The Structure of Social Action

Introduction

Talcott Parsons, a young Harvard instructor who had taken his doctorate in Heidelberg and translated Weber’s Protestant Ethic (1930), published this first book in 1937. It starts from Hobbes’s problem of order – how is a stable society possible if individuals pursue their own interests? – and argues that four different thinkers, the economists Alfred Marshall and Vilfredo Pareto, Durkheim and Weber, had independently moved away from utilitarian and positivist theories towards a shared “voluntaristic” theory of action. Its basic unit is the “unit act”: an actor, an end, a situation of means and conditions, and norms that guide choice. The book helped establish Durkheim and Weber as classics in America, though critics argued that it fitted them to Parsons’s own theory.

Connections

Builds on

• The Rules of Sociological Method1895 · Émile Durkheim
• The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism1905 · Max Weber

Taken up in

• The Social System1951 · Talcott Parsons

More works by Talcott Parsons

• 1951The Social System