Talcott Parsons

Talcott Parsons (Colorado Springs, December 13, 1902 – Munich - West Germany, May 8, 1979) was an American sociologist in the classical tradition of sociology, known for his theory of social action and its structural-functionalist approach. Parsons is considered one of the most influential figures in the development of sociology in the 20th century. After earning a Ph.D. in economics, he served on the faculty of Harvard University from 1927 to 1979, and in 1930 was among the first professors of the recently created department of sociology.

Based on empirical data, Parsons' theory of social action was the first broad, systematic, and generalizable theory of social systems developed in the United States.  One of Parsons's greatest contributions to world sociology Anglophone were his translations of the works of Max Weber and his analyzes of the works of Weber, Émile Durkheim and Vilfredo Pareto. The work of these authors strongly influenced Parsons' perspective and was the basis for his theory of social action, in which he viewed voluntaristic action through the prism of cultural values and the social structures that constrain choices and that, in Ultimately, they determine all social actions, as opposed to the idea that actions are determined based on internal psychological processes. Although Parsons is generally considered a structural-functionalist, towards the end of his career in 1975 he published an article in the one that declares that the terms "functional" and "structural-functionalist" they were inappropriate ways of describing the character of his theory.

In the early 1970s, a new generation of sociologists criticized Parsons's theories, viewing them as socially conservative and unnecessarily complex prose. Since then, sociology courses have placed less emphasis on his theories compared to the height of his popularity between the 1940s and 1970s. However, a revival of interest in his ideas is recognized.

Biography

Talcott Parsons was born on December 13, 1902, in Colorado Springs. He was the son of Edward Smith Parsons (1863-1943) and Mary Augusta Ingersoll (1863-1949). His father attended Yale Divinity School and was ordained as a Congregationalist minister, first serving as a minister to a pioneer community in Greeley. At the time of Talcott Parsons' birth, Edward Parsons was Professor of English and Vice President at Colorado College.

During his period as a Congregationalist minister in Greeley, Edward Parsons had empathized with the social gospel, while maintaining a superior theological position, while at the same time showing hostility to socialism, treating it as mere ideology. At the time, Edward Parsons and his son Talcott were close to the theology of Jonathan Edwards. The father would later become the president of Marietta College in Ohio.

The Parsons family is one of the oldest families in American history. His ancestors were some of the first to arrive from England in the first half of the 17th century. The family heritage consisted of two separate and independent Parsons lines, both of which hark back to early American days and English history. On the paternal side, the family can be traced back to the Parsons of York. On the maternal side, the Ingersoll line was connected to Jonathan Edwards, and from this on there would be a new and independent Parsons line, since his older sister Sarah Edwards married Elihu Parsons on June 11, 1750.

University studies

Parsons began studying biology, sociology, and philosophy at Amherst College, receiving his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1924. Amherst College was traditionally a Parsons family-attended institution: the Talcott's father and uncle attended it, as well as his older brother Charles Edward Parsons. Initially, Talcott Parsons was drawn to a career in medicine, inspired by his older brother, which led him to study biology extensively and spend a summer working at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

Parsons' biology professors at Amherst College were Otto Glaser and Henry Plow. Parsons also became one of the most outstanding students at the institution. He took classes with Walton Hamilton and the philosopher Clarence Edwin Ayres, both known as "institutional economists," who showed him the works of Thorstein Veblen, John Dewey, William Graham Sumner, among others. Parsons also took a course with George Brown on the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, as well as one on modern German philosophy with Otto Manthey-Zorn, who was a leading interpreter of Kant. Parsons early showed a great interest in philosophy, which was probably reminiscent of his father's great interest in theology in the tradition in which he was socialized, a position that contrasted with the perspective of Talcott Parsons's teachers.

Two final essays that Parsons wrote as a student of Clarence Ayres in the Philosophy III class at Amherst College have been rescued and have been referred to as the Amherst Papers and have been of great interest. for Parsons scholars. The first was written on December 19, 1922 and is entitled The Theory of Human Behavior in its Individual and Social Aspects. was written on March 27, 1923 and is entitled A Behavioristic Conception of the Nature of Morals. The essays partly reveal Parsons' early interest in questions about social evolution. The Amherst Papers also reveal that Parsons disagreed with his institutionalist professors, as he held that technological development and moral progress were two structurally independent empirical processes.

Following Amherst College, he studied at the London School of Economics (LSE) for a year, where he was exposed to the work of R. H. Tawney, Bronislaw Malinowski, and Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse. During his time at the LSE he made friends with Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard, Meyer Fortes and Raymond Firth (who participated in Malinowski's seminar), and had strong personal friendships with Arthur Burns and Eveline Burns.

While studying at the LSE, he met a young American woman in the student commons, whose name was Helen Bancroft Walker, whom he would marry on April 30, 1927. The couple had three children: Anne, Charles, and Susan, and eventually four grandchildren. Helen's father was born in Canada, but moved to the Boston area and became a US citizen.

Parsons then went to the University of Heidelberg, where he received his doctorate in sociology and economics in 1927. During his time at this university, he worked with Alfred Weber (brother of Max Weber), Edgar Salin (who was his dissertation tutor), Emil Lederer and Karl Mannheim. In addition, he took an exam on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason with the philosopher Karl Jaspers Parsons was also examined at this university by Willy Andreas on the French Revolution. Parsons' doctoral thesis was written under the title The Concept of Capitalism in the Recent German Literature and focused on the work of Werner Sombart and Max Weber. It is clear from his discussion that he rejects Sombart's quasi-idealistic visions and adheres to Weber's attempts to strike a balance between historicism and idealism, as well as a neo-Kantian approach.

The most crucial discovery for Parsons in Heidelberg was his encounter with the work of Max Weber, whom he had never heard before coming to Germany. Weber became tremendously important to Parsons because, considering his upbringing with a liberal but strongly religious father, the question of the role of culture and religion in the basic processes of world history became a persistent enigma for him. In this sense, Weber was the first academic who really provided Parsons with a convincing theoretical answer to this question, which is why Parsons was deeply and extensively absorbed in reading Weber's work.

Parsons then decided to translate Weber's work into English, approaching Marianne Weber, Max Weber's wife, for this purpose. During his stay in Heidelberg, Parsons was invited by Marianne Weber to "sociological picnics& #34;, which were group study meetings that Marianne had in the library of her and Max Weber's old apartment. One of the academics Parsons met in Heidelberg who shared his enthusiasm for Weber was Alexander von Schelting. Parsons later wrote a review in von Schelting's book on Weber. In general, Parsons read extensively in the literature on religion, especially works focused on the sociology of religion. One academic who became especially important to Parsons in this regard was Ernst Troeltsch. Parsons also read widely on the topic of Calvinism, including the works of Emile Doumerque, Eugéne Choisy, and Henri Hauser.

Academic Career

In 1927, after a year teaching at Amherst College, Parsons entered Harvard as an instructor in the Department of Economics where he followed Frank William Taussig's lectures on Alfred Marshall and became friends with economist and historian Edwin Gay, who was the founder of the Harvard Business School. Parsons also became a close associate of Joseph Schumpeter and took his course in General Economics. Parsons generally disagreed with some of the tendencies of the Department, which in those days was highly technical and mathematically oriented, so he sought other options at Harvard and taught courses in Social Ethics and the Sociology of Religion. Although Parsons entered Harvard through the Economics Department, he never aimed to become an economist; all his activities and his basic intellectual interest drove him towards sociology, although there was no Sociology Department in the early years he was at Harvard. However, Harvard was in those years working to establish one and Parsons positioned himself in various ways by writing and teaching, so he was ready to join the Department of Sociology when it was finally established. Parsons was never forced to leave the Economics Department, rather his departure was a voluntary and deliberate decision.

The chance to establish himself in sociology came in 1930, when the first Department of Sociology was created at Harvard by Pitirim Sorokin.  Sorokin had come to the United States in 1923 escaping the Russian Revolution. Parsons became one of two instructors in the newly created department, along with Carl Joslyn, and established close ties with biochemist and sociologist Lawrence Joseph Henderson, who took a personal interest in Parsons's career at Harvard. Parsons was also part of the Pareto study group, formed by Henderson himself, in which some of the most important Harvard intellectuals participated: Crane Brinton, George Casper Homans and Charles Curtis. As a result of reading Pareto, Parsons wrote an article on Pareto's theory and later made explicit his adoption of his concept of a social system. Parsons also developed close relationships with two other influential intellectuals, with whom he corresponded for several years: economist Frank Hyneman Knight and Chester Barnard, one of America's most dynamic businessmen. Relations between Parsons and Sorokin were quickly strained, in part by Sorokin's deep disgust for American civilization, which he viewed as a sensible culture in decline. Sorokin's writings became progressively antiscientific in his later years, widening his gap with the work of Parsons and turning against him a sociological community in America that was turning increasingly positivist. Even Sorokin came to belittle all sociological tendencies that differed from his own work, becoming by 1934 a rather unpopular academic at Harvard.

Some of the students Parsons taught in the early years of the new Sociology Department included Robin Williams Jr., Robert K. Merton, Kingsley Davis, Wilbert Moore, Edward Devereux, Logan Wilson, Nicholas Demereth, John Riley Jr.. and Mathilda White Riley. Later generations of students included Harry Johnson, Bernard Barber, Marion Levy, and Jesse Richard Pitts. At the request of the students, Parsons established a small, informal study group that met annually. Towards the end of Parsons's career, systems theorist Niklas Luhmann also attended his classes.

In the academic term 1939-1940, Parsons and Schumpeter conducted an informal faculty seminar at Harvard held in Emerson Hall that sought to discuss the concept of rationality. Participants included Abram Bergson, Wassily Leontief, Gottfried Haberler, and Paul Sweezy. Schumpeter contributed to the seminar with his essay Rationality in Economics, while Parsons contributed his article The Role of Rationality in Social Action. rationality in social action). Schumpeter proposed to Parsons to jointly write and edit a book on rationality, but the project never came to fruition.

Faced with the discussion between neoclassical and institutionalist economists, which was one of the prevalent conflicts in economics between the 1920s and 1930s, Parsons drew a very fine line. He was highly critical of neoclassical theory, an attitude he remained with throughout his life and was reflected in his criticisms of Milton Friedman and Gary Becker. In particular, he was opposed to the utilitarian bias of neoclassical theory. However, Parsons partially agreed with the theoretical and methodological style of this approach. Therefore, he found himself unable to accept the solution proposed by institutional economics, which he regarded as primarily empirical, descriptive, and without a theoretical approach.

Parsons returned to Germany in the summer of 1930 and witnessed first hand the feverish atmosphere in the Weimar Republic, during which the Nazi Party came to power. Parsons received constant reports of the rise of Nazism through his friend Edward Yarnall Hartshorne. In the late 1930s, Parsons began warning the American public about the Nazi threat, but met with little success. A poll of the time shows that 91% of the country was opposed to World War II. Also, the majority of the American people thought that the country should have stayed out of World War I and that the Nazis did not represent a threat, despite what they did in Europe. Even some Americans were sympathetic to Germany because of their ancestry in that country and the view that, both countries being strongly anti-communist, only Germany managed to get out of the Great Depression. One of the first articles Parsons wrote on Nazism was New Dark Age Seen If Nazis Should Win, which made him one of the key initiators of the Defense Committee. from Harvard, which aimed to unify American public opinion against the Nazis. Parsons spread this message through local radio stations in Boston and at a rally held at Harvard, which was agitated by antiwar activists. Along with Charles Orlando Porter, Parsons sought to unify graduate students at Harvard to go to war. Even during the war, Parsons led a special study group at Harvard that sought to analyze what its members considered the causes of Nazism, including experts on the subject for analysis.

Work

Parsons generated a general theoretical system for the analysis of society that he called action theory. This theory has a methodological and epistemological foundation in the principle of analytic realism, while its ontological assumption is that of voluntaristic action. Parsons' concept of analytic realism can be understood as a kind of compromise between the nominalist and realist views of the nature of reality and of human knowledge. Parsons believed that objective reality could be related only to a particular view of that reality, and that general intellectual understanding is plausible through conceptual schemes and theories. Interaction with objective reality on the intellectual level must always be understood as an approximation. Parsons often explained the meaning of analytic realism by quoting Lawrence Joseph Henderson: "A fact is a statement about experience in terms of conceptual schema."

In general, Parsons has maintained that his inspiration regarding analytic realism has been Lawrence J. Henderson and Alfred North Whitehead, although he probably had this idea earlier. The concept of analytical realism allows him to insist on the reference to an objective reality and, with this, mark an important difference with the fictionalism of Hans Vaihinger.

The Structure of Social Action (1937)

The Structure of Social Action is Parsons's most famous work. The central figure for him was Weber and the other two key authors, Durkheim and Pareto, were added to the discussion as the central idea took shape. An important publication that helped Parsons to develop the central argument of this work was found unexpectedly in 1932: it is La formation du radicalisme philosophique by Élie Halévy, particularly the third volume, a work that allowed him to clarify the assumptions of English utilitarianism.

Theoretical foundations of social action

The theory of action that Parsons developed in The Structure of Social Action can be characterized as an attempt to maintain the scientific rigor of positivism while stressing the need for the subjective dimension of action. human action, incorporated into hermeneutic sociological theories. Capital in the general theoretical and methodological vision of Parsons is the understanding of human action in conjunction with the motivational component of the human act. For this reason, he considers that the social sciences must consider the problem of ends, purposes and ideals in the analysis of human action. The author's strong reaction to both behaviorist theory and pure materialist approaches derives from the attempt of these theoretical positions to eliminate ends, purposes, and ideals as factors in analysis. In his Amherst College essays, Parsons was already criticizing attempts to reduce the understanding of human life to psychological, biological, and materialistic forces. For Parsons, the way in which culture was codified was essential in human life, which was an independent variable that cannot be deduced from another factor in the social system. Some of these issues were previously introduced by Parsons in an essay written two years before the publication of The Structure of Social Action.

Concept of social action

There are three concepts that lie at the core of action theory: the act-unit, voluntarism and verstehen. The most basic phenomenon of action theory is what Parsons called the act-unit, defined by its four components:

1. The existence of a actor.
2. The supposition of a endor a future state to which action is directed.
3. Development of action in a situationwhich involves two elements: the things that the actor cannot control (conditions) and those you can control (media).
4. The standards and valueswhich serve to determine the choice of the actor among the various means to achieve the ends.

Voluntarism refers to the choices that actors make in the social situations in which they find themselves. This does not mean that the actors are totally free to make their choice, since the concept of voluntarism implies a conscience. Finally, the verstehen refers to the need to analyze the action from a subjective perspective.

The Social System (1952)

General theory of society

The solution proposed by Parsons to the polarizations prior to his time, was a general theory of society, which thinks of social life as a totality and that can be constituted as a great story, with explanatory and predictive capacity on social life (in the manner of Comte). However, Parsons is going to encounter a problem that will give him many headaches throughout his life: the role of the individual. Faced with such a general theory, it is worth asking what is the place of the individual within such a large universe of supra-entities. And, what is more, if the implications of functional structuralism are taken into account, for which individuals are embedded in cells of the social structure, which determine what they are socially, and their objective is to fulfill a social function, that is,, who have already determined what they have to do, where is the individual decision?

Fonts

Parsons to develop his theory is based on several relationships. He mainly takes Durkheim, using his definition of society, but considered as a system and not an organism, as opposed to Marx. He borrows from Weber the concept of social action, which is behavior with meaning in relation to culture.

It also takes up questions from authors outside the sociological discipline, such as Freud, using his second topic, which raises the personality composed of three components: the id (natural tendencies of living organisms), the superego (the ego ideal) and the ego (the part of the id modified by education and cultural influence). With this, he bases himself on Freud's book Discomfort in Culture, which presents society as a repressor of our instincts, since in the case of the repressions of the superego they are all of social conformation.

Finally, Bertalanffy, biologist and father of general systems theory, takes his proposal for a model that broadens the scientific vision under a new aspect of ordering and relationship through the system model.

Theory

• System: Interrelated and hierarchical set of parts that when interacting produce certain behavior.
• Hierarchy: Concept that extracts Parsons from Bertalanffy and implies order by social rank.
• Aparato: Interrelated set of parts in which there is not one more important than another.
• Criterion of hierarchy: Balance of change and stability.

Parsons is known in the history of sociology, as the author of the functionalist structural theory, which is called “A.G.I.L.-.”. The agile scheme, or the model of the four functions, as is the Functional Structural Theory, which is the same, was neither the first nor the most important, that is, the most lucid, of the Parsonian attempts to solve this problem. Parsons produced many attempts at Theory, all of them very suggestive, very interesting, very attractive. One of them achieved some notable success in the international sociological community. It was the AGIL model. But what is interesting is that Parsons tries to overcome the distinction between action and system, between subjectivism and objectivism in Sociological Theory. Curiously, each of the moments of his Theory moved, and deep down, unconsciously, he ended up being the representative of each of those approaches.

Parsonian Systemic Theory

Already understanding this, we can understand Parsons' systemic theory. The system that encompasses everything is the cultural system, which is the one that regulates the orientations; within this is the social system which is that it encompasses the means and conditions; and within this system, there is the personality system , which is the one that locates the actor and his individual needs. It can also be said that within the personality system is the biological one.

In general, an individual within a social system will always have a status, which is his location in society, and a role, which is the function he fulfills within a social system. Every social system always has minimum needs to satisfy, these are the functional prerequisites, which are needs of the social system in general. And with this, Parsons would solve the problem of the Hobbesian order, since individuals would function through their roles to fulfill these prerequisites, which are: first, social systems must be structured in a way that they are compatible with other systems; second, the social system must be supported by other systems; third, it must satisfy a significant part of the needs of the actors; fourth, it must encourage its members to participate sufficiently; fifth, you must exercise control over potentially disruptive behaviors; sixth, if a conflict arises, you must control it; and, seventh, it requires a language in order to survive.

These prerequisites make up the four famous subsystems of Parsons, formed by four functional imperatives (AGIL) necessary in every system, which are: adaptation (A), that is, every system must encompass the external situations, you must adapt to your environment and adapt the environment around your needs; the ability to achieve goals (G); integration (I), that is, regulating the interrelation between the other functional imperatives; latency (L), a system must provide, maintain, and renew the motivation of individuals and the cultural patterns that create and maintain motivation. The general system of action is composed of adaptation by the organic system, of goals by the personality system, of integration by the social system and latency by the cultural system. Giving an example, this system would be like a game of Russian dolls, and Parsons has the luxury of describing how it is inside the social system: economy is in adaptation, politics is in goals, community is in integration, and latency is this endoculturation. The grace is that these systems interact with each other and work as a system.

Trouble keeping balance

Social processes: the functioning of any system involves solving the following problems.

• How does the necessary coordination between all subsystems ensure? In order to achieve coordination among subsystems, we must first define goals and objectives as well as methods for achieving the objectives. Operating standards, gratification and sanctions systems and appointing authorities must then be established. This set constitutes the political subsystem.
• How does it ensure that all members of society know the values on which it is sustained? How do you motivate them to accept them and fold them? Through the process of socialization the different members of the system are being formed from children according to established standards and using gratification and sanctions systems to achieve social purposes.
• How does the system and its members achieve their objectives? Splitting the work among the different members, coordinating and integrating. The place you occupy in society will determine the power, prestige and property you have.

Whoever else has met the goals will be higher in the social pyramid. According to Parsons each person has the place they deserve within the pyramid. The failure of societies is individual failure.

Relations between cybernetics and systems theory

Parsons developed his ideas during a period when systems theory and cybernetics were gaining prominence in the social and behavioral sciences. Taking elements of these approaches, he postulated that the relevant systems treated in said sciences were open, that is, inserted in an environment with other systems. For the social and behavioral sciences, the broadest system is the action system, consisting of the interrelation of the behaviors of human beings inserted in a physical-organic environment.

As Parsons developed his theory, he became increasingly linked to the fields of cybernetics and systems theory, drawing on Alfred Emerson's concepts of homeostasis and teleonomic processes coined by Ernst Mayr. With this, Parsons tried to balance the psychologism of phenomenology with idealism on the one hand and the pure types of what he called the utilitarian-positivist complex on the other.

Parsons' theory includes a general theory of social evolution and a concrete interpretation of the major impulses in world history. In his theory of history and evolution, he posits that the constitutive-cognitive symbolization of the cybernetic hierarchy of systemic action levels performs, in principle, an equivalent function to that of DNA genetic information in controlling evolution. biological. However, this does not mean that the meta-systemic control factor determines the results, but rather that it defines the limits of the orientation of the action.

For Parsons, transformative processes and entities at the constitutive level of society are generally at least one level of empirical analysis, which is performed and actualized by myths and religions. Philosophy, however, art systems and even the semiotics of consumer behavior can also, in principle, perform the same functions.

Integrated approach to sociological theory

Parsons' theory reflects a vision of a unified concept of the social sciences and of living systems in general. His approach differs essentially from Niklas Luhmann's theory, since Parsons rejects the idea that systems can be autopoietic, be they actual action systems or individual actors. For him, systems have immanent capacities, but only as a result of the institutionalized processes of action systems, corresponding, in the last analysis, to the historical effort of individual actors. While Luhmann remains in pure systemic immanence, Parsons insists that the question of autocatalytic and homeostatic processes is not exclusive of the question of who is the actor's first mobiliser. In this sense, homeostatic processes may be necessary if they occur, but action is necessary.

Parsons's sayings about the ultimate reference in the framework of action should be understood as the idea that the systems of higher cybernetic order in history will tend to control the social forms organized at lower levels of the cybernetic hierarchy. For Parsons, the highest levels of the cybernetic hierarchy at the general level of action correspond to the constitutive part of the cultural system (ie Latency in the AGIL scheme). However, in the interaction processes within the system, the analysis must focus especially on the cultural-expressive axis (the L-G line in AGIL). The term "constitutive" it is understood by Parsons as referring to highly codified cultural values, especially religious elements. However, the interpretation of this term throughout his work is not clear.

Cultural systems have an independent status from the normative and guiding guidelines of the social system, which is why neither of these systems is reducible to the other. For example, the question about the cultural capital of a social system as a pure historical entity (that is, in its function as a fiduciary system) is not equivalent to the greater cultural values of that system. This occurs because a metastructural logic is embodied in the cultural system that cannot be reduced to any given social system or seen as a materialist (or behavioral) deduction from the needs of the social system. In that context, culture would have an independent transitional power, not only as a factor of current socio-cultural units (such as Western civilization), but also as original cultural bases that tend to become universal through interpenetration and expansion over a large number of social systems. The second happened with Classical Greece and ancient Israel, where the original social bases disappeared, but the cultural system survived as an independent and functioning cultural pattern (which is evidenced in the cases of Greek philosophy or Christianity as a derivation). modified from its origins in Israel).

Parsons and Habermas

The difference between Parsons and Jürgen Habermas lies mainly in the way Habermas uses Parsons's theory of action to establish the basic propositions of his own. Habermas rescues Parsons's separation between the internal and external dimensions of the social system, calling the first "world of life" (I and L in AGIL) and the second "system" (A and G in AGIL). From Parsons' point of view, this model presents two problems. First, conflict within the social system can actually arise from any relational point, and not simply from the system/lifeworld dichotomy. Secondly, by relating the system/lifeworld model to a type of liberation, Habermas would raise the utopian notion that potential conflict within a social system has a final solution, generating a confused concept of the nature of the world. systemic conflict.

Books

• The system of modern societies1974.
• The social system1976.
• Intellectual Autobiography: Development of a Social System Theory1978.

Translations

• Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. (1905) Translated by Parsons in 1930. (It was his first English translation.)
• Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. (1921–22) Translated by Parsons with Alexander Morell Henderson in 1947.