The Talcott Parsons reader / edited by Bryan S. Turner

 

Introduction: The Contribution of Talcott Parsons to the Study of Modernity - 1

 

Fast forward:     Parsons and Modernity

Reading Parsons

Criticism and Re-appraisal

Parsons and Economic Sociology

References

 

Parsons and Modernity

 

These selections from the sociology of Talcott Parsons are based on a number of fundamental assumptions, which have guided my decision as to which elements of Parsons's extensive oeuvre might be included.  Parsons was a prolific writer, whose academic career stretched over more than half a century.  In addition, he contributed to a broad range of issues in contemporary sociology.  In making this selection, my aim has been to uncover the "essential Parsons," and thus many articles and chapters, which are in themselves of interest, have not been included in so far as they do not address what I believe are the constitutive issues of his sociology.  That his work continues to evoke robust responses, ranging from praise to outright hostility, leads me to believe that a short but effective collection of his work will find a sympathetic reception in the academic community. 

 

His sociology remains academically important and controversial, because Parsons' work is an explicit defence of modernity in terms of its cultural values, political system, and moral authority.  Against the contemporary interest in the implications of postmodernism, Parsons presents us with an unambiguous celebration of modernity.  Parsons' sociology does not exhibit any subtle feelings for the ambiguities or ambivalence of modernity.  By contrast with conservative traditionalism and reactionary politics, Parsons's commitment to liberal democracy, industrial capitalism, and secular values of achievement and universalism remains undiluted and largely unquestioned.  Radical critics of modern society have often been committed implicitly to a nostalgic or romantic defense of tradition and community (Turner, 1987).  Conservative critics of modern technological civilization such as Martin Heidegger lamented the negative impact of technology on man's place in the world (Heidegger, 1977).  Radical critics of contemporary capitalism such as Theodor Adorno attacked the alienation of human beings under conditions of capitalist exploitation, but implicitly defended aristocratic notions of academic authenticity (Stauth and Turner, 1988). 

 

2  Introduction

 

In contemporary sociology and philosophy, there is often a yearning for communal stability and authentic values, which has been expressed through various forms of communitarianism.  Emile Durkheim's attack on egoistic individualism in Professional Ethics and Civic Morals (1992) established a sociological perspective on communal solutions to utilitarian individualism and promoted the importance of intermediary groups in regulating the market.  By contrast, Parsons believed that the process of modernization improved the capacity of society to respond effectively to new challenges through the division of labor and institutional upgrading.  Modern values of activism and individualism were to be embraced as positive responses to modern conditions.  In his political sociology, Parsons believed that liberal values (such as individual freedoms and personal autonomy) would triumph over authoritarian political regimes.  While critics condemned modernity because it was seen to erode the meaningfulness of human existence, Parsons saw it as the fulfillment of a positive trend in western history.  For Parsons, the seed beds of modernity were in Greek democracy and Christian ethical teaching, and the outcome of modernization were the secular values of universalism, activism, and individualism.  Parsons remained opposed to what he called the "ideological pessimism" about modern societies which was prevalent in his time (Parsons, 1971: 142).

 

Parsons defended modern society, but he was specifically the champion of the American version of liberal capitalism (Robertson and Turner, 1991).  Radical critics from C. Wright Mills to Alvin Gouldner attacked American society as an aggressive capitalist system, which was imperialist in its foreign relations and exploitative internally through the class system and the caste-like hierarchy of racial groups.  For Parsons, despite these obvious patterns of inequality and exploitation, American society and its values were the summation of a process of secular enlightenment, which started in the seventeenth-century Puritan sects and culminated in American denominationalism.  Parsons' vision of secular social reality could be described as Weberian, but without the overwhelming sense of melancholy which saturates Weber's world-view (Goldman, 1992). 

 

Parsons' secular liberalism has been unfashionable in post-war social theory.  One reason for this critical attitude towards Parsons is the intellectual dominance of post-humanism as the legacy of Nietzsche and Heidegger.  This legacy has been profoundly influential in the critique of subjectivity in the work of Foucault and Derrida (Renaut, 1997).  Parsons' later work was specifically concerned with the human condition, with death and the problem of religion in late modernity; his stance has been clearly out of tune with the prevailing fashion.  However, one can anticipate a reaction against the anti-humanism of structuralist and post-structuralist social theory, because there is a need for a robust theory of democracy and human rights in the modern world.  The question of human rights has become more rather than less urgent in late twentieth-century politics.  In French social theory, one can see such a reaction in contemporary discussions of human rights in the work of Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, who have also conducted a critical engagement with Heidegger's orientation to technological modernity (Ferry and Renaut, 1990).  One can detect similar re-appraisals of democratic theory in reactions to the legacy of J. F. Lyotard (Rojek and Turner, 1998). 

 

Introduction  3

 

Whether or not one accepts Parsons' version of American secular triumphalism, it is important to read Parsons in order to grasp, in its unexpurgated form, the essence of cultural modernity.  Francois Bourricaud's The Sociology of Talcott Parsons (1981) is one of the few studies of Parsonian sociology to grasp fully the centrality of cultural values to Parsons' understanding of modernity, especially the so-called "pattern variables."  Bourricaud's study was first published in French as L'individualisme institutionnel in 1977.  This title captures Parsons’ notion that social actors must make choices between a fixed range of alternative courses of action.  The voluntaristic theory of action pays attention to both the normative and material determination of the social relations and the voluntaristic nature of social action.  The pattern variables describe this phenomenon of institutionalized individualism.  The variables articulate a number of dichotomies that define the nature of choice between different courses of action: universalism versus particularism, diffuseness versus specificity, affective neutrality versus affectivity, achievement versus ascription (later described as performance versus quality). 

 

In the pattern variables, modernity is a set of values which inscribe universalism, affective neutrality, role specificity, and performance into the central institutions and culture of a modern society.  Modernization is that social process which brings about the dominance of these secular values of achievement, universalism, and neutrality.  Finally, this process of modernization can be detected in a broad range of systematic changes in the contemporary world.  These changes include the professionalization of the occupational system with a growing emphasis on the credentialization of specific, affectively neutral, and universalistic services.  In the growth of a mass education system, especially at the tertiary level, Parsons saw new opportunities for the extension of democracy on the basis of a secular ethic which embraced universalism and achievement.  In Parsons' terms, the final wave of modern citizenship after the welfare state was the educational revolution.  Modernization also involved the secularization of religion and the transformation of the Protestant ethic into a democratic value system.

 

4  Introduction

 

Reading Parsons

 

In order to understand the grand narrative of progressive modernization, of which postmodern theory is the critique, one should read Parsons carefully and thoughtfully.  But how is this reading to be accomplished, given the apparent complexity of his argument, and what is to be read, given the obvious diversity of his writing?  In trying to answer that question, there are broadly six principles of selection on which this essential collection has been made. 

 

The first obviously is that Talcott Parsons' work has, towards the close of the twentieth century, a major significance and value for sociology, and more widely for the social sciences.  His sociology has both scope and depth as a general approach to the social sciences.  Parsonian sociology, especially in The Social System (1951), is an attempt to construct a general theory of social action, which will integrate the separate disciplines of the social sciences.  Its scope and complexity are daunting.  At the same time, his social theory, especially The Structure of Social Action (1937), represents a profound criticism of utilitarianism, and in the modern period provides us with a compelling criticism of economic rationalism as a platform for social policy.  In addition, he has made specific and lasting contributions to various fields within general sociology such as the sociology of religion (Parsons, 1962), medical sociology (1975), and economic sociology (Parsons and Smelser, 1956).  He was also responsible for introducing the work of Max Weber to the English-speaking academic community through his translation of Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1930).  He contributed more widely to the creation of a sense of "classical sociology" through his commentaries on the work of Emile Durkheim and Vilfredo Pareto.  In short, Parsons offers a general but systematic framework for the analysis of modernity. 

 

Second, Parsons played an important role politically as a critic of fascism.  Although Parsons retained a deep respect for German culture and scholarship, he was highly critical of National Socialism in Germany and he campaigned to get the government of the United States committed to American involvement in the Second World War.  Parsons subsequently wrote a series of insightful and important sociological essays on the social origins of fascism.  Parsons's criticism of fascism has not been fully appreciated by sociologists, who, following the critical evaluation of Parsons's functionalism by Alvin Gouldner (1970) in The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology, regarded Parsons as either intellectually apathetic or politically reactionary.  The appreciation of Parsons's critical analysis of fascism was not fully established until the publication of Uta Gerhardt's Talcott Parsons on National Socialism (1993).  It is true that Parsons's objection to fascism was part of a wider criticism of authoritarian regimes.  He was thus equally critical in his later years of communism.  His political orientation was that of a liberal reaction to various forms of authoritarianism, and thus we can analyze Parsons's political sociology as an expression of his commitment to the principles of modern citizenship, as presented in the work of T. H. Marshall (1964).

 

Third, it is difficult to read Parsons without being impressed by the importance of religion in his understanding of modern society.  Parsons rejected the secularization thesis.  In the post-war period, sociologists typically embraced a naive theory of modernization which stipulated an inevitable secularization of religious institutions and values.  The continuing importance of Protestantism in mainstream American life, the vitality of Judaism, the centrality of Hinduism to Indian politics, and the world-wide importance of fundamentalism have obviously thrown doubt on the secularization thesis.  Islam in particular appears to have survived long periods of secular nationalism, communism, and western commercialism (Turner, 1994b).  However, Parsons's sociology of religion does not involve the proposition simply that religion can survive industrialization.  Because he followed in the footsteps of Durkheim's sociology of religion (1954), Parsons had a subtle understanding of the contribution of religious values to cultural systems, and how religion as "the serious life" in Durkheim's terms was an underpinning of the human condition as such.  Parsons does not share the pessimism of Alasdair Maclntyre's post-Catholic criticism of modernity (Maclntyre, 1981) or the optimism of those sociologists who treat the American civil religion in its commercial forms as evidence of the human need for religion.  Parsons's argument was that with secularization many aspects of Protestant culture are both transferred and transformed into pluralism, activism, and individualism. 

 

Introduction  5

 

Fourth, Parsons is a founder of medical sociology.  He studied many facets of this issue, which was set within a sociology of the professions, and many aspects of the importance of health and illness.  These sociological interests brought him directly into contact with a number of key existential issues such as sex, aging,sickness, and death. His concept of the sick role has been criticized (Turner, 1995), but it provided an original insight into sickness as a social condition.  His work on Freudian issues in the doctor-patient relationship also provided a

provocative framework for the development of sociological analysis of profes-

sional roles. Parsons also contributed to the notion that medicine is one of the

basic institutions of modern society, and that it is impossible to understand the

emphasis on activism in American culture without a recognition of the ways in

which medical values shape and inform modern culture.

 

Fifth, he also had a very practical involvement in and concern for sociology as

a discipline (Parsons, 1950). His involvement in the interdisciplinary program

at Harvard in the Department of Social Relations gave Parsons an important

insight into the place of sociology within theories of social action. Parsons had a

very clear idea of the importance of general theory to the survival of sociology in

the university. His theory of the social system was also an attempt to understand

sociology in relation to the issues of integration and motivation of social actors.

Parsons's account of the allocative and integrative problems of any society

produced an important defense of sociology as that science which attempts to

analyze the contribution of shared values to the creation of an integrated social

system.

 

Sixth, his writings can be seen as broadly a reflection on the role of American

society in relation to the emerging world order. Parsons's sociology has relev-

ance to the growing importance of globalism, difference, and social complexity,

and hence by stressing the importance of Parsons as a theorist of modernity, I

obliquely point forward to the development of postmodern theory. Parsons's

work on global politics and international relations has been somewhat neglected

by commentators.

 

In terms of these principles of selection, these readings attempt to correct the

view that Parsons's sociology was so abstract that he could make no real con-

tribution to the study of contemporary society. These essential readings note

Parsons's contribution to the study of international relations, political sociology,

and the study of economics. These selections also attempt to recognize the

importance of Parsons's medical sociology where his analysis of the doctor-

patient relationship played an important part in the development of the socio-

logical study of the professions and professional practice. Parsons's medical

sociology also embraced the study of death in modern societies, the process of

aging, and the values which inform our understanding of the human condition.

For this reason, one should not artificially separate Parsons's work on the

impact of religion on secular society. In making that connection between reli-

gion and secular values, Parsons remained aware of his intellectual debt to the

classics. Hence I have selected work to represent his deep understanding of the

 

6 Introduction

 

cumulative nature of sociological theory. Finally, Parsons remained committed

to the defense of American liberal democracy. This attachment to American

civilization remains controversial. Its positive side was the defense of citizenship

as a framework for liberty, for example in his work on race relations in America.

Its negative side was American triumphalism and a blindness to cultural differ-

ences.

 

Criticism and Re-appraisal

 

There has clearly been since the 1980s a major re-evaluation of the sociology of

Talcott Parsons and an extensive assessment of his legacy. Since Parsons's death

in 1979, there have been a number of important contributions to the systematic

overview of his work (Adriaansens, 1980; Alexander, 1984; Buxton, 1985;

Holton and Turner, 1986; Munch, 1981). This re-appraisal of Parsonian

sociology is often associated with the neo-functionalist revival (Alexander,

1985, 1988a). In this introduction, I wish to contribute to this re-assessment

through an examination of a frequent criticism of Parsons's functionalism,

namely its inability to provide a valid framework for the analysis of historical

processes and social change. In order to give this discussion a specific focus, I

shall consider a critical comparison between the figurational or process model of

sociology in the work of Norbert Elias (1978a) and Parsons's structural func-

tionalism. This comparison with Elias is relevant because they have both been

criticized for their conservatism, they have both drawn heavily from Weber and

Freud, and they were both influenced by the Weber legacy at Heidelberg in the

1920s (Bogner, 1986, 1987).

 

There are broadly three (somewhat repetitive) criticisms of Parsonian soci-

ology. First, by its emphasis on value integration and social equilibrium, it could

not account for social conflict, dysfunction, or the collapse of equilibrium

(Dahrendorf, 1968). Second, and related to the first type of criticism, it is

claimed that Parsons's sociology could never grasp specific historical processes,

and was in any case evolutionary and teleological in its treatment of such

processes as differentiation (Gouldner, 1970). Finally, Parsons's sociology was

typically too abstract and general to cope with the real and empirical issues of

politics, social conflict, and social change (Mills, 1959).

 

It is interesting to note that, while neo-functionalism is often broadly regarded

as a defense of the legacy of Parsonian sociology, it has generally accepted the

legitimacy and validity of these three criticisms of Parsons's sociology. Alexan-

der (1985: 15) recognizes the need for a greater emphasis on conflict, interests,

and contingent social change in the neo-functionalist critiques of Parsons. Else-

where Alexander (1987: 375) has argued that "Sociological theory today is no

longer engaged in the effort to dethrone Parsons. It is post Parsonian, not anti."

The implication is that modern sociology, having digested the critique of Par-

sons, can now proceed to achieve the kind of synthesis which Parsons had hoped

to establish in his general theory of action. Alexander's recent work Action and

Its Environments (1 988b) offers a promising development of this post-Parsonian

synthesis.

 

Introduction  7

 

While I am sympathetic to Alexander's project (and more generally to the

neo-functionalist paradigm), I do not fully accept these conventional criticisms

of Parsons and Parsonian sociology. Furthermore, I do not accept the idea that

Parsons's approach was antipathetic to historical analysis. I want to sketch out

briefly an alternative interpretation of the general thrust of Parsons's sociology

by reflecting on the parallel between German Lebensphilosophie and Parsonian

action theory.

 

However, in order to focus on this debate, I turn first to a contribution from

Johan Goudsblom who, in a defense of Elias's analysis of the civilizing process

(Elias, 1978a, 1982), offers a highly negative evaluation of Parsons as a sociol-

ogist. Goudsblom (1987: 327-31) argues that there are three crucial differences

between the sociological work of Parsons and Elias. The first difference is that,

while Parsons "worked as a theorist," Elias is concerned with the "interplay

between theoretical and empirical investigation." Second, in his theory of

social systems, Parsons employed "static and disjunctive" elements, while

Elias has always retained a major commitment to understanding "the processual

character of the social world." Finally, while Parsons always "focussed on the

problem of normative order," Elias has maintained a clear interest in "the part

played by conflicts and power in the dynamics of societies." Although these

criticisms of Parsons are by no means original (see, for comparison, Cancian,

1960; Nagel, 1956), they provide a useful summary, and the comparison drawn

between Elias and Parsons is prima facie interesting.

 

To suggest that Parsons was a "theorist" who was not concerned to analyze

the interplay between theoretical and empirical inquiry is to make a general

charge against Parsons which is palpably false. The entire purpose of Parsonian

sociology was to develop a general theory of action (which would be common to

all social sciences) as the foundation for theoretically informed social investiga-

tion. More importantly, Goudsblom's accusation ignores, for example, Par-

sons's specific application of his approach in his essays on German social

structure (Parsons, 1942), the sick role (1951), the urban family (Parsons and

Fox, 1953) or aging, youth, and social structure (Parsons, 1964). Goudsblom

appears to take Parsons's claim that The Structure of Social Action was an

empirical inquiry as the principal ground for describing Parsons as a "theorist."

Parsons's own position was that The Structure of Social Action was not an exercise

in formal theory construction, but rather developed a voluntaristic theory of

action through an empirical inquiry into the collapse of various types of positiv-

ism in European social theory. In my view, The Structure of Social Action remains

the principal sociological challenge to the rationalist and specifically utilitarian

models of action which inform economic theory and which more broadly under-

pin collective rational action theory. A rather more appropriate criticism is that

the empirical discussions of social processes which are contained in Parsons's

essays are not linked systematically with the type of theory contained in, for

example, The Social System.

 

Second, Goudsblom argues that Parsons was primarily concerned with the

juxtaposition of static, disjunctive elements. In particular, it is suggested that

Parsons's development of the dichotomy of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft into

the rigid ahistorical system of the pattern variables is the classical illustration of

 

8  Introduction

 

Parsons's propensity for reducing the complexity of social processes into static

theoretical contrasts. Of course, we should note that not only was Parsons

concerned to understand the social conditions (for example in the historical

development of Christianity) which promote varying combinations of the pat-

tern variables (Parsons, 1962), but he was also committed to the use of the

pattern variables as a heuristic device for comparative sociology (between, for

example, Japan and the United States) in his analyses of activism as a value.

Parsons also employed the pattern variables to understand comparatively and

historically the relation between expert and client in the development of the

professions (Parsons, 1960).

 

Goudsblom further illustrates the allegedly stationary character of Parsonian

theory by claiming that Parsons operated with a rigid, ahistorical contrast

between personality and the social system, which was merely a sociological

reflection on the common-sense contrast between "individual" and "society."

I offer three counter-arguments against this position. In the first instance,

Parsons always examined, theoretically and empirically, the interpenetrations

of "culture," "social system," and "personality" in the notion of "double

contingency"; there was also a constant emphasis on culture as the critical

feature of the integration of personality and social role. Second, Parsons had a

clear appreciation of the historical development and specificity of "the indi-

vidual" in the western tradition. Third, Parsons's view of the personality was

profoundly influenced by the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud (Par-

sons, 1959) and by the developmental theories of Jean Piaget (Lidz and Lidz,

1976); he had a clear view not only of the tensions between "individual" and

"society," but also of the tensions in "the personality" between ego, superego,

and id.

 

Finally, Goudsblom criticizes Parsons for an emphasis on normative integra-

tion, while applauding Elias's focus on the role of conflict and power in social

life. Of course, Parsons had responded to this critique in his own lifetime in

his essays on power, influence, and authority (Parsons, 1967). He was clearly

aware of the contradictions and conflicts in modern social systems, especially in

terms of conflicts over equality and citizenship. These are issues which are

reflected in his essays on the black American (Parsons and Clark, 1966).

Parsons recognized that the establishment of procedural rules of democracy

created a framework for the management of conflict rather than the eradication

of conflict. In this respect, Parsons was obviously influenced by the work of

American philosophers of law such as Lon L. Fuller, whose analysis of common

law attempted to identify the procedural agreements necessary for social order

(Sciulli, 1992).

 

I do not wish, in defending Parsons's sociology from these critical assess-

ments, to pretend that Parsons was not fundamentally interested in the condi-

tions of social integration and normative order. Of course, he was, but two issues

should be observed in this respect. First, while David Lockwood's distinction

between social and system integration (1992) is useful, Parsons never saw social

(as opposed to system) integration as complete. Second, to argue that conflict

and power are crucial to social life is a banality. A theory of conflict is never

adequate in itself as a theory of society.

 

Introduction  9

 

One of the persistent issues in functionalist sociology has been the relation-

ship between causal analysis and functional descriptions of system needs. The

distinction between these two approaches was clearly recognized by Durkheim

(1958), who argued that the search for the antecedent causes of social phenom-

ena was quite separate from the question of the function of social structures in

relation to social requirements. It can be argued that the analysis of system

needs was the defining characteristic of functionalism and that functionalism

never resolved the logical relationship between function and cause. Further-

more, the fact that neo-functionalism does not address the question of func-

tional prerequisites and system needs signifies that it is not a form of

functionalism.

 

This characterization of the problem of the relationship between traditional

functionalism and neo-functionalism is useful in pinpointing the criticism of

Parsonian functionalism as an ahistorical mode of analysis. In Parson's soci-

ology, we clearly find both types of analysis. The studies of the evolutionary

importance of Christianity for the emergence of modern citizenship belong to

causal understanding because Parsons was concerned to comprehend the ante-

cedent causes of modern political life. However, Parsons, following Durkheim,

was also concerned to analyze the functional significance of religion for the

integration of American society. Goudsblom's critique of Parsons is focused on

the functional analysis of system needs, but Parsons also undertook causal

analyses of historical change and this form of explanation in Parsonian sociology

is neglected by his critics.

 

This comment, however, still leaves open to question the relationship (if any)

between causal and functional analysis. The response of neo-functionalists has

been to argue that there is nothing logically incompatible between causal

analysis (for example in terms of historical change being brought about by

conflicts between social groups) and functional analysis of the conditions of

social stability (in terms of the system prerequisite of social stability on the basis

of shared values). It is in fact possible to specify this relationship even more

precisely. Functional analysis specifies the conditions for the reproduction of

social system requirements (Y) by social structures (X). A causal/historical

analysis merely tells us how by antecedent causes the relationship Y-X came

into existence as a consequence of a cause (Z). The "functional circle" between

Y-X is explained by the causal sequence Z. For example, the functional rela-

tionship between possessive individualism and capitalism is explained by both

the functional requirements of the capitalist society (private property) and by a

causal analysis of the peculiar developments of English Protestantism, which

gave a special emphasis to the authority of the individual in relation to the

interpretation of the Bible. The fact that this hypothetical example is historically

dubious does not influence the formal claim as to the nature of the relationship

between causal mechanisms and functional requirements (Abercrombie, Hill,

and Turner, 1986). It follows that the logical grounds for the critique of

Parsonian functionalism in relation to historical accounts of social reality are

not warranted.

 

The intention here is not to attempt a critique of Elias's figurational sociology

in order to mount a defense of Parsons's functionalism. However,

it is important

 

10  Introduction

 

to identify a crucial difference between Elias and Parsons in order to clarify an

important dimension of Parsons's approach to the sociological analysis of insti-

tutions. While Elias has given special emphasis to military conflicts and social

violence in his study of the civilizing process, he has almost completely

neglected the historical and comparative nature of religious culture, the sacred,

the priesthood, and the Church in the history of western society. This analytical

silence with respect to the regulative function of religious norms in the historical

process of civilizing military violence, the court, and the bourgeois household is

a remarkable absence in Elias's treatment of the institutional matrix of western

nation-states. By contrast, religion as a basic component of the social as such

dominated Parsons's view of social relations (1962) and processes from his

translation of Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1930) to

his final reflections on the classics in sociology (Parsons, 1981; Robertson,

1982).

 

By contrast, Elias has written about medieval court society (1982) and

western civilization with hardly any reference to Roman Catholicism in par-

ticular or to Christianity in general. It is interesting in this respect to compare

Elias's historical analysis of this period with, for example, the work of George

Duby, whose analysis of marriage, alliances, the knighthood, and chivalry

depends on an extensive inquiry into the social role of Catholic doctrine

(Duby, 1978, 1983). It is also interesting to compare Elias with an older

tradition of historical scholarship from Germany, in particular Ernst Troeltsch's

magisterial analysis of western Christendom (Troeltsch, 1931). 

 

Elias's failure to discuss the role of religion in relation to the civilizing process,

or more specifically to consider the place of Roman Catholicism in the history of

the court, has been defended by a number of scholars. For example, Steven

Russell (1996), in his excellent application of Elias's notion of figurational or

process sociology to Jewish identity, argues that Elias ignores organized

Christianity because his focus was on the secular court. This defense fails to

address the more fundamental question: can one develop a general sociology of

the civilizing process without reference to how western Christianity shaped,

for example, conscience? It is difficult to see how a theory which owes so

much to Freudian philosophy regarding the tensions between instinctual

gratification and religious asceticism could ignore the role of religious norms

in shaping behavior and normative constraint. In this respect, it would be

valuable to carry out a thorough comparison of Elias on civilizing processes

and the work of Benjamin Nelson on conscience, confession, and constraint(Huff, 1981).

 

There remains one final issue in Goudsblom's account of Elias and Parsons.

If Parsons's sociology was defective and deficient for the reasons outlined by

Goudsblom, how can one explain the differential success and failure

(in academic terms) of these two men? While Parsons enjoyed considerable

institutional success (becoming, for example, President of the American Sociological

Association), Elias was not recognized until late in his career. The answer

offered by Goudsblom is relatively simple. Parsons at Harvard was at the core

of the American academic establishment, whereas at Leicester in England Elias

"attained only a modest position at a new university" (Goudsblom, 1987: 327).

 

Introduction  11

 

Clearly Parsons enjoyed considerable intellectual and institutional advantages,

but it is absurd to refer to Leicester as a "modest" or "new university," implying

thereby that it was relatively marginal. In fact, sociology in Britain was primarily

carried out in "provincial" centres at Hull, Leeds, Manchester, and Leicester.

Under the headship of Ilya Neustadt, the department at Leicester has produced

many of the leading sociologists in England in the contemporary period, includ-

ing Joe Banks, John Goldthorpe, Bryan Wilson, and Anthony Giddens. Of

course, while the United Kingdom provided a haven for many European intel-

lectuals in the Nazi period, there were many obstacles to their academic promo-

tion. Some migrant intellectuals failed to achieve even "modest" positions, such

as the marxist sociologist of science Alfred Sohn-Rethel (1978). The institu-

tional location of Elias and Parsons cannot by itself explain the differences in

their academic careers. In any case, Parsons's professional influence in Amer-

ican sociology declined rapidly after 1960.

 

Goudsblom's criticism of Parsons is based, as we have seen, on the assump-

tion that these two sociologists represent entirely different intellectual traditions

and embraced incompatible projects. In this section of my reply to Goudsblom,

I argue that one can detect a convergence between Elias and Parsons - a

convergence which provides the pretext for sketching out a different interpreta-

tion of Parsons's sociology.

 

The core motif of Elias's process sociology (1978a) is a study of the long-term

processes by which the untutored and vulgar interpersonal behavior of feudal

times was eventually replaced by codes of good manners and courtesy, and

finally by a culture of bourgeois education into a formal system of personal

control. His historical inquiry is superficially into the emergence of "manners,"

but this project is also connected with the emergence of the modern state which

regulates public violence in a situation where the individual has to exercise

increasing self-control. The emotions of self-attention play an important role

or function in securing an appropriate level of social conformity (Barbalet,

1998: 80). We can see part of Elias's argument as a combination of a Freudian

theory of instinctual regulation and a Weberian analysis of the state as that

institution which has a legitimate monopoly of violence. In this respect one

may interpret Elias's sociology as in fact a social psychology of the historical

transformation of systems of restraint. The history of manners is an account of

how "natural passions" are managed and regulated by "culture"; more simply,

it is an account of how "biology" is coerced into socially useful activities.

Behind Elias's account of civilization is the theory of social contract as the

basis of social life, whereby individuals (who are by "nature" violent brutes)

submit to the state (as a third-party authority) and to the civilizing process of

culture. It would not be inappropriate to suggest that Elias has provided us with

a brilliant historical analysis of the classical problem of political theory, namely

the Hobbesian problem of order.

 

It is now very easy to see an initial point of contact between Parsons's The

Structure of Social Action which was published in 1937 and Elias's The Civilizing

Process which was originally published in Basel in 1939. Whereas Elias gave a

historical analysis of the Hobbesian question ("How is society possible?"),

Parsons in 1937 proceeded to criticize rationalist and reductionist views of

 

12  Introduction

 

action (especially in the economic theories of Alfred Marshall and Vilfredo

Pareto). Parsons's answer was in this sense a theoretical response to the social

contract problem by arguing that action (as opposed to behavior) was only

intelligible if we take notice of the role of choice with reference to the ends of

action which are structured by values. It is only because there are values behind

actions that agreements over social order can be maintained. Social order

becomes possible (but not inevitable) because there are shared values; in

short, there is a non-contractual or cultural element of contract.

 

It is well known that this (largely implicit) general theory in The Structure of

Social Action was then elaborated at great length by Parsons in his "middle"

phase in The Social System (1951), Economy and Society (Parsons and Smelser,

1956), and in collections such as Social Structure and Personality (1964). It was in

this period that Parsons developed a more elaborate account of structural

functionalism in which he argued that there is an interpenetration between

society and personality whereby individuals experience psychological rewards

for social conformity. The linkage between the cultural system and the social

system is provided by internalization and socialization, whereby social order is

grounded in a common value system. This development is also a major aspect of

successful system adaptation, because social differentiation is accompanied by a

higher level of integration. It was this version of structural functionalism which

explained system equilibrium and which became the central target of criticism

of Parsons, namely that he had produced an "oversocialized theory of man"

which had excluded the tensions and contradictions addressed by Freud

(Wrong, 1961). Elias's sociology of civilizational processes can be read as a

historical account of the tensions between instinctual gratification and the

necessities and requirements of civilized life.

 

While one can agree with those commentators who suggest that "The Social

System represented a departure from the action theory of The Structure of Social

Action" (Scott, 1963), there is also a strong sense of continuity in Parsons's work

connecting the early interest in action theory, the middle-career focus on the

sick role, and the final focus on "the human condition." There is no significant

rupture of interest. In short, the linking theme in Parsons's sociology is action

theory as a version of life-philosophy. While Parsons's interest in culture and

value integration was shaped by the Durkheimian tradition, his action theory

was the product of his encounter with the sociology of Weber. Although Parsons

was especially influenced by Weber's analysis of capitalism, there was a broader

impact through Weber's sociology of "character" and social orders.

 

There are good reasons (Hennis, 1988) for seeing Weber as part of the

German Lebensphilosophie tradition, which was important in the German intel-

lectual tradition between 1880 and 1930 (Schnabelbach, 1984). In turn this

Lebensphilosophie tradition had some common roots in the earlier Romantic

philosophy which in Germany was associated with the idea of life as a work of

art (Engelhardt, 1988). Following the philosophical critique of Nietzsche and

Bergson, the search for an "authentic" life became a dominant theme in the

youth movement, in neo-romanticism, and in aesthetics (for example, the

Jugendstil). This notion of "life" was opposed to Hegelian rationalism and to

empiricism. This life-philosophy tradition established the basis for a romantic

 

Introduction  13

 

critique of technology, science, and capitalism in the philosophy of writers such

as Stefan George and Ludwig Kiages (Stauth and Turner, 1988).

 

There are some connections between this German tradition of life-philosophy

(which grounded human action in life processes against the state and urban

civilization) and the action theory of Parsons and his followers (Turner, 1994a).

One can speculate that this influence in Parsons's work emerged Out of Par-

sons's encounter with the work of Karl Jaspers at Heidelberg. Although the early

action theory had been overshadowed by systems theory in the 1950s and

1960s, the themes of life-philosophy as action theory re-emerged in Parsons's

work in the 1970s. We might with plausibility therefore call Parsons's primary

project the establishment of a "life-sociology" organized around the idea of the

situation of action in which social actors in a structured life-context select ends

by reference to personality needs, interactional requirements, and shared values.

In short, the notion of "institutionalized individualism" could describe some

dimensions of the German tradition of Lebensphilosophie.

 

Although Parsons never really solved the relationship between the biological

and the social, it remained a constant theme in his sociology of action. In The

Structure of Social Action, Parsons was interested in the biological conditions of

action. In Toward a General Theory of Action (Parsons and Shils, 1951) and The

Social System (1951), the "biological" was translated into an interest in affect,

affectual action, and emotional questions relating to cathexis. In this period,

Parsons explored the interaction of the biological processes and social interac-

tion in the sick role. Parsons also developed the basis for a sociology of aging as a

bio-social process in various essays on youth, activism, and social structure.

Finally, towards the end of his career, issues relating to the gift of life, blood,

religion, and death became prominent in Action Theory and the Human Condition

(1978). The Lebensphilosophie focus on the patterns of the life process became in

Parsons's action theory a general framework for the sociological analysis of the

complex interaction between human nature (being-in-the-world of the agent),

the regulative world of civilization, and the solidarities which are enduring

consequences of endless, but fleeting, human exchange.

 

Parsons and Elias converge, therefore, around a number of common empiri-

cal concerns - the moral problem of death (Elias, 1985a), the social regulation

of emotions (Elias, 1987a), and the relations between the sexes (Elias, 1987b).

Of course, there is much that divides Elias's and Parsons's versions of sociology

in terms of epistemology, approaches to theory, and underlying presuppositions.

However, what signals their common or overlapping concerns was a profound

ethical interest in the "human conditio" (Elias, 1985b) or the "human condi-

tion" (Parsons, 1978) as the ultimate focus of sociology.

 

Parsons and Economic Sociology

 

I have sought to defend Parsons against a number of common criticisms, partly

by comparing his analysis of the origins of modernity with Elias's analysis of the

civilizing process. There are, however, other dimensions to the intellectual

coherence of Parsons's work which are best appreciated through a commentary

 

14  Introduction

 

on his economic sociology. The issue of intellectual coherence and continuity in

the academic life of major social theorists is a topic much debated in the history

of sociological thought. In the case of Parsons, it has often been thought that

there was a major division between his work before 1951 and the subsequent

growth of functionalism with the publication of The Social System. Whereas the

work of the early Parsons was seen to be concerned with the development of a

voluntaristic theory of action, the publications of the later Parsons were believed

to be focused on structural functionalism as a model for the analysis of social

systems in terms, for example, of their subsystem properties.

 

If one wanted to identify a thematic continuity in the work of Parsons from

the early essays on economic theory, to The Structure of Social Action, and

beyond into his collaborative work with Neil Smelser, then it would be his

interest in the intellectual and academic relationship between economics and

sociology. Parsons's persistent attention to economic theory had been relatively

neglected by critics of Parsons who, in attacking the alleged functionalism of

Parsonian sociology, concentrated on the issues of value consensus and normat-

ive integration, believing that Parsons had relatively little interest in the "eco-

nomic base" of society. This neglect of Parsons's economic sociology was

probably intensified by the marxist undercurrent of much so-called conflict

theory. In recent years, there has fortunately been considerable interest shown

in Parsons's analysis of economic theory and more specifically in his economic

sociology (Gansmann, 1988; Holton, 1991; Holton and Turner, 1986; Robert-

son and Turner, 1991). Following the work of Charles Camic (1991) and Bruce

Wearne (1989), we have a much better understanding and appreciation of

Parsons's early immersion in debates about the nature of economic theory. It

was this engagement with institutional economics in his early career that marked

Parsons's departure from biology into the social sciences.

 

At one level economics presented Parsons with a model of a successful social

science, in particular as a model of a general theory of action. Economics as a

discipline was successful in two separate ways. First, it was an established and

prestigious discipline within the university system, and second, it offered the

opportunity to create an analytically coherent but parsimonious account of

rational behavior. Economics promises to explain social reality by reference to

an elementary list of propositions which are to do with rational behavior in a

context of scarcity. The principle of marginal utility lies at the core of this

elementary account of human behavior. By contrast, sociology lacks parsimony

and precision, giving rise instead to a welter of imprecise, competing observa-

tions and propositions about social actions and social relations. In this context,

sociology was also subject to competition from the biological sciences and

biologically based psychology which attempted to explain human behavior by

a process of reductionism. Parsons's general theory of action was an attempt to

reconcile these conflicting sociological approaches and perspectives. Parsons's

sociology grappled with: the relationship between economics and sociology as

competing explanations of rational action; the problem of biological reduction-

ism with respect to human values and culture; the question of so-called "mis-

placed concreteness" in the philosophy of the social sciences; and the nature

and role of analytical schema in the development of sciences. Parsons sought to

 

Introduction  15

 

solve these issues via a voluntaristic theory of action, in order not only to resolve

a set of intellectual puzzles but to contribute to the professional establishment of

sociology as an autonomous and recoguized discipline within the pantheon of

the academic social sciences.

 

If the social sciences are in general concerned with action systems, then

Parsons saw the relationship between sociology and economics in terms of a

continuum in the means-end schema, whereby sociology was concerned with

the value end of the action chain and economics with the specific means by

which scarcity is resolved. In practice, sociology has evolved more as a com-

mentary on the marginal problems of economic theory, that is the nature ofnon-

rational and irrational behavior in a context of scarcity of means for the satisfac-

tion of needs.

 

In The Structure of Social Action, Parsons approached this problem of the

relationship between sociology and economics by reference to what he called

"residual categories," namely the hidden and taken for granted set of assump-

tions within economic theory whereby such phenomena as social stability and

contracts are explained. The problem facing economics was the explanation of

social order in rational terms, in a context where fraud and force are rational

solutions to conditions of scarcity. Economics has traditionally solved this

Hobbesian problem of order by reference to such notions as sentiment and

the hidden hand of history. Sociology as an academic discipline has by contrast

been concerned with such issues as culture, values, and morality as foundations

of social relations.

 

If we compare economics, politics, and sociology as social sciences of action,

then economics is the discipline concerned with the reduction of scarcity by the

application of means to ends, politics is a science concerned with the distribu-

tion of power in relation to scarce resources, and finally sociology is that

discipline concerned with the conditions and maintenance of social solidarity

(namely value integration) in a world of risk, scarcity, and uncertainty. The term

"sociology" is itself derived from the Latin for friendship (socius), that is,

sociology is a science or discipline concerned with the explanation of compan-

ionship via such phenomena as rituals, values, and culture. Parsons addressed

this issue primarily by drawing on Durkheim's sociology of religion, namely The

Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1954), as a model of the religious sources

of social integration through the collective possession of authoritative norms

and values.

 

In his early discussion of culture, we see Parsons beginning the process of

establishing an alternative approach to institutional economics and to psycho-

logical reductionism by understanding the framework within which, for exam-

ple, economic contracts work in terms of culture and values. This perspective is

Parsons's substantive answer to the economic analysis of scarcity, namely that

collective behavior and social agreements depend upon a bedrock of shared

cultural assumptions which are handed down to new generations by the pro-

cesses of socialization and internalization of values, for example, within the

domestic or familial context. This substantive understanding of the relationship

between scarcity and solidarity occupied Parsons's sociology throughout his

mature academic and intellectual life, and we see this contrast emerging once

 

16  Introduction

 

more in the famous AGIL subsystem analysis within his approach to systems

theory (Parsons, 1951). The AGIL paradigm depends upon a fundamental

distinction or contrast between the allocative problems of society (which are

primarily to do with economics and politics) in a context of scarcity and the

integrative and motivational problems of social systems (which are to do with

the creation of solidarity and commitment through values and mores). The

allocative problem is the essence of political economy, while the integration

and commitment issues are fundamental to sociology.

 

In trying to develop an analytical framework for sociology, Parsons sought to

avoid the traditional dichotomy between idealism and positivism. In general

terms, the natural and social sciences in the nineteenth century, particularly in

the Anglo-Saxon world, had emerged on the basis of a positivistic science of

reality. Within this paradigm, biological accounts of human behavior were

significant in the p6sitivist reduction of values to nature. Parsons, by contrast,

wanted to assert the autonomy and emergence of culture and values as inde-

pendent phenomena in the explanation and understanding of action. This

principle of emergence was not fully developed until The Structure of Social

Action, and in his later work he absorbed the idea of the "super organic" from

the work of anthropologists such as A. L. Kroeber. In attempting to grapple with

issues about biology and environment in the Amherst papers, we find in the

early work the intellectual seed of what Parsons came to call the "external

conditions of the action schema" in the unit act concept of The Structure of

Social Action. Parsons came to conceive of the action schema in terms of a

means-end chain in which ends are selected by reference to values and means

by reference to norms, but the orientation of the actor toward his or her social

situation is always conducted in the context of what Parsons called the condi-

tions of action, which were basically the physical or environmental conditions of

action and choice.

 

Parsons did not substantially depart from this framework, although he came

to conceptualize the embodiment of the social actor in more complicated terms

in his later work partly as a consequence of his engagement with the psycho-

analytic theories of Freud and a more sophisticated understanding of cyber-

netics and teleology. Whether or not Parsons came to an appropriate

understanding of the "embodiment of the human actor" (Turner, 1992) is an

issue beyond the confines of this introduction.

 

Conclusion

 

While wanting to defend Parsons from false or irrelevant criticism, one has to

acknowledge and confront the characteristically abstract and formalistic char-

acter of much of Parsons's work - an issue which has been addressed by

Alexander in his Theoretical Logic in Sociology (1984). There is a tendency to

over-use and over-extend, for example, the heuristic validity of the AGIL

model, which produces a formalism devoid of any content. Although I have

attempted also to defend Parsons from the criticism that he lacked any sense of

historical change, there is a valid criticism that Parsons rarely engaged in

 

Introduction  17

 

debates about the historical specificity of his examples or cases. Furthermore,

although Parsons attempted to present his sociology as a component within a

broader understanding of the social sciences (including economics, politics, and

psychoanalysis), there is little sustained evidence of any sensitivity to the place

of anthropology, history, and geography in the scheme of "social

relations."

 

Despite these and other difficulties, I remain confident with the

argument that an understanding of Parsons's sociology is essential for those who wish to

understand modern social science with any depth or sophistication. In sum-

mary, Parsons provides us with the most robust and unashamed account of

modernity (from within a liberal perspective). His sociology is the perfect foil by

which to understand both the strength and the weakness of postmodernism.

Parsons's sociology is the most coherent exposition of the grand narrative of

modernity. Second, although his work is a defense of modernization, it is also a

powerful criticism of utilitarian rationalism, the underlying foundation of so-

called economic rationalism. Third, Parsons's criticisms of rationalism and his

account of modernity are grounded in a comparative study of culture. Differ-

ences between societies are primarily differences between cultural systems. This

focus on culture is a strikingly contemporary emphasis in sociology. These

reasons can be taken as powerful justifications for a collection of essential

readings.

 

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18  Introduction

 

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