179.

TALCOTT PARSONS (1902–1979)

T
alcott parsons was an American sociologist best known for the creation of
a sociological version of structural functionalism, initiated by The Structure of Social
Action (1937), a treatise regarded by informed scholars as his most important work. His
role as teacher and theorist at Harvard for forty-five years shaped mid-century sociology more
significantly than any of his peers, other than Robert K. Merton at Columbia University.
The scholarly relationship between Habermas and Parsons apparently occurred on a one-way
street, heavily traveled by the former but hardly known to the senior theorist. Nowhere in his
later writing does Parsons refer to Habermas, and the elaborate finding guide to the vast
Parsons Papers held in Harvard’s library names hundreds of correspondents, students, and
coauthors, but has no entry regarding his German expositor. Worse still, Parsons’ biographer
makes only one (negative) comment about their missed interaction: “Even as outstanding an
author as Jürgen Habermas, in Theory of Communicative Action, misinterprets Parsons’ knowl-
edge aim and overlooks his political engagement” (Gerhardt 2002, x). Habermas’s own bio-
grapher invokes Parsons’ name only infrequently: “at the annual meeting of sociologists that
commemorated Max Weber’s hundredth birthday in April 1964 in Heidelberg, he spoke
alongside the famous American sociologist Talcott Parsons in a plenary session chaired by
Horkheimer” (Müller-Doohm 2016a, 89; plus incidental references at 128 and 215).
Not surprisingly, Parsons became increasingly insular in his study of competing theories as he
aged, so by the time he formally retired from Harvard (1973) he no longer pursued the latest
theoretical voices as he had when much younger. This was at just the moment when Habermas
was turning in earnest to Parsons’ structural functionalism in the interest of creating “new”
theory by means of “historical reconstruction” – along with renewed attention to Weber,
Lukács, Adorno, Durkheim, and Mead. (Like Parsons forty years before, Habermas, too,
neglected Georg Simmel, an odd decision given his interest in the “lifeworld,” about which
Simmel wrote more expertly than had almost any of his peers.) Among Habermas’s works,
nontrivial reference to Parsons occurs in On the Logic of the Social Sciences (LSS, 78–80; 83–86;
187–89), The Theory of Communicative Action (TCA2, 199–299), and Between Facts and Norms
(BFN, 73–80, regarding law). As is usually the case when Habermas debates another theorist
over time, once he establishes his position, he sticks to it, and subsequent treatments closely
follow his first impressions.
Students of Habermas recognize that he spent his early career, especially as the junior quasi-
representative of the Frankfurt School, performing his version of Hegel’s famous Aufhebung:
consuming, digesting, and replacing previous theorists’ ideas to suit his own particular fascina-
tion with what’s been called the “linguistification” of social thought. In one of theorizing’s
minor ironies, and despite their mutual pursuit of linguistic innovation, neither Parsons nor
Habermas was ever accused of writing for easy comprehension – in fact, witty Harvard graduate
students were known to ask if learning “Parsonsese” would count toward their doctoral foreign
language requirement. So when Habermas laid his own thick prose on top of Parsons’, the

639

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSF Library, on 08 Nov 2019 at 15:14:41, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available
at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316771303.181
 640 / alan sica
challenge for readers became a triple-layered task: first, to understand what Parsons had
originally intended, itself nothing simple; second, to understand Habermas’s interpretation of
Parsons’ ideas; and third, to evaluate the advance, if any, made by Habermas’s new direction in
view of what Parsons had already accomplished over the preceding fifty years (1926 through
1976).
In order to appraise Habermas’s hundred-page disquisition on Parsons’ ideas in TCA2, one
must first examine, in however a truncated manner, some of the latter’s main theoretical
inclinations. “Eye-witness accounts” prove handy and more reliable than others that have
sprung up over many decades of evaluating Parsons’ language and thought. For example,
Daniel Bell, Parsons’ colleague at Harvard for decades, offered an explanation of his importance
for the New York Times, attempting to supplement an anemic obituary that appeared a few days
previously (Bell 1979). He explained that Parsons, “trained in both biology and economics,”
followed the classical Galilean method of scientific inquiry by searching for a general model of
social life based on “abstract properties,” rather than trying to capture empirical or historical
specificities in their concrete reality. In doing so Parsons meant to “establish a ‘morphology’ of
society, a way of studying society’s form and structure.” This morphologic picture of social
organization was based on Parsons’ belief that “all social groups” must meet “four ‘functional
requisites’ if they are to remain stable,” thus meeting “four basic needs: to achieve goals, adjust
to the environment, integrate the various parts of society and deal with deviations from accepted
standards.” Scholars of a certain age will recognize this as the famous AGIL scheme of Parsons’
functionalism, first codified in 1958, which he applied to countless empirical examples of
modern social organization. Though generous in his estimate, Bell did note: “How much of
Parsons’s architectonic system will endure is an open question,” one which Habermas tried in
part to answer.
Working from the other end of the academic hierarchy, we read this: “I recall working as
Parsons’ teaching assistant in 1960–61; I was astonished when he began a course called
‘The Theory of Action’ with a four-fold classification of the universe” (Mayhew 1982, 29).
As part of the legendary “Heritage of Sociology” series, this volume is as close to an official
rendering as one can find. Mayhew was granted sixty-six pages with which to introduce his
former teacher, and used them to cover, by means of twenty excerpts and articles, most of
Parsons’ sociological concerns. By some measures Parsons’ first book, The Structure of Social
Action (1937), has remained his most venerated and unambiguously admired, yet Habermas’s
dissection and reapplication of Parsons’ ideas considers more carefully his forays into what came
to be called, not without implied sarcasm, “grand theory,” that is, The Social System (1951),
Toward a General Theory of Action, with Edward Shils (1951), Economy and Society, with Neil
Smelser (1956), and “An Outline of a Social System” (1961).
Given the tenor of the times, Parsons followed other important sociologists in their march
toward formulating a scientistic facade more in keeping with the National Science Foundation
than the National Institute for the Humanities. This trajectory correlated well with Parsons’
early education at Amherst College, pointed out by Daniel Bell, in biology and economics.
The idea was to provide a “general model” for social action and organization that would appear
just as stringently scientific as similar work then being done in game theory, econometrics,
psychometrics, and other social “sciences.” This meant, for Parsons, the systematic removal of
any “idiographic” facts of the kind that Max Weber so brilliantly exploited, so that the
“nomothetic” patterns of social life could be more readily perceived. As sociology earlier in

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSF Library, on 08 Nov 2019 at 15:14:41, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available
at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316771303.181
 Talcott Parsons (1902–1979) / 641
the twentieth century had stridden briskly away from its origins in social work and the ministry,
under Parsons and his functionalist colleagues, history was also left out of their “models,” along
with its fellow humanistic disciplines. That this strategic epistemological move would produce
arid, other-worldly images of the societal, freed of any real “content” recognizable as such by
historians or philosophers, did not seem to concern Parsons or his admirers; in fact, it was
viewed as an “analytic” virtue.
The vocabulary Parsons foisted on his readers is vast and in some ways applied idiosyncrati-
cally, even when anchored in previous theorists’ work, after being reshaped to his own purposes.
His use of “norms” and “values” was not innovational, nor “socialization processes,” or “insti-
tutionalization.” His fascination with “media of exchange” (reminiscent of Simmel’s Philosophy of
Money [1900]; see Nichols 2001) reminded sociologists that their theoretical connection with
economics should be enhanced. The all-purpose AGIL scheme he invented looked like “science”
but was grounded in quasi-religious sentiments about the sanctity of democratic processes that
likely appealed to Habermas at a deep level. (It is not insignificant that Parsons’ father and
Habermas’s notable grandfather were both theologians.) His sometime teaching assistant recalls:
During the early 1960s, I often heard Harvard undergraduates refer to his course on
American society as “Every day in every way American society is getting better and
better.” In candor I must concede that Parsons’ lectures on American society often
seemed to present views somewhat akin to religious conviction . . . the American
emphases on striving, achievement, self-expression, and individual search for mean-
ing, perhaps even salvation – were very close to Parsons’s own “ultimate values.”
(Mayhew 1982, 55)
Decades of critique regarding Parsons’ doctrinal inability to deal with war, conflict, antagonism, and
the other obvious components of human unpleasantness reflect “Parsons’s habit of always placing
conflict and change in the context of a higher order of stability” (Mayhew 1982, 59) – a routine
reappearance of Hegel (itself odd, given Parsons’ study of Kant under Karl Jaspers in 1926).
What did Habermas believe he could borrow (and rescue?) from the Parsons architectonic,
even as younger American sociologists, as he knew, were busy “de-Parsonizing” social theories
(Cohen, Hazelrigg, and Pope 1975) and the classical tradition on which they were built? He
claims that “no theory of society can be taken seriously today [c. 1979] if it does not at least
situate itself with respect to Parsons” (TCA2, 199). After laying out his second set of
Zwischenbetrachtungen (“System and Lifeworld,” 113–97), he observes: “The main reason for
occupying ourselves with Parsons, in both an instructive and a critical vein, has to do with the
theme of our second set of intermediate reflections” (TCA2, 200). As is by now widely known,
Habermas felt that a pathological disconnect had occurred between systemic requirements of
modern social systems and the internally experienced lifeworld of its woe-begone participants.
Whether he “needed” Parsons to bring this to awareness is an interesting question and parallels
Parsons’ own self-proclaimed “need” to include in his first book studious evaluations of Vilfredo
Pareto and, even less orthodox, of Alfred Marshall, sections which have never registered as
important, while his treatments of Durkheim and Weber became canonical soon after they
appeared, eighty years ago.
Habermas goes on: “My point of departure, then, is that the problem for theory construction
of how to combine the basic concepts of systems and action theory is a genuine one.
My provisional formula, to the effect that societies be conceived as systematically stabilized

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSF Library, on 08 Nov 2019 at 15:14:41, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available
at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316771303.181
 642 / alan sica
complexes of action of socially integrated groups, already includes these two aspects” (TCA2,
201). Habermas here, and elsewhere in the book, speaks the very Parsonsese that intimidated
Harvard’s graduate sociology students. Yet being the synthesizing descendant of Frankfurt
School theorists, and also much more politically alert than Parsons allowed himself to become
during the 1960s and 1970s, Habermas integrates as best he can additional realizations taken
from nonorthodox Marxism, Luhmann’s systems theory (itself a byproduct of Parsons’ teach-
ing), the perennially unavoidable Weber, a happy infusion of George Herbert Mead (wholly
ignored by Parsons), plus everything he learned from linguistic and analytic philosophy, which
he chides Parsons for ignoring.
There are more than a few passages which Parsons could just as easily have written in the
1950s, for example: “Under the functional aspect of mutual understanding, communication
serves to transmit and renew cultural knowledge; under the aspect of coordinating action, it serves
social integration and the establishment of solidarity; finally, under the aspect of socialization,
communicative action serves the formation of personal identities” (TCA2, 137). This rhetoric,
these conceptual distinctions, mimic very closely Parsons’ work between 1950 and the early
1970s. Habermas concludes: “Corresponding to these processes of cultural reproduction, social
integration, and socialization are the structural components of the lifeworld: culture, society,
person” (TCA2, 138). It could be argued by students of modern social theory that Habermas’s
expedition into the Parsonsian forest of theorizing served as much to rediscover what was in part
already known about basic sociological processes as to advance his own special interest in the
pragmatic utility of “communicative action.” In any case, cross-pollination has occurred and
benefitted both camps.
Alan Sica

see also:
Functionalist Reason
Lifeworld and System
Modernity and Modernization
Social Evolution
Émile Durkheim
Niklas Luhmann
Max Weber

suggested reading
Gerhardt, Uta. 2002. Talcott Parsons: An Intellectual Biography. Cambridge University Press.
Ingram, David. 1989. Habermas and the Dialectic of Reason. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Parsons, Talcott. 1951. The Social System. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
1968. The Structure of Social Action. New York: Free Press.

Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UCSF Library, on 08 Nov 2019 at 15:14:41, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available
at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316771303.181