that what we need is not a science purified of theoretical infection - but one with the nearest possible approach to an equivalent of the role of mathematical analysis in physics."

It appears that Parsons seriously misjudged the role that mathematics plays in science. It is not necessary for the production of theories nor for their statement, though it is a part of the apparatus of inference that enables physicists to extract testable consequences from the theory.

So the conclusion of this analysis of Parsons' general theory of systems is that he was misled by a defective theory of the relationship between concepts and theories. This was aggravated by his ambiguous view on isomorphism and his holism. Despite this he established himself as the sociological theorist par excellence so that anyone who disagrees with his approach is nevertheless obliged to contend with it, which can be a time consuming process. The situation was not improved when commentators such as Robert Merton, who appeared to have a more healthy appreciation of the role of theory, still felt obliged to tip his hat to Parsons. "The major contribution [to theory] in recent years is, of course, that by Talcott Parsons in The Social System". However Merton went on to mention some reservations which might very usefully have been spelled out at greater length. "The salient contributions of so comprehensive and logically complex a work as The Social System cannot be readily distinguished from its more provisional and at times debatable conceptual developments". See also his comments on a book by Levy, The Structure of Society. "This book derives largely, as the author says, from Parsons' conceptual scheme, and presents a logical multiplication of numerous categories and concepts. It remains to be seen whether such taxonomies of concepts will prove appropriate and useful in the analysis of sociological problems".

It seems that Parsons and his ideas have faded from view, which is surprising when you think how many students would studied Sociology during the two or three decades when he was a leader in the field in the US. Such is the rise and fall of fads and fashions.

AN ALTERNATIVE DEVELOPMENT FOR PARSONS

If Parsons was on the right track in his first book, what would have represented a more appropriate line of development, in contrast with the holistic and essentialist path that he actually pursued?

This is a question that has to be addressed to those of the Popper school and the Austrians who are engaged in empirical studies. I am not aware of anyone who is self-consciously using Popper's approach to field work in the social sciences, and the only discipline where the Austrians appear to be active is economics. Much remains to be done.

Rafe Champion