Producing Parsons' reputation: Early critiques of Talcott Parsons' social theory and the making of a caricature

Abstract

This article examines the critical responses to Talcott Parsons' first major work, The Structure of Social Action (1937), and his two subsequent books, Toward a General Theory of Action and The Social System (both 1951). Because Parsons' work was the subject of such virulent debate, we cannot fully understand Parsons' impact on the discipline of sociology without understanding the source and nature of those early criticisms. I trace the responses to Parsons, first through book reviews and private letters and then in the more substantial statements of C. Wright Mills, George Homans, and Alvin Gouldner, from the largely positive but superficial reception of Structure to the polemics that followed Parsons' 1951 works. In the late 1930s and 1940s, Parsons' reputation grew steadily but there remained no careful reception of Structure, fostering resentment toward Parsons in some quarters while precluding a sophisticated understanding of his work. After 1951, a few critics capitalized on that tension, writing sweeping rejections of Parsons' work that spoke to a much broader audience of sociologists. That dynamic, coupled with Parsons' own indifference toward his harshest critics, produced a situation in which many sociologists simply chose not to read Parsons in the 1950s and 1960s, reinforcing a caricature and distorting perceptions of Parsons' place in mid-twentieth-century American sociology.

“The Status of the Classics: A View from Today” (comment on Donald Levine, “The Variable Status of the Classics in Differing Narratives of the Sociological Tradition”)

“…There have been many recent, narrowly focused publications that attempt to explain the particular status of some classical author or authors. These likewise fit under Levine’s rubric of contextualism: Baehr (2013a) on Aron, Bortolini (2012) on Bellah, Camic (1992) on Parsons, Da Silva (2006; Da Silva and Vieira, 2011) on Mead, Nichols (2010) on Merton, Owens (2010) on Parsons, Parker (1997) on Weber and Durkheim). While their specific emphases and conclusions vary widely, collectively, they demonstrate that research into the status of the classics is alive and well as a branch of the sociology of knowledge.…”

Introduction: The Social Sciences in a Cross‐Disciplinary Age

“…Having one foot in the social sciences and another in the natural sciences, psychology was especially permeable to the latter's influences, but other disciplines, including sociology, political science, and economics, were similarly affected. Clearly, the emulation of natural‐science methods played a dominant role in the construction of postwar social scientific knowledge as illustrated by a number of articles recently published in JHBS (Selcer, ; Nichols, ; Owens, ; Martin‐Nielsen, ; Gunnel, ).…”

“…Economics and Neighboring Disciplines since 1945, and A Historiography of the Modern Social Sciences (2014), all coedited with Roger Backhouse. Correspondence concerning this article should be sent to Philippe Fontaine, Département d'économie et de gestion,École normale supérieure de Cachan,61,avenue du Président Wilson,94235 Cachan Cedex,France; natural-science methods played a dominant role in the construction of postwar social scientific knowledge as illustrated by a number of articles recently published in JHBS (Selcer, 2009;Nichols, 2010;Owens, 2010;Martin-Nielsen, 2011;Gunnel, 2013).…”

“…If some essays published in this journal point to the necessity of writing the history of the social sciences with paying heed to the natural sciences, an even more significant number of them have emphasized the cross-disciplinary nature of social scientific knowledge in the postwar era. Whether authors consider leading social scientists, such as Robert K. Merton (Nichols, 2010), Talcott Parsons (Owens, 2010), and David Easton (Gunnel, 2013); influential works, such as William F. Whyte's sociological classic Street Corner Society (Andersson, 2014); committees, such as the University of Chicago's Committee on Education, Training, and Research in Race Relations (Gordon, 2010); think tanks, such as the RAND Corporation and the Cowles Commission (Van Horn & Klaes, 2011) and the Simulmatics Corporation (Rohde, 2011); international organizations, such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO; Selcer, 2009); educational models, such as the researchbased model of business education (Bottom, 2009); research movements, such as measurement of decision making (Heukelom, 2010), the projective test movement (Lemov, 2011), the peace research movement (Tomás Rangil, 2012), and behavioralism in political science (Hauptmann, 2012); or disciplines and fields, such as psychoanalysis (Gitre, 2010), linguistics (Martin-Nielsen, 2011, International Relations (Guilhot, 2011), and British sociology (Steinmetz, 2014), their narratives point invariably to the historical significance of cross-disciplinary engagements. 1 Here, too, natural scientists occasionally played a role.…”

Introduction: The human sciences and Cold War America

“…By 2009, the increasingly wide scope of research on the behavioral science nexus was apparent in articles covering animal psychology, the role of behavioral science in foundation‐sponsored business education, and UNESCO's attempts to act as patron and unifying agent in the broad field of the social sciences after World War II (Vicedo, 2009; Bottom, 2009; Selcer, 2009). Last year, JHBS published four articles on aspects of American social science in the Cold War era, and a further two with direct bearing on postwar developments (Gordon, 2010; Nichols, 2010; Owens, 2010; Heukelom, 2010; Gitre, 2010; Stark, 2010).…”