The Social Thought of Talcott Parsons by Gerhardt Uta

Author:Gerhardt, Uta
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2011-05-04T16:00:00+00:00

Postscript: Imagine the Sociologist

20 years into his indefatigable effort to make understandable the structure(s) of social action, Parsons might have deserved more than the “satirizing” from Mills in 1959. Though the American ethos was clearly visible in how he imagined modern democracy, neither The Sociological Imagination, nor The Port Huron Statement, praised Parsons for the effort.

At the brink of the 1960s Mills deemed The Social System worth one twentieth of the Behemoth of Franz Neumann: why exactly was Mills wrong and his sociology flawed theoretically?

Alfred N. Whitehead in his famous lectures, Science and the Modern World,237 had warned against “the ‘Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness’,”238 the “accidental error of mistaking the abstract for the concrete.” Whitehead had explained how “The Century of Genius,” the seventeenth century, had given way to a new interpretation of nature, in the eighteenth century and beyond. No longer could the researcher trust his personal conceptions of the world of nature, thinking that his observations mirrored reality per se. To think that the laws were observable directly that govern the phenomena under consideration, was an error! Induction, supposedly proving the law of gravitation, Whitehead lectured, was no road to take in the study of the laws of nature,

[I]nduction is not based on anything which can be observed as inherent in nature. Thus we cannot look to nature for the justification of our belief in any law such as the law of gravitation. In other words, the order of nature cannot be justified by the mere observation of nature.

Whitehead, on this note, warned of “the dangers of unimaginative empiricism.”239 It was this danger that even Newton had fallen into, as he had rejected the wave theory of light because it could not account for the fact “that shadows cast by obstructing objects are defined by rectilinear rays.” Whitehead:

If you have had your attention directed to the novelties in thought in your own lifetime, you will have observed that almost all really new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced.

The conceptual frame of reference of sociology, this was Parsons’s credo, has to abide by the warnings of Whitehead: it is indispensable to understand nature in its laws (and society in its structure and processes) when the perspective of the scientist is crucial. Mills’s diatribes against “Grand Theory,” however, presuppose that any person who declares himself a sociologist can observe society as it is, no conceptual fetters needed. Mills’s criticism, emulated until this day, sees in Parsons’s work “the danger of unimaginative empiricism”—one that Parsons likewise directs against Mills.

This chapter has argued that in the virtual dialogue between Parsons and Mills from the middle 1950s onwards, the crux was whether the theory of society should hinge on the philosophy of science of, for one, Whitehead. Mills the sociologist had no methodological agenda. Indeed, Mills made it his agenda that methodology be overcome. All the same, Parsons and Mills shared the concern for American democracy, even agreeing in their warnings against “the dangers of unimaginative empiricism.”

Mills

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.