塔尔科特·帕森斯
社会之所以凝聚在一起，是因为人们共享价值，而每一个社会系统要生存下去，都必须解决同样的基本任务。
定位
哈佛的社会学家，其理论在1950年代主导了美国社会学：他把韦伯、涂尔干和弗洛伊德融合为一种行动和社会系统的一般理论——并成为下一代人的主要靶子。
核心思想
- 唯意志论的行动理论
- 结构功能主义
- AGIL 图式
- 社会秩序问题
影响
受影响于 6
托马斯·霍布斯
受其影响
Parsons made the ‘Hobbesian problem of order’, why society does not dissolve into a war of all against all, the starting point of his action theory (1937). T. Parsons, The Structure of Social Action (1937); T. Hobbes, Leviathan (1651); SEP “Thomas Hobbes”
依据: AI 草稿
托马斯·霍布斯 › 1588–1679
维尔弗雷多·帕累托
受其影响
Parsons devoted part of The Structure of Social Action (1937) to Pareto, reading his theory of non-logical action and residues as converging on a voluntaristic theory of action. T. Parsons, The Structure of Social Action (1937), part II; V. Pareto, Trattato di sociologia generale (1916)
依据: AI 草稿
维尔弗雷多·帕累托 › 1848–1923
西格蒙德·弗洛伊德
受其影响
Parsons used Freud’s superego to explain how cultural values are internalised in socialisation, linking personality to the social system (‘The Superego and the Theory of Social Systems’, 1952). T. Parsons, “The Superego and the Theory of Social Systems”, Psychiatry 15 (1952), in Social Structure and Personality (1964)
依据: AI 草稿
西格蒙德·弗洛伊德 › 1856–1939
埃米尔·涂尔干
受其影响
Parsons read Durkheim as moving from positivism to a voluntaristic theory of action in which internalised shared norms constitute social order (The Structure of Social Action, 1937). T. Parsons, The Structure of Social Action (1937), part II; H. Joas and W. Knöbl, Sozialtheorie (2004)
依据: AI 草稿
埃米尔·涂尔干 › 1858–1917
马克斯·韦伯
受其影响
Parsons translated The Protestant Ethic (1930) and made Weber, with Durkheim, Pareto and Marshall, a source of his voluntaristic theory of action (The Structure of Social Action, 1937). M. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. T. Parsons (1930); T. Parsons, The Structure of Social Action (1937); SEP “Max Weber”
依据: AI 草稿
马克斯·韦伯 › 1864–1920
布罗尼斯拉夫·马林诺夫斯基
受其影响 ✓
Parsons heard Malinowski at the LSE (1924–25) and later read his functionalism as a step towards social systems theory (‘Malinowski and the Theory of Social Systems’, 1957). T. Parsons, “Malinowski and the Theory of Social Systems”, in R. Firth (ed.), Man and Culture (1957)
依据: 亦见于 Wikidata · Wikidata
布罗尼斯拉夫·马林诺夫斯基 › 1884–1942
影响了 5
罗伯特·K. 默顿 教过
教过
Merton took Parsons’s first courses in sociological theory as a graduate student at Harvard in the early 1930s; his dissertation on science in seventeenth-century England (1938) was supervised by Pitirim Sorokin and guided by the historian of science George Sarton. R. K. Merton, “Remembering the Young Talcott Parsons”, The American Sociologist 15 (1980)
依据: AI 草稿
罗伯特·K. 默顿 › 1910–2003
哈罗德·加芬克尔 教过
教过 ✓
Garfinkel took his PhD at Harvard in 1952 under Parsons with The Perception of the Other: A Study in Social Order; ethnomethodology grew out of his questions to Parsons’s theory of action. H. Garfinkel, The Perception of the Other (diss. Harvard 1952); J. Heritage, Garfinkel and Ethnomethodology (1984)
依据: 亦见于 Wikidata · Wikidata
哈罗德·加芬克尔 › 1917–2011
克利福德·格尔茨
影响了 ✓
Trained in Harvard’s Department of Social Relations, Geertz used Parsons’s distinction between cultural and social system to explain a failed Javanese funeral (‘Ritual and Social Change’, 1957). C. Geertz, “Ritual and Social Change: A Javanese Example”, American Anthropologist 59 (1957), in The Interpretation of Cultures (1973); “Passage and Accident” (2000)
依据: 亦见于 Wikidata · Wikidata
克利福德·格尔茨 › 1926–2006
尼克拉斯·卢曼 教过
教过
Luhmann, then an administrative official, spent 1960–61 at Harvard on a scholarship and attended Parsons’s seminars; a one-year stay. He took his doctorate and Habilitation later, both in Münster in 1966. N. Luhmann, Archimedes und wir. Interviews (1987)
依据: AI 草稿
尼克拉斯·卢曼 › 1927–1998
尤尔根·哈贝马斯
影响了 ✓
Habermas took over Parsons’s account of money and power as steering media to conceive economy and state as systems, distinct from the lifeworld (Theory of Communicative Action, 1981). J. Habermas, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (1981), vol. II, “Talcott Parsons: Konstruktionsprobleme der Gesellschaftstheorie”; T. Parsons, “On the Concept of Political Power” (1963)
依据: 亦见于 Wikidata · Wikidata
尤尔根·哈贝马斯 › 1929–2026
批评
受批评于 4
赫伯特·布鲁默
受其批评
Blumer objected that Parsons and the functionalists treat actors as passive media of social forces, neglecting how people interpret their situations (Symbolic Interactionism, 1969). H. Blumer, Symbolic Interactionism: Perspective and Method (1969), ch. 1; N. J. Smelser, “Remembering Herbert Blumer”
依据: AI 草稿
赫伯特·布鲁默 › 1900–1987
C. 赖特·米尔斯
受其批评
In The Sociological Imagination (1959) Mills attacked Parsons’s ‘grand theory’, translating passages of The Social System into a few plain sentences and faulting its neglect of power. C. W. Mills, The Sociological Imagination (1959), ch. 2
依据: AI 草稿
C. 赖特·米尔斯 › 1916–1962
安东尼·吉登斯
受其批评
Giddens objected that Parsons’s normative functionalism turns actors into ‘cultural dopes’ and attributes needs to social systems, countering with structuration theory (New Rules of Sociological Method, 1976). A. Giddens, New Rules of Sociological Method (1976); Central Problems in Social Theory (1979)
依据: AI 草稿
安东尼·吉登斯 › 1938年生
雷温·康奈尔
受其批评
Connell rejected the sex-role theory Parsons built on instrumental and expressive family roles, arguing that it naturalises gender and leaves power and change unexplained (Gender and Power, 1987). R. W. Connell, Gender and Power (1987), ch. 3; T. Parsons & R. F. Bales, Family, Socialization and Interaction Process (1955)
依据: AI 草稿
雷温·康奈尔 › 1944年生
批评了 1
赫伯特·斯宾塞
批评了
Parsons opened The Structure of Social Action (1937) with Brinton’s question ‘Who now reads Spencer?’, declaring Spencer’s positivist, utilitarian evolutionism dead. T. Parsons, The Structure of Social Action (1937), ch. 1; C. Brinton, English Political Thought in the Nineteenth Century (1933)
依据: AI 草稿
赫伯特·斯宾塞 › 1820–1903
作品
立场
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.
生平与背景
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.
其他主要作品
- 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)
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