Public conferences In 1955 to 1956, a group of faculty members at
Cornell University met regularly and discussed Parsons' writings. The next academic year, a series of seven widely attended public seminars followed and culminated in a session at which he answered his critics. The discussions in the seminars were summed up in a book edited by
Max Black,
The Social Theories of Talcott Parsons: A Critical Examination. It included an essay by Parsons, "The Point of View of the Author". The scholars included in the volume were Edward C. Devereux Jr., Robin M. Williams Jr., Chandler Morse, Alfred L. Baldwin,
Urie Bronfenbrenner, Henry A. Landsberger,
William Foote Whyte, Black, and Andrew Hacker. The contributions converted many angles including personality theory, organizational theory, and various methodological discussions. Parsons' essay is particularly notable because it and another essay, "Pattern Variables Revisited", both represented the most full-scale accounts of the basic elements of his theoretical strategy and the general principles behind his approach to theory-building when they were published in 1960. One essay also included, in metatheoretical terms, a criticism of the theoretical foundations for so-called
conflict theory.
Criticism of theories From the late 1950s to the student rebellion in the 1960s and its aftermath, Parsons' theory was criticized by some scholars and intellectuals of the left, who claimed that Parsons's theory was inherently conservative, if not reactionary.
Alvin Gouldner even claimed that Parsons had been an opponent of the
New Deal. Parsons' theory was further regarded as unable to reflect social change, human suffering, poverty, deprivation, and conflict.
Theda Skocpol thought that the
apartheid system in South Africa was the ultimate proof that Parsons's theory was "wrong". At the same time, Parsons' idea of the individual was seen as "oversocialized", "repressive", or subjugated in normative "conformity". In addition,
Jürgen Habermas and countless others were of the belief that Parsons' system theory and his action theory were inherently opposed and mutually hostile and that his system theory was especially "mechanical", "positivistic", "anti-individualistic", "anti-voluntaristic", and "de-humanizing" by the sheer nature of its intrinsic theoretical context. By the same token, his evolutionary theory was regarded as "uni-linear", "mechanical", "biologistic", an ode to world system status quo, or simply an ill-concealed instruction manual for "the capitalist
nation-state". The first manifestations of that branch of criticism would be intellectuals like
Lewis Coser,
Ralf Dahrendorf, David Lockwood, John Rex,
C. Wright Mills,
Tom Bottomore and Gouldner.
Democratic Party supporter Parsons supported
John F. Kennedy on November 8, 1960; from 1923, with one exception, Parsons voted for Democrats all his life. He discussed the Kennedy election widely in his correspondence at the time. Parsons was especially interested in the symbolic implications involved in the fact of Kennedy's
Catholic background for the implications for the United States as an integral community (it was the first time that a Catholic had become President of the United States). In a letter to Robert N. Bellah, he wrote, "I am sure you have been greatly intrigued by the involvement of the religious issue in our election." Parsons, who described himself as a "Stevenson Democrat", was especially enthusiastic that his favored politician,
Adlai Stevenson II, had been appointed
United States Ambassador to the United Nations. Parsons had supported Stevenson in 1952 and 1956 and was greatly disappointed that Stevenson lost heavily both times.
Modernization theory influence In the early 1960s, it became obvious that his ideas had a great impact on much of the theories of modernization at the time. His influence was very extensive but at the same time, the concrete adoption of his theory was often quite selective, half-hearted, superficial, and eventually confused. Many modernization theorists never used the full power of Parsons' theory but concentrated on some formalist formula, which often was taken out of the context that had the deeper meaning with which Parsons originally introduced them. In works by
Gabriel A. Almond and
James S. Coleman,
Karl W. Deutsch,
S. N. Eisenstadt,
Seymour Martin Lipset,
Samuel P. Huntington,
David E. Apter,
Lucian W. Pye,
Sidney Verba, and
Chalmers Johnson, and others, Parsons' influence is clear. Indeed, it was the intensive influence of Parsons' ideas in
political sociology that originally got scholar William Buxton interested in his work. In addition,
David Easton would claim that in the history of
political science, the two scholars who had made any serious attempt to construct a general theory for political science on the issue of political support were Easton and Parsons.
Interest in religion One of the scholars with whom he corresponded extensively with during his lifetime and whose opinion he highly valued was
Robert N. Bellah. Parsons's discussion with Bellah would cover a wide range of topics, including the theology of
Paul Tillich. The correspondence would continue when Bellah, in the early fall of 1960, went to Japan to study
Japanese religion and ideology. In August 1960, Parsons sent Bellah a draft of his paper on "The Religious Background of the American Value System" to ask for his commentary. In a letter to Bellah of September 30, 1960, Parsons discussed his reading of
Perry Miller's
Errand into the Wilderness. Parsons wrote that Miller's discussion of the role of
Calvinism "in the early
New England theology... is a first rate and fit beautifully with the broad position I have taken." Miller was a literary Harvard historian whose books such as
The New England Mind established new standards for the writing of American cultural and religious history. Miller remained one of Parsons' most favoured historians throughout his life. Indeed, religion had always a special place in Parsons' heart, but his son, in an interview, maintained that he that his father was probably not really "religious." Throughout his life, Parsons interacted with a broad range of intellectuals and others who took a deep interest in religious belief systems, doctrines, and institutions. One notable person who interacted with Parsons was Marie Augusta Neal, a nun of the
Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur who sent Parsons a huge number of her manuscripts and invited him to conferences and intellectual events in her
Catholic Church. Neal received her PhD from Harvard under Parsons's supervision in 1963, and she would eventually become professor and then chair of sociology at
Emmanuel College.
Criticism of Riesman Parsons and Winston White cowrote an article, "The Link Between Character and Society", which was published in 1961. It was a critical discussion of
David Riesman's
The Lonely Crowd, which had been published a decade earlier and had turned into an unexpected bestseller, reaching 1 million sold copies in 1977. Riesman was a prominent member of the American academic left, influenced by
Erich Fromm and the
Frankfurt School. In reality, Riesman's book was an academic attempt to give credit to the concept of "
mass society" and especially to the idea of an America suffocated in
social conformity. Riesman had essentially argued that at the emerging of highly advanced
capitalism, the America basic value system and its socializing roles had changed from an "inner-directed" toward an "other-directed" pattern of value-orientation. Parsons and White challenged Riesman's idea and argued that there had been no change away from an inner-directed personality structure. The said that Riesman's "other-directness" looked like a caricature of
Charles Cooley's
looking-glass self, and they argued that the framework of "
institutional individualism" as the basic code-structure of America's normative system had essentially not changed. What had happened, however, was that the industrialized process and its increased pattern of societal differentiation had changed the family's generalized symbolic function in society and had allowed for a greater permissiveness in the way the child related to its parents. Parsons and White argued that was not the prelude to greater "otherdirectness" but a more complicated way by which inner-directed pattern situated itself in the social environment.
Political power and social influence 1963 was a notable year in Parsons's theoretical development because it was the year when he published two important articles: one on political power and one on the concept of
social influence. The two articles represented Parsons's first published attempt to work out the idea of Generalized Symbolic Media as an integral part of the exchange processes within the AGIL system. It was a theoretical development, which Parsons had worked on ever since the publication of
Economy and Society (1956). The prime model for the generalized symbolic media was money and Parsons was reflecting on the question whether the functional characteristics of money represented an exclusive uniqueness of the
economic system or whether it was possible to identify other generalized symbolic media in other subsystems as well. Although each medium had unique characteristics, Parsons claimed that power (for the
political system) and
influence (for the societal community) had institutional functions, which essentially was structurally similar to the general systemic function of money. Using
Roman Jakobson's idea of "code" and "message", Parsons divided the components of the media into a question of value-principle versus coordination standards for the "code-structure" and the question of factor versus product control within those social process which carried the "message" components. While "utility" could be regarded as the value-principle for the economy (medium: money), "effectiveness" was the value-principle for the political system (by political power) and
social solidarity for the societal community (by
social influence). Parsons would eventually choose the concept of value-commitment as the generalized symbolic medium for the fiduciary system with
integrity as the value principle.
Contacts with other scholars In August 1963, Parsons got a new research assistant,
Victor Lidz, who would become an important collaborator and colleague. In 1964, Parsons flew to Heidelberg to celebrate the 100th birthday of Weber and discuss Weber's work with Habermas,
Herbert Marcuse, and others. Parsons delivered his paper "Evaluation and Objectivity in Social Science: An Interpretation of Max Weber's Contribution". The meeting became mostly a clash between pro-Weberian scholars and the Frankfurt School. Before leaving for Germany, Parsons discussed the upcoming meeting with
Reinhard Bendix and commented, "I am afraid I will be something of a Daniel in the Lion's den." Bendix wrote back and told Parsons that Marcuse sounded very much like
Christoph Steding, a
Nazi philosopher. Parsons conducted a persistent correspondence with noted scholar
Benjamin Nelson, and they shared a common interest in the rise and the destiny of
civilizations until Nelson's death in 1977. The two scholars also shared a common enthusiasm for the work of Weber and would generally agree on the main interpretative approach to the study of Weber. Nelson had participated in the Weber Centennial in Heidelberg.
Opposition to the Frankfurt School Nelson got into a violent argument with
Herbert Marcuse and accused him of tarnishing Weber. In reading the written version of Nelson's contribution to the Weber Centennial, Parsons wrote, "I cannot let the occasion pass without a word of congratulations which is strong enough so that if it were concert I should shout bravo." In several letters, Nelson would keep Parsons informed of the often-turbulent leftist environment of Marcuse. In the letter of September 1967, Nelson would tell Parsons how much he enjoyed reading Parsons' essay on
Kinship and The Associational Aspect of Social Structure. Also, one of the scholars on whose work Parsons and Nelson would share internal commentaries was Habermas.
Ethnicity, kinship, and diffuse solidarity Parsons had for years corresponded with his former graduate student
David M. Schneider, who had taught at the
University of California Berkeley until the latter, in 1960, accepted a position as professor in anthropology at the
University of Chicago. Schneider had received his PhD at Harvard in social anthropology in 1949 and had become a leading expert on the American kinship system. Schneider, in 1968, published
American Kinship: A Cultural Account which became a classic in the field, and he had sent Parsons a copy of the copyedited manuscript before its publication. Parsons was highly appreciative of Schneider's work, which became in many ways a crucial turning point in his own attempt to understand the fundamental elements of the American kinship system, a key to understanding the factor of
ethnicity and especially building the theoretical foundation of his concept of the societal community, which, by the beginning of the early 1970s, had become a strong priority in the number of theoretical projects of his own intellectual life. Parsons borrowed the term "diffuse enduring solidarity" from Schneider, as a major concept for his own considerations on the theoretical construction of the concept of the societal community. In the spring of 1968, Parsons and Schneider had discussed
Clifford Geertz's article on religion as a cultural system on which Parsons wrote a review. Parsons, who was a close friend of Geertz, was puzzled over Geertz's article. In a letter to Schneider, Parsons spoke about "the rather sharp strictures on what he [Geertz] calls the extremely narrow intellectual tradition with special reference to Weber, but also to Durkheim. My basic point is in this respect, he greatly overstated his case seeming to argue that this intellectual tradition was by now irrelevant." Schneider wrote back to Parsons, "So much, so often, as I read Cliff's stuff I cannot get a clear consistent picture of just what the religious system consist in instead only how it is said to work." In a letter of July 1968 to Gene Tanke of the
University of California Press, Parsons offered a critical note on the state of psychoanalytical theory and wrote: "The use of psychoanalytical theory in interpretation of social and historical subject matter is somewhat hazardous enterprise, and a good deal of nonsense has been written in the name of such attempts." Around 1969, Parsons was approached by the prestigious
Encyclopedia of the History of Idea about writing an entry in the encyclopedia on the topic of the "Sociology of Knowledge". Parsons accepted and wrote one of his most powerful essays, "The Sociology of Knowledge and the History of Ideas", in 1969 or 1970. Parsons discussed how the
sociology of knowledge, as a modern intellectual discipline, had emerged from the dynamics of
European intellectual history and had reached a kind of cutting point in the philosophy of Kant and further explored by
Hegel but reached its first "classical" formulation in the writing of Mannheim, whose brilliance Parsons acknowledged but disagreed with his
German historicism for its antipositivistic epistemology; that was largely rejected in the more positivistic world of American social science. For various reasons, the editors of the encyclopedia turned down Parsons' essay, which did not fit the general format of their volume. The essay was not published until 2006. Parsons had several conversations with
Daniel Bell on a "
post-industrial society", some of which were conducted over lunch at William James Hall. After reading an early version of Bell's
magnum opus,
The Coming of the Post-Industrial Society, Parsons wrote a letter to Bell, dated November 30, 1971, to offer his criticism. Among his many critical points, Parsons stressed especially that Bell's discussion of technology tended to "separate off culture" and treat the two categories "as what I would call culture minus the cognitive component". Parsons' interest in the role of ethnicity and religion in the genesis of social solidarity within the local community heavily influenced another of his early 1960s graduate students,
Edward Laumann. As a student, Laumann was interested in the role of social network structure in shaping community-level solidarity. Combining Parsons' interest in the role of ethnicity in shaping local community solidarity with
W. Lloyd Warner's structural approach to social class, Laumann argued that ethnicity, religion, and perceived social class all play a large role in structuring community social networks. Laumann's work found that community networks are highly partitioned along lines of ethnicity, religion, and occupational social status. It also highlighted the tension individuals experience between their preference to associate with people who are like them (
homophily) and their simultaneous desire to affiliate with higher-status others. Later, at the beginning of his career at the
University of Chicago, Laumann would argue that how the impulses are resolved by individuals forms the basis of corporate or competitive
class consciousness within a given community. In addition to demonstrating how community solidarity can be conceptualized as a
social network and the role of ethnicity, religion, and class in shaping such networks, Laumann's dissertation became one of the first examples of the use of population-based surveys in the collection of
social network data, and thus a precursor to decades of egocentric social network analysis. Parsons thus played an important role in shaping the early interest of social network analysis in homophily and the use of egocentric network data to assess group- and community-level social network structures.
Systems theory on biological and social systems In his later years, Parsons became increasingly interested in working out the higher conceptual parameters of the human condition, which was in part what led him toward rethinking questions of cultural and social evolution and the "nature" of telic systems, the latter which he especially discussed with Bellah, Lidz, Fox, Willy de Craemer, and others. Parsons became increasingly interested in clarifying the relationship between biological and social theory. Parsons was the initiator of the first Daedalus conference on "Some Relations between Biological and Social Theory", sponsored by the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Parsons wrote a memorandum dated September 16, 1971, in which he spelled out the intellectual framework for the conference. As Parsons explained in the memo, the basic goal of the conference was to establish a conceptual fundament for a theory of
living systems. The first conference was held on January 7, 1972. Among the participants beside Parsons and Lidz were
Ernst Mayr,
Seymour Kety,
Gerald Holton,
A. Hunter Dupree, and
William K. Wimsatt. A second Daedalus Conference on Living Systems was held on March 1–2, 1974 and included
Edward O. Wilson, who was about to publish his famous work on
sociobiology. Other new participants were John T. Bonner,
Karl H. Pribram, Eric Lennenberg, and
Stephen J. Gould.
Sociology of law Parsons began in the fall of 1972 to conduct a seminar on "Law and Sociology" with legal philosopher
Lon L. Fuller, well known for his book
The Morality of Law (1964). The seminar and conversations with Fuller stimulated Parsons to write one of his most influential articles, "Law as an Intellectual Stepchild". Parsons discuses
Roberto Mangabeira Unger's
Law in Modern Society (1976). Another indication of Parsons' interest in law was reflected in his students, such as
John Akula, who wrote his dissertation in sociology,
Law and the Development of Citizenship (1973). In September 1972, Parsons participated in a conference in
Salzburg on "The Social Consequences of Modernization in Socialist Countries". Among the other participants were
Alex Inkeles, Ezra Vogel, and
Ralf Dahrendorf.
Criticism of Bendix In 1972, Parsons wrote two review articles to discuss the work of Bendix, which provide a clear statement on Parsons' approach to the study of Weber. Bendix had become well known for his interpretations of Weber. In the first review article, Parsons analyzed the immigrant Bendix's
Embattled Reason, and he praised its attempt to defend the basic values of
cognitive rationality, which he unconditionally shared, and he agreed with Bendix that the question of cognitive rationality was primarily a cultural issue, not a category that could be reduced from biological, economic, and social factors. However, Parsons criticized how Bendix had proceeded, who he felt especially had misrepresented the work of Freud and Durkheim. Parsons found that the misrepresentation was how Bendix tended to conceive the question of systematic theorizing, under the concept of "reductionism". Parsons further found that Bendix's approach suffered from a "conspicuous hostility" to the idea of
evolution. Although Parsons assessed that Weber rejected the linear evolutionary approaches of Marx and
Herbert Spencer, Weber might not have rejected the question of evolution as a generalized question. In a second article, a review of Bendix and
Guenther Roth's
Scholarship and Partisanship: Essays on Max Weber, Parsons continued his line of criticism. Parsons was especially concerned with a statement by Bendix that claimed Weber believed Marx's notion that ideas were "the epiphenomena of the organization of production". Parsons strongly rejected that interpretation: "I should contend that certainly the intellectual 'mature' Weber never was an 'hypothetical' Marxist." Somewhere behind the attitudes of Bendix, Parsons detected a discomfort for the former to move out of an "idiographic" mode of theorizing.
Study of US university In 1973, Parsons published
The American University, which he had authored with Gerald M. Platt. The idea had originally emerged when Martin Meyerson and Stephen Graubard of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, in 1969, asked Parsons to undertake a monographic study of the American university system. The work on the book went on for years until it was finished in June 1972. From a theoretical point of view, the book had several functions. It substantiated Parsons' concept of the educational revolution, a crucial component in his theory of the rise of the modern world. What was equally intellectually compelling, however, was Parsons' discussion of "the cognitive complex", aimed at explaining how cognitive rationality and learning operated as an interpenetrative zone on the level of the general action-system in society. In retrospect, the categories of the cognitive complex are a theoretical foundation to understand what has been called the modern knowledge-based society. ==Retirement==