Talcott Parsons

Dzieła

• 1937Struktura działania społecznego

  Odczytuje Marshalla, Pareta, Durkheima i Webera jako zbiegających się w jednej „woluntarystycznej” teorii działania: aktorzy wybierają swoje cele, ale w obrębie wspólnych norm.

• 1951System społeczny

  Funkcjonalizm strukturalny w pełnym wydaniu: jak system społeczny utrzymuje porządek dzięki wspólnym wartościom, rolom i socjalizacji – główny cel krytyków „wielkiej teorii”.

Stanowisko

The Structure of Social Action (1937) read Alfred Marshall, Vilfredo Pareto, Durkheim and Weber as converging on a single “voluntaristic” theory of action: people pursue ends, but choose their goals and means within norms and values they share. This, Parsons argued, answers the “Hobbesian problem of order” – why society does not collapse into a war of all against all. From The Social System (1951) on he built a vast conceptual architecture. Every action system must fulfil four functions – adaptation, goal attainment, integration and latent pattern maintenance (the AGIL scheme) – which in society are served by the economy, the polity, the “societal community” of law and norms, and the institutions of family, education and culture. “Pattern variables” describe the choices between traditional and modern orientations. With Freud he explained how values are internalised in socialisation, and his concept of the “sick role” helped found medical sociology. From the late 1950s critics such as C. Wright Mills, Ralf Dahrendorf and Alvin Gouldner charged that his structural functionalism was abstract, conservative and blind to conflict and power. Yet his systems thinking lived on, transformed, in Niklas Luhmann and Jürgen Habermas.

Życie i kontekst

Talcott Parsons was born in 1902 in Colorado Springs, the son of a Congregationalist minister who later became a college president. He studied biology and then economics at Amherst College, spent 1924–25 at the London School of Economics, where he heard the anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski, and then went to Heidelberg, where he took his doctorate with a thesis on the concept of capitalism in Werner Sombart and Max Weber. In 1930 he published the first English translation of Weber’s Protestant Ethic. He taught at Harvard from 1927 until 1973 and in 1946 founded its interdisciplinary Department of Social Relations. For two decades he was the leading figure of American sociology. He died in Munich in 1979, during a visit to Germany that had taken him back to Heidelberg.

Dalsze główne dzieła

• The Structure of Social Action (1937)
• The Social System (1951)
• Toward a General Theory of Action (with Edward Shils and others, 1951)
• Societies: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives (1966)
• The System of Modern Societies (1971)