On talcott parsons'The Social System

Abstract

At times, as I read this book, I am tempted to regard it as the greatest theoretical work since Weber. Generally, however, my assessment is that it falls well short of that standard. In many ways, Parsons does in The Social System what C. Wright Mills and I intended in our chapter on institutions in Character and Social Struc ture, to elaborate a general view of institutions and social structures and how they are related to persons.1 He does so mainly by constructing ty pologies that echo the analytical features of T?ennies's distinction between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, further subdividing each into "diffuseness vs. specificity," "status vs. contract," "particularistic vs. universalist," and so forth. By cross tabulating these categories, Parsons finds all sorts of big ger and better typological opportunities. At a theoretical level, this is all well and good and even somewhat im pressive as a display of conceptual virtuosity. When Parsons risks touching upon empirical reality, however, his points are frequently unconvincing and even mistaken, and his arguments take on an unreal quality. For example, in Parsons' view of the world, unearned income does not exist; rentier income from land disappears into his murky conception of a "reward structure"; and Marx's industrial reserve army as well as the issues, so prominent in the 1930s, of "technological unemployment" and the "dole" (another form of unearned income) also vanish in favor of a simple and naive "liberal theory model" through which the Chamber of Commerce's normative image of capi talism is transformed into a Parsonian ideal type. Or consider Parsons's dis missal of group prejudice, scapegoating, and class conflicts as mere symptoms of "strain" produced by technological change?and therefore "not to be ac cepted literally without discount"2?rather than as the result of inherent con flicts of interest. Such a perspective can tell us little about, say, the race riots