The Parsons Project, continued

This is a project to describe the rise and fall of Talcott Parsons (1902-1967). He wrote an important book that essentially reinvented the Austrian wheel of methodological individualism and then he lost the plot and led sociology astray for some decades. The Structure of Social Action (1937) represents the high point of Parsons' career and from then it was downhill all the way. Some of the danger signs are visible in TSA and it may be be illuminating to investigate just how the wheels came off in later works.

This previous post sketches the early career and influences on Parsons as he discovered the problems and isssues that he addressed in his first book. This post provides a summary of the issues that he addressed and the resolution that he reached, with a hint of the problems that persisted in his approach.

Parsons as an empiricist

Parsons made the interesting and (I think) valid claim that he was engaged in a combined theoretical and empirical project, with the data consisting of the theories of the writers that he studied. He claimed that he had verified some conclusions from his research and the evidence consisted of passages from the works, some of which he quoted or summarised, and other evidence could be found by reading the relevant texts.

The verified conclusion was the ACTION FRAME OF REFERENCE which he found more or less present in the four main players in his game (Marshall, Pareto, Durkheim and Weber), though in each case adjustments were required that Parsons provided himself to produce a better finished product than any of the others had managed. Hence TSA represented an advance by systematising and merging the sound and valid aspects of his subjects.

My thesis is that he could have got his final product straight from Carl Menger, or at least that Menger's scheme would have required less tweaking than the others to produce the fully formed Action Frame of Reference. From this perspective the four key players in the Parsons game could be seen as deviants to a greater or less extent from Menger and the deviations could be seen as major and persisting flaws in the mainstream of economics. Parsons corrected the situation to a certain extent but TSA had no influence on economics and sociology was derailed by his work after TSA.

TSA operates at two levels. One is the level of philosophy (the role and nature of theories) and the other is the theory of social action itself. At this stage I am not sure how much to say about the first level, where Parsons expounds Analytical Realism, meaning that theories are real things (in some sense) and not merely "convenient fictions" to organise data. So I will proceed straight to his major substantive concern with sociological theory.

The Action Frame of Reference

This is taken from Chapter XIX "Tentative Methodological Implications" which follows his chapter on "Verified Conclusions". He describes the "unit act" which is the simplest level of social action. The main features are (from pp 732-3):

1. The structural elements of the unit act are - ends, means, conditions and norms.

2. There is "A normative orientation of action, a teleological character".

3. "There is inherently a temporal reference. Action is a process in time".

4. "Finally, the schema is inherently subjective...the normative elements can be conceived of as 'existing' only in the mind of the actor."

The conditions could be described as the situation, the geographical, topological, economic, political or military state of affairs at the time and place where the action is being investigated. In fact the situation could be a theoretical problem situation and so the analysis applies to the reconstruction of intellectual work as much as anything else.

The second condition could be reformulated in the language of Mises to talk about the purposeful nature of human action.

The third condition of course is Austrian to the core, as is the fourth.

And there is is. Parsons was such an incredibly verbose writer that it is amusing to find how concisely his main ideas can be rendered. It is a pity that he did not operate under the constraint that was imposed on Popper with his first book which had to be cut in half (or more). In fact they would have been working at the same time, through the late 20s and into the 1930s, although Popper was done by 1934.

A number of problems have emerged at this stage to be addressed in further research.

1. To what extent did Carl Menger anticipate both Parsons "analytical realism" regarding theories and also the structure of social action? I consider Parsons' Action Framework to be practically identical to Popper's Situational Analysis and also the Austrian approach (stripped of unhelpful talk about apoditic certainty).

2. How did Parsons miss Menger (he appears in a footnote refering to the debate with Schmoller)? He became very fluent in German and translated Weber and he must have assumed that all he needed from Menger was in Weber.

3. A host of questions about the factors that drove Parsons off course following TSA. One of the factors would appear to be a climate of ideas and influences at Harvard where grand general methematical systems were all the rage in economics.

The education of young Talcott Parsons

The most extended account of Parsons’ intellectual development is in his Daedalus article “On building social system theory: a personal history” (Fall 1970)

Parsons found his way into theoretical sociology as a result of personal and intellectual contacts that he made in his college studies in the US, England and Germany. His early academic career is a remarkable record of change and confusion, with some remarkably lucky breaks.

Peter Hamilton has an excellent biographical overview on line. "Parsons was born in 1902 into a religious family in which ascetic Protestantism was the moral base of life: his father was a Congregational minister in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and active in the social reform movement known as the Social Gospel movement. The elder Parsons was also a college teacher of English, who eventually became President of a small college in Ohio. Parsons thus spent the early part of his life in an atmosphere of American midwest provincialism and, as Guy Rocher suggests, experienced the austerity and limited social horizons typical of small American colleges in the first quarter of the century".

Clearly he was a bright and motivated student from early days. He went to Amherst College in the west of Massachusetts, intending to concentrate on biology with the possibility of a medical career, following in the footsteps of his older brother.

Amherst is described as a “liberal arts college founded in 1821 as a nonsectarian institution for the education of indigent young men of piety and talents”. The Parsons family was not indigent, but nor was it affluent. The ethos of the college was clearly progressive social ameliorism, and this impacted directly on Parsons from two of his most important teachers, Walton Hamilton and Clarence Ayers. Incidentally Veblen and Tawney were visitors to the college.

“In 1923, my junior year, I was converted to social science [from biology and medicine] under the influence especially of the unorthodox ‘institutional economist’ Walton Hamilton. Then all my concentration plans were disorganised by the dismissal, at the end of my junior year, of Alexander Meiklejohn as president of the college. None of the teachers whose courses I had elected was on hand the next fall. I made do with more courses in biology, some in philosophy, includingd one on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and some in English literature”.

When the time came for graduate work he was not attracted by the American courses on offer and he was pleased to accept the offer of an uncle to finance a year of studies overseas. Knowing of Hobhouse, Tawney and Laski he elected to go to the London School of Economics where he discovered Bronislaw Malinowski who became his most important London influence. Good things happen in London! He met the woman who he married and on top of all that he was offered an exchange fellowship to Germany and he was assigned to Heidleberg which was the stronghold of Max Weber's thought. Weber turned out to be Parsons’ most important single influence and he wrote “It is significant that I do not remember having heard his name either at Amherst or in London”.

Weber’s work made an immediate and powerful impact, especially "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism", which Parsons later translated into English. Parsons was not a degree candidate in London and he did not intend to take a degree in Heidleberg until he found that this could be done in a year, including a dissertation (which he completed at Amherst) on “The Concept of Capitalism in Recent German Literature” with special reference to Werner Sombart and Max Weber. During his year of teaching and writing at Amherst he resolved to go thoroughly into the relations between economic and sociological theory, helped by extended discussions with Richard Meriam, the chairman of the Department of Economics.

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.

And so we leave the education of young Talcott, on the brink of his first and most useful work, the reinvention of the Austrian wheel of situational analysis and methodological individualism which he presented in "The Structure of Social Action" (1937).