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 THE ROUTLEDGE INTERNATIONAL
HANDBOOK OF TALCOTT PARSONS
STUDIES

Talcott Parsons was the leading theorist in American sociology—and perhaps in world soci-
ology—from the 1940s to the 1970s. He created the dominant school of thought that made
“Parsonian” a standard description of a theoretical attempt to unify social science, as reflected in
the fact that his contributions to the discipline cover a range of issues, including medicine, the
family, religion, law, the economy, race relations, and politics—to name but a few. This volume
brings together leading scholars working in the field of “Parsonian Studies” to explore the back-
ground of Parsons’s work, the content of his oeuvre, and his subsequent influence. Thematically
organized, it covers Parsons’s contributions and impacts in areas including the philosophy and
methodology of the social sciences; cultural sociology; personality, mental illness, and psycho-
analysis; and economics and political and economic sociology. In addition, it considers his
influence in different areas of the world and on particular students, and offers insights into the
Parsonian tradition’s practical application to contemporary social issues. An authoritative, com-
prehensive, and in-depth critical assessment of the Parsonian legacy, The Routledge International
Handbook of Talcott Parsons Studies will appeal to scholars across the social sciences and in sociology
and social theory in particular, with interests in the history of sociology and the enduring rele-
vance of Talcott Parsons.

A. Javier Treviño is Professor of Sociology at Wheaton College, Norton, Massachusetts, U.S.A.

He is the author of The Social Thought of C.Wright Mills; C.Wright Mills and the Cuban Revolution:
An Exercise in the Art of Sociological Imagination; and The Emerald Guide to C.Wright Mills. He is the
editor of Talcott Parsons on Law and the Legal System; Talcott Parsons Today: His Theory and Legacy in
Contemporary Sociology; and The Anthem Companion to Talcott Parsons.

Helmut Staubmann is Professor of Social Theory and Cultural Sociology at the University of
Innsbruck, Austria. He is the editor of The Rolling Stones: Sociological Perspectives and Action Theory:
Methodological Studies, and the co-editor of Rationality in the Social Sciences:The Schumpeter-Parsons
Seminar 1939-40 and Current Perspectives (with Victor Lidz) and Georg Simmel: Rembrandt: An
Essay in the Philosophy of Art (with Alan Scott).
 THE ROUTLEDGE
INTERNATIONAL HANDBOOK
OF TALCOTT PARSONS
STUDIES

Edited by
A. Javier Treviño and Helmut Staubmann
 First published 2022
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2022 selection and editorial matter, A. Javier Treviño and Helmut Staubmann;
individual chapters, the contributors
The right of A. Javier Treviño and Helmut Staubmann to be identified as the authors of the editorial material,
and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections
77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any
electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and
recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks,
and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Treviño, A. Javier, 1958- editor. | Staubmann, Helmut, editor.
Title: The Routledge international handbook of Talcott Parsons studies /
edited by A. Javier Treviño and Helmut Staubmann.
Description: 1 Edition. | New York, NY : Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group,
2022. | Series: Routledge international handbooks | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021024190 (print) | LCCN 2021024191 (ebook) | ISBN
9780367336677 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032118734 (paperback) | ISBN
9780429321139 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Parsons, Talcott, 1902-1979. | Sociologists--United
States--Biography. | Parsons, Talcott, 1902-1979.--Criticism and
interpretation. | Sociology--United States--History--20th century.
Classification: LCC HM479.P38 R67 2022 (print) | LCC HM479.P38 (ebook) |
DDC 301.092 [B]--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021024190
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021024191

ISBN: 9780367336677 (hbk)

ISBN: 9781032118734 (pbk)
ISBN: 9780429321139 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9780429321139
Typeset in Bembo
by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.
 CONTENTS

List of contributors viii

1 Introduction: The scope and significance of Talcott Parsons studies 1

A. Javier Treviño and Helmut Staubmann

PART I
Methodology and philosophy of the social sciences 17
Helmut Staubmann

2 Backstage with the Parsons Circle: Charisma, dialogue, and dissent in

the formation of a theory school 19
Lawrence T. Nichols

3 Interpreting and critiquing Talcott Parsons’s human condition paradigm 30

Victor M. Lidz and Harold J. Bershady

4 The theory of action and the analysis of culture 48

Victor M. Lidz

5 The “cognitive complex” and globalization: Conclusions for

the future of higher education and research 69
Helmut Staubmann and Victor M. Lidz

6 Parsons/Habermas, scientific sociology/critical theory, and a

natural law theory of morality 80
Mark Gould

v
 Contents

7 The analytical realism of Talcott Parsons: A sketch of the theorist

as essay writer 94
Bruce C.Wearne

PART II
Illness, personality, and psychoanalysis 109
A. Javier Treviño

8 Double deviance: The case of drug offenders 111

Günter Stummvoll

9 Toward a codification of Parsons’s theory of psychopathology 121

A. Javier Treviño

10 Durkheim and Freud: Parsons and the dialogue between sociology

and psychoanalysis 133
Raquel Weiss and Luciano Assis Mattuella

11 The sociological reception of psychoanalysis in Parsons’s

“The superego and the theory of social systems” 145
Katharina Hechl

PART III
Economics and politics 155
A. Javier Treviño

12 Parsons and sociological economics 157

Milan Zafirovski

13 Parsons, the symbolic media, and Weber’s view of power and stratification 168
John Scott

14 Norms, interests, and desirable futures: Exploring contemporary political

upheavals through the voluntaristic theory of action 183
Bettina Mahlert

15 Parsons on the international system and global society 196

Gert Verschraegen

16 The problem of “race” in Talcott Parsons’s account of the

citizenship complex 206
John Holmwood

17 Parsons and the “problem” of ethnicity and race in modern society 218
Giuseppe Sciortino

vi
 Contents

PART IV
Parsons and his students 235
Helmut Staubmann

18 A revolutionary science and its carriers: On Talcott Parsons,

Robert N. Bellah, and teacher–pupil chains in scholarly fields 237
Matteo Bortolini

19 Talcott Parsons and Harold Garfinkel: The development of

culture as interaction 249
Jason Turowetz and Anne Warfield Rawls

20 Talcott Parsons and Clifford Geertz: Modernization, functionalism,

and interpretive social science 261
Andrea Cossu

21 Niklas Luhmann and Talcott Parsons 271

Raf Vanderstraeten

22 Talcott Parsons and Robert K. Merton: A bibliometric assessment

of their intellectual impact 281
Philipp Korom

PART V
Parsons’s influence in various countries and world regions 293
Helmut Staubmann

23 Talcott Parsons and the tradition of Max Weber: Influence

on German-speaking sociology 295
Helmut Staubmann and Victor M. Lidz

24 Evolutionary universals in Czechoslovak society: Talcott Parsons, the

Prague Spring, and structures of interest 308
Jan Balon

25 Talcott Parsons in Brazil 322

Hugo Neri and Veridiana Domingos Cordeiro

26 Talcott Parsons and Italian sociology: A complex and (perhaps)

surprising story 329
Andrea Cossu and Matteo Bortolini

Index 342

vii
 LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Jan Balon is the head of the Department of Science and Technology Studies of the Czech
Academy of Sciences. He is co-author, with Marek Skovajsa, of History of Sociology in the Czech
Republic (Palgrave, 2017). His research interests are in social theory and the institutional history
of sociology. He is currently working with John Holmwood on a project which seeks to pick up
on sociological legacies in relation to the topic of domination.

Harold J. Bershady is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Sociology at the University of

Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. He collaborated and published with Talcott Parsons on the human
condition paradigm. He authored Ideology and Social Knowledge (1973; new edition 2014) and is
co-editor of After Parsons: A Theory of Social Action for the Twenty-First Century.

Matteo Bortolini teaches sociology at the University of Padova, Italy. His research interests are
in the sociology of ideas and intellectuals, the history of the social sciences, and cultural soci-
ology. Among his recent publications are Italian Sociology 1945-2010 (Palgrave, 2017, with Andrea
Cossu) and The Anthem Companion to Robert N. Bellah (ed., Anthem, 2019). His biography of
Robert N. Bellah will be published by Princeton University Press in 2021.

Veridiana Domingos Cordeiro holds a B.A., M.S., and Ph.D. in Sociology from the University
of São Paulo. Her research interests focus on Social Theory, Sociology of Memory, Sociology of
Mind, and Sociology of Understanding. She is affiliated with the University of São Paulo and the
University of Chicago. She is co-author of Sociology in Brazil: A Brief Institutional and Intellectual
History (Palgrave McMillan, 2019).

Andrea Cossu is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Trento. His research
interests are in the areas of sociological theory, memory studies, and cultural sociology. He is the
author of Italian Sociology 1945-2010 (Palgrave, 2017, with Matteo Bortolini) and of a series of
recent publications on Clifford Geertz and the rise of interpretive social science.

Mark Gould is Professor and former Chair of the Sociology Department at Haverford College.
He received a Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard University with a dissertation on Revolution in
the Development of Capitalism: The Coming of the English Revolution published 1987 with
University of California Press. He was teaching and research assistant to Talcott Parsons.

viii
 List of contributors

Katharina Hechl holds a master degree in social and political theory from the University of
Innsbruck and is currently pursuing her master’s degree in European and International Politics.
Her research interests include social theory, psychoanalysis, sociology of music, political parties,
and electoral studies.

John Holmwood is Professor Emeritus in the School of Sociology and Social Policy at the
University of Nottingham and Senior Researcher in the Centre for Science Technology and
Society Studies at the Institute for Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Science. His research
focuses on sociological theory and public sociology. He was an expert witness for the defense in
professional misconduct cases brought against teachers accused of a “plot to Islamize schools in
Birmingham.”The cases collapsed in 2017. He is co-author (with Therese O’Toole) of Countering
Extremism in British Schools? The Case of the Birmingham Trojan Horse Affair (Policy Press, 2018).

Philipp Korom is Principal Investigator in two research projects financed by the Austrian
Science Fund (FWF) and worked previously as a Senior Researcher at the Max Planck Institute
for the Study of Societies at Cologne. His research focuses on elites, intellectuals, and wealth
inequality. He is currently finishing a book entitled Sociology and its Prestige Elite: On Eminence in
a Disintegrated Discipline.

Victor M. Lidz is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Psychiatry of the Drexel University
College of Medicine. He earned is A.B. and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University, where he
studied with Talcott Parsons and Robert N. Bellah. He served as Parsons’s research assistant
for five years, published with him, and later taught with him at the University of Chicago and
University of Pennsylvania. Most of his publications have concerned the theory of social action
developed by Talcott Parsons. For several years, he has collaborated with Helmut Staubmann in
preparing previously unpublished works by Parsons for publication.

Bettina Mahlert is Professor for General Sociology and Sociological Theory at the University
of Innsbruck. Presently she is interested in which modes of thought enable or inhibit actors from
perceiving those aspects of reality that are relevant to them. In recent publications, Bettina has
explored this question with regard to specific actors, including authors and readers of sociological
textbooks as well as policy analysts in the field of development.

Luciano Assis Mattuella holds a B.A. in Psychology (Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do
Sul), an M.S. and a Ph.D. in Philosophy (Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul)
and is a clinical psychoanalyst in Porto Alegre (Brazil). His research focuses on the cultural back-
ground of clinical diagnostics and the concepts of “normal” and “pathological” in psychoanalysis,
psychology and psychiatry. He is author of Os futuros dos passado [“The futures of the past”] (Editora
Phi, 2017) and O corpo do analista [“The body of the psychoanalyst”] (Editora Artes & Ecos, 2020).

Hugo Neri holds an M.S. in Sociology and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of São
Paulo. He works at the Center for the Artificial Intelligence, University of São Paulo. His research
interests focus on common sense, risk perception, social theory, epistemology, and philosophy. He
is co-author of Sociology in Brazil: A Brief Institutional and Intellectual History (Palgrave McMillan,
2019) and The Formation of Risk Perception of Artificial Intelligence (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020).

Lawrence T. Nichols is a Professor of Sociology (retired) and former chair of the Department
of Sociology and Anthropology at West Virginia University. His publications include articles on

ix
 List of contributors

criminology, social problems theory and the history of sociology, along with co-authored books
on alternate dispute resolution and corporate social responsibility, and an edited volume on
public sociology. Dr. Nichols also edits The American Sociologist.

Anne Warfield Rawls is Professor of Sociology at Bentley University (U.S.A.) and Research
Professor at Siegen University, Germany. Research focuses on theories of constitutive prac-
tice in classical and contemporary social theory with particular application to issues of social
justice, race, and racism. Publications include Durkheim’s Epistemology (Cambridge, 2009), editor
of Garfinkel’s Parsons Primer, and co-author with Jason Turowetz of “‘Discovering Culture’ in
Interaction: Solving Problems in Cultural Sociology by Recovering the Interactional Side of
Parsons’ Conception of Culture” (American Journal of Cultural Sociology).

Giuseppe Sciortino teaches sociology at the Università di Trento. His research interests are in
social theory, cultural sociology, and international migration. He has recently edited The Cultural
Trauma of Decolonization (Palgrave, 2019, with Ron Eyerman) and Populism in the Civil Sphere
(Polity, 2020, with Jeffrey C. Alexander and Peter Kivisto).

John Scott CBE FBA is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Plymouth, U.K.,
and visiting professor at the Universities of Essex and Exeter. He works in social theory, social
stratification and power, and social network analysis. His most recent publications include The
Emerald Guide to Talcott Parsons (Emerald, 2020), British Sociology: A History (Palgrave, 2020), The
Emerald Guide to Max Weber (Emerald, 2019), and British Social Theory: Recovering Lost Traditions
before 1950 (Sage, 2018).

Helmut Staubmann is Professor for Social Theory and Cultural Sociology at the University
of Innsbruck. His research focuses on aesthetics and foundational issues of sociological theory.
He edited Georg Simmel’s Rembrandt (Routledge, 2005) with Alan Scott and Rationality in the
Social Sciences. The Schumpeter-Parsons Seminar 1939-40 and Current Perspectives (Springer, 2018)
with Victor M. Lidz.

Günter Stummvoll D.Phil. teaches social theory and methodology at the Department of
Sociology at the University of Vienna, Austria, and he works as a researcher at the European
Centre for Social Welfare Policy and Research in Vienna. His research interests focus on devi-
ance and institutions of social control, the relationship between health care systems and criminal
justice systems, and between social work and policing. With Bruce C. Wearne, he published the
translation of Talcott Parsons’ D.Phil dissertation (1927) in a bi-lingual edition in German and
English (LIT Verlag, 2018).

A. Javier Treviño is Professor of Sociology at Wheaton College (Massachusetts, U.S.A.). He has

edited several books on Parsons and his work, including Talcott Parsons: His Theory and Legacy in
Contemporary Sociology (Rowman and Littlefield, 2001), Talcott Parsons on Law and the Legal System
(Cambridge Scholars, 2008), and The Anthem Companion to Talcott Parsons (Anthem, 2016).

Jason Turowetz is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Siegen. He received his Ph.D. from
the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2016 in sociology with a focus on ethnomethodology
and conversation analysis. He has published in American Journal of Cultural Sociology and the Journal
of Classical Sociology, among others.

x
 List of contributors

Raf Vanderstraeten is Professor and Director of the Center for Social Theory at Ghent
University. He is also Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
A main focus in his recent research is the history of science, and of sociology in particular. He
published Sociology in Belgium:A Sociological History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) with Kaat Louckx.

Gert Verschraegen is Professor of Sociology at the University of Antwerp. His research interests
are in social theory, cultural sociology, the sociology of science, and the sociology of European
integration. His most recent books include Divercities: Dealing with Diversity in Deprived and Mixed
Neighbourhoods (Policy Press, 2018, edited with Stijn Oosterlynck) and Imagined Futures in Science,
Technology and Society (Routledge, 2017, edited with Frédéric Vandermoere, Luc Braeckmans, and
Barbara Segaert).

Bruce C. Wearne, an independent researcher, is a commentator on the writings of Talcott

Parsons. With Günter Stummvoll, he has edited a bi-lingual edition of the German text of
Parsons’s 1929 D.Phil degree from Heidelberg. As an editorial board member of The American
Sociologist and The Journal of Sociology and Christianity, he also advises a community development
project in Cambodia and is an occasional ghost-writer for a disability rights advocate.

Raquel Weiss is Professor in the Department of Sociology of Universidade Federal do Rio

Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Brazil, where she teaches sociological theory and sociology of morality
and currently researches the relationship between sociology and psychoanalysis. She directs the
Brazilian Center for Durkheimian Studies and coordinates the Research Committee of socio-
logical theory of Brazilian Association of Sociology. Together with Rafael Faraco Benthien edits
the collection Bibiloteca Durkheimiana (EDUSP), a series of books dedicated to critical and bilin-
gual editions of papers from Durkheimian School. She also translated into Portuguese several
books in sociological theory, amongst them Parsons’ The Structure of Social Action (Vozes, 2010).

Milan Zafirovski is Professor in the Department of Sociology at University of North Texas,

U.S.A. His research interests are interdisciplinary encompassing sociology and economics and
focusing on economic sociology and sociological economics. He is the editor of A Modern Guide
to Economic Sociology (to be published in 2021) and International Handbook of Economic Sociology (to
be published in 2022).

xi
 1
INTRODUCTION
The scope and significance of Talcott
Parsons studies

A. Javier Treviño and Helmut Staubmann

Based on the scope, significance, and global impact of his work, Talcott Parsons is doubtless one
of the most important and influential social thinkers of all time. By the mid-twentieth century,
he had become the most celebrated academic sociologist of any nationality. It was only toward
the end of the 1960s that his theoretical work began to be eclipsed by more politically charged
conceptual orientations. Parsons’s standing in American sociology, and indeed in world sociology,
cannot be overstated.
Beginning with his first major book, The Structure of Social Action, Parsons played a crucial
role in maintaining and promoting a commitment to the classic tradition in sociological theory
(Parsons 1937). Then in Toward a General Theory of Action (1951a), he advanced a grand theoret-
ical program for all forms of human action. In his final intellectual statement, Action Theory and
the Human Condition (Parsons 1978), he expanded the action frame of reference to include the
human condition, where he focused the sociological perspective on the experientially mean-
ingful problems of suffering, death, health, and disease.
When Talcott Parsons died in 1979, he left behind a pervasive and enduring theoretical
arrangement, one that was both systematic and wide-ranging.Truly pathbreaking were his efforts
at providing the social sciences and humanities with a unified conceptual and methodological
base and his contributions to various subfields in sociology.
The field of Talcott Parsons Studies reflects today’s growing interest in the corpus of his writings.
A look at Google Scholar Citations reveals a first, albeit only a quantitative, impression of his
prominence in sociological discourse. Parsons’s overall quote count is above 163,000. Although
considerably behind Max Weber (370,000), he nonetheless exceeds reference totals for Georg
Simmel (110,000), Parsons’s most prominent critic, C.Wright Mills (127,000), and is comparable
with that of Emile Durkheim (175,000). Further, there has been a steady increase in the number
of citations to Parsons’s works from about 2,000 per year in the 1990s to a peak of about 8,000
in 2013, and an average of 7,000 per year subsequently.
There are several reasons for quoting Parsons. To begin with, there is a growing desire in con-
temporary social science to acknowledge its theoretical foundations, to which Parsons made
major contributions. This desire comes after decades of neglecting foundational ideas during
which time social and cultural research acquired a predominantly empirical orientation. Second
is the heightened recognition of Parsons’s essential impact on important schools of thought—
like ethnomethodology, critical theory, and cultural studies—that were for too long mistakenly

1 DOI: 10.4324/9780429321139-1
 A. Javier Treviño and Helmut Staubmann

regarded as countervailing forces to his works. These schools’ continued development requires
reexamining their origins in the context of Parsonian notions. Additionally, the controversies and
issues posed by Parsons’s unfinished conceptual apparatus continue to inspire further refinement
of his ideas. Finally, there is the longstanding tradition of subjecting Parsons’s work to vigorous
criticism that continues to provoke debates crucial to Talcott Parsons Studies.

Parsons’s impact on sociology and related fields

During the late nineteenth- and early twentieth centuries, sociology’s classic founders sought
an overarching conceptual framework for the discipline. Around the mid-twentieth century,
however, this “foundational” phase of theorizing was superseded by critical inquiry, particularly
of the Marxian variety, and by applied research approaches allegedly conducted from inter-
disciplinary perspectives. On closer examination, however, these latter efforts amounted to no
more than wayward pursuits based on quotidian understandings of the life-world. The need
for general interpretations and for ordering research results into a coherent scholarly program
was dependent on schools of thought that were fragmented and frequently at odds with each
other.What appeared to the external observer as multi-disciplinary progressive development, was
regarded from within each paradigm as an array of tenuous propositions lacking broad intellec-
tual support. To expand such restricted scholarly perspectives, it was necessary to return to the
classic endeavor that lies at the heart of Parsons’s intellectual heritage: the forging of a general
theory. Indeed, in his 1949 presidential address to the American Sociological Association, Parsons
argued that the cumulative development of knowledge must possess a degree of generality for
relating findings, interpretations, and hypotheses. The generalized conceptual scheme that he
developed through integrative theorizing—the general theory of action—received its full articu-
lation a couple of years later with the publication of Toward a General Theory of Action (Parsons
1951a) and The Social System (Parsons 1951b).
Because the notion of a “general theory of action” is vague, it inevitably led to numerous
misunderstandings and misrepresentations that eventually became the object of a constant queru-
lous hostility. To avoid such complications, it is necessary to distinguish between two types of
theorizing. The first involves a Kantian a priori inquiry that goes beyond a purely experiential
understanding of everyday life. However, such an analytic approach is limited due to the fact
that all scholarly efforts ultimately require terminological precision and clarity. But in the social
sciences, concepts such as “behavior” and “action,” for example, are highly abstract and inde-
terminate. Further, because a priori forms of inquiry—like behaviorism and action theory—­
commonly account for a broad scope of social phenomena, they are formulated as “general”
theory, in which case middle-range theorizing becomes irrelevant. The middle-range approach,
however, is essential to the other type of theorizing—which conducts empirical investigations
that are situationally informed and contextually specific.
We need to discern between theory as an a priori condition for empirical research and theory
as a set of substantive-empirical propositions. While Parsons never claimed to have discovered
comprehensive causal principles that transcend time and space, his contributions to analytical
theorizing can go a long way toward redressing today’s highly fractured and ideologically infused
social sciences.
Clearly, Parsons’s general theory of action has contributed significantly to the establishment
of sociological schools of thought that are frequently seen as divergent and contradictory. It
is doubtless the case that aspects of Parsons’s program have become cornerstones of critical
approaches, as indicated for example, by Jürgen Habermas’s theory of communicative action
that continues to spark interest in Parsonian ideas. Moreover, Habermas’s purported intellectual

2
 Introduction

competitor, Niklas Luhmann, could not have formulated his statements about autopoietic social
systems without, at least in part, relying on some of Parsons’s conceptual contributions. The
recent publication of Harold Garfinkel’s Parsons’s Primer reveals Garfinkel’s collaborations with
his erstwhile teacher, Parsons, and the extent to which ethnomethodology is rooted in the latter’s
sociology. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz repeatedly acknowledged that many of his core
ideas stemmed from Parsons’s influence. In the same vein, cultural sociology could not have
advanced its “strong program,” as Jeffrey C. Alexander and Philip Smith call it, without Parsonian
guidance.
As disparate as these intellectual traditions may be, they are all, to some extent, openly appre-
ciative of Parsons’s contributions to social theory. Habermas, for example, was convinced that to
be of real consequence, a theory of society had to at least be minimally contextualized in relation
to Parsons. As for Luhmann, he considered Parsons as being much more at the cutting edge of
sociological theorizing than did the many detractors who saw Parsons’s proposals as anachron-
istic. According to Luhmann, “Parsons went far beyond the first step of theory development.
Whoever does not accept the Parsonian re-organization cannot regress to its original state. At the
least, they would have to come up with new explanations. [Parsons’s] work is a lasting challenge
for all further work on sociological theory” (Luhmann 1980: 12). The academic field of Talcott
Parsons Studies, to which this handbook is dedicated, takes up these and other problematics that
the Parsonian tradition presents to contemporary sociology.

Misunderstandings, ambiguities, and shortcomings

The Parsonian theoretical project is, to be sure, complex and variegated. Indeed, it is readily
acknowledged that ideational discrepancies, evident at different stages in its elaboration, present
conundrums for its interpretation. For no less a thinker than Luhmann (1980: 5), the theoretical
program’s lack of internal coherence remained a standing problem. Victor Lidz (1986: 142) has
observed that those few who claim to truly comprehend Parsons, all too often end up disagreeing
among themselves. Some Parsonians even feel that the general theory of action resembles a
labyrinth (Jensen 1980: 7) where one can easily get lost in its myriad conceptualizations. In
today’s time-pressed world, one obstacle to assessing Parsons’s writings is their sheer enormity.
It is estimated that throughout his career, Parsons developed an oeuvre contained in some 160
published items. As Jonathan H.Turner and Leonard Beeghley once expressed it with a generous
dose of irony: “The most obvious problem with interpreting Parsons’s work is that there is so
much of it” (1974: 60). Even one of Parsons’s most accomplished students and collaborators, Neil
J. Smelser, affirmed that “to think along with him was exhausting” (1981: 149).
In addition to inconsistencies and vast output, another presentational problem with Parsons’s
general theory of action has to do with the idiosyncrasies of his writing style, about which much
has been written elsewhere. Particularly poignant in this regard was C. Wright Mills’s (1959)
famous attack in The Sociological Imagination where he claimed to have translated a section of
Parsons’s The Social System into straightforward English. While Mills’s sarcasm is doubtless over-
blown, he does shed light on the fact that Parsons’s lack of intelligibility, due largely to his con-
voluted prose, has been a real hindrance to the appreciation of his work.
Yet another pivotal factor in the acceptance of Parsons’s ideas is a line of critique that emerged
from the campus unrest and the political upheavals of the 1960s—the marches, protests, and
various forms of social activism—as well as the pertinence of such contemporaneous issues as
civil rights, women’s liberation, and the Vietnam War. This type of denunciation charged Parsons
with being oblivious to pressing social problems that involved conflict and power and with
being inclined toward a harmonious and static view of society that legitimized the status quo. A

3
 A. Javier Treviño and Helmut Staubmann

debate has been raging over whether these allegations are truly justified (Treviño 2020) or are
simply a strawman attack, as Rawls (2019) has described it. As recently argued by Staubmann
(2021), the various misunderstandings toward Parsons’s program are likely due to the blind spots
inherent in all sociological paradigms that prevent them from accurately perceiving each other’s
assertions. Whatever the epistemological merits of these negative assessments, taking them ser-
iously provides the opportunity not only for resolving the ambiguities and shortcomings in
Parsons’s theory but also for clearly communicating its proposals. This opportunity may likewise
encourage efforts at further refining Parsons’s concepts and typologies for greater theoretical
elaboration—an undertaking wholly consistent with his intellectual intentions.

Some focal points of Talcott Parsons studies

Talcott Parsons occupies a singular position in the annals of sociological thought insofar as he
sought to synthesize the prevailing theoretical and methodological traditions of his time. As such,
his aim was to establish a unified conceptual scheme—a “frame of reference,” as he called it—for
sociology and allied subjects. A general theory of action, in the Parsonian sense, provides the
requisite clarity of concepts for use in empirical research and corresponding theories. In essence,
it is a metatheory of sociology, but also of the social sciences and the humanities in general.
Beginning his career as an economist, Parsons came to the early realization that competing
explanations about the development of capitalism were not based on different facts but on different
perspectives. The recourse, according to him, lay in identifying analytical presuppositions to guide
empirical observation and, in this way, get the “full picture” of an issue. It was while writing
his dissertation on divergent conceptions of modern capitalism that he came upon this insight,
which later formed the basis of his first and still most famous work The Structure of Social Action.
The “voluntaristic theory of action,” as Parsons called the result of his disquisitions in Structure,
was not a mechanistic explanation about social phenomena but rather an analytic frame of ref-
erence necessary for obtaining a comprehensive understanding of the social world. This refer-
ence frame, which was based on the epistemology of analytic realism, was, at bottom, intended to
synthesize idealism and positivism, two systems of thought that Parsons believed were conver-
ging given that they were increasingly adopting each other’s concepts. The veracity of Parsons’s
“convergence thesis” has been much debated. But whether there had, in fact, occurred a factual
confluence of idealist and positivist concerns or he was simply projecting convergence onto
the prevailing intellectual discourse, the technique of conceptual differentiation he originated
remains a viable tool for progressing sociological knowledge. The basic idea is that the means of
action (stressed in the utilitarian system) and the meaningfully constituted ends of action (stressed in
idealist positions) must be considered in all sociological analyses.
Parsons used the term “structural independence” to refer to the idea that neither means nor
ends could, “in the last instance,” be incorporated into the other. To be structurally independent
signifies that “means” and “ends” interrelate and, as such, are dependent on each other. But the
issue of dependence is really an empirical one and understanding the means–ends relationship
occurs only when the inner logic of the interacting actors is examined. Empirically, means and
ends are always linked, as in the case of cognition and emotions, for example, but as components
of social action, they are structurally independent. The advantage of structural independence is
that it inveighs against all types of reductionist thinking.
One theme in social and cultural theory that had persisted since the nineteenth century and
that may be traced to Ferdinand Tönnies’s Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft dichotomy was the notion
of sequential societal progression. To address Tönnies’s main shortcoming, which Parsons saw as
giving a one-sided conception of sociohistorical evolution, he formulated the famous “pattern

4
 Introduction

variables.” As specific characteristics of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, the pattern variables may be
viewed as types of actions and interactions that evolve in the course of societal advancement: from
particularistic-ascription to universalistic-achievement, indicating a general move in the direc-
tion of the rationalization of social life. However, modernity is not a purely distinct phase where
rationality is dominant, having been preceded by nonrational premodernity. Rather, for Parsons,
all rational as well as nonrational human tendencies arise simultaneously in a highly differential
society. In The Social System, he further enhanced this notion by indicating that, in the context of
modernity, a rational-economic complex can exist alongside an expressive-emotional complex.
This poses a clear challenge to the continuing notion of successive development—whether from
premodern to modern or from late-modern to postmodern.

Versions of action theory

Parsons’s conceptual refinements in analyzing the structure of social action were only the begin-
ning. Throughout his career, his general theory of action went through several iterations, the
impetuses being, on the one hand, important developments in the humanities, as in, for example,
psychoanalysis, linguistics, and most important, cybernetics and systems theory, and, on the other
hand, empirical studies that in turn facilitated his theoretical breakthroughs. Following his initial
formulation of the voluntaristic theory of action in Structure, Parsons then produced different
versions of action theory.
Starting with the manuscript Actor, Situation, and Normative Pattern (written in 1939 and
published in 2010), up to Toward a General Theory of Action, and The Social System, textbooks have
typically referred to the first version as “structural functionalism.”
Toward a General Theory of Action was a collaborative effort, with sociologists working in con-
junction with psychologists and anthropologists, that attempted an architectonic integration of
the disciplines represented in Harvard’s Department of Social Relations that Parsons, along with
like-minded colleagues, Gordon W. Allport, Henry A. Murray, and Clyde Kluckhohn, founded in
1946. The new disciplinary synthesis led Parsons and his associates to identify additional systems
of action, namely, the cultural system, the social system, and the personality system. This, in turn,
resulted in a couple of significant discoveries. First, from the point of view of the general action
system, these ancillary systems constitute three structurally independent subsystems. Second, the
subsystems are themselves crisscrossed by three structurally independent action dimensions: the
cognitive-instrumental, the affective-cathectic, and the normative-evaluative. These discoveries
became axioms explaining the subsystem’s structural independence, precise characterization, and
internal patterning based on the action dimensions. If it is the nature of axioms to appear sim-
plistic and obvious, in the Parsonian case, their theoretical ramifications were, for the “social
relations” disciplines, quite elaborate and novel. Let us briefly consider a few of the conceptual
developments that derived from Parsons’s axioms that are examined by some of the contributors
to this volume.
First, Parsons’s epistemological notion that the action subsystems possess an “emergent quality”
was an unequivocal rejection of methodological individualism. Such a position had played a
role in Weberian action theory and continues to do so today in variants of action theory like
rational choice theory. A reverberation of methodological individualism, however, is evident in
the structure–­agency dualism that thinkers like Giddens and Bourdieu have grappled with, where
cause and effect are considered only in terms of “concrete” actors constructing social “structures.”
This “fallacy of misplaced concreteness,” as Parsons, following the philosopher Alfred North
Whitehead, called it, attempts to create theories that are exact descriptions of empirical reality.
This is an illusory undertaking since what we call social reality is a product of experiences based

5
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