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The Interstitial Ascent of Talcott Parsons: Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration and Careerism at Harvard, 1927–1951

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Abstract

The paper builds on Joel Isaac’s analysis of “interstitial” arrangements that generate scientific knowledge, and also draws upon the networking model of theory groups articulated by Nicholas and Caroline Mullins. I consider how the “interstitial academy” at Harvard, as well as Talcott Parsons’s navigation of it, facilitated his professional rise from a vulnerable young instructor in economics in 1927 to one of the most prominent social scientists in the United States in 1951. I examine Parsons’s engagement with curriculum-building committees in sociology and social ethics, in “the area of social science” and in social relations, as well as with undergraduate courses on institutions and on sociological theory, including a graduate student discussion circle, and with seminars on Pareto, on rationality and on “basic social science.” In some instances, Parsons’s involvement as a newcomer or junior participant led to important peer alliances, or to the support of higher-ranking faculty and administrators who sponsored his advancement. In other instances, especially as his ascent progressed, Parsons played the more powerful role of “indispensable hub” who gained stature by organizing cross-disciplinary interaction. Parsons’s interdisciplinary dialogue and collaboration also placed him an initial administrative role that would prepare him to serve as chair of two academic departments. The final and most important outcome of the process of upward mobility was the creation of a “theory school” that elevated Parsons to a unique status as the most boundary-spanning theorist of the social sciences. The paper thus supplements existing accounts of the rise of Parsons while also offering a mode of analysis that might be widely applied to the careers of other social scientists, both contemporary and historical (e.g., to figures such as Jane Addams and W. E. B. DuBois), in diverse academic settings and national contexts.

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Notes

  1. Most members of the Committee on Sociology and Social Ethics became either full-time or “interdepartmental” members of the Department of Sociology in fall 1931. Full-time members included Richard Cabot, Carl Smith Joslyn, Talcott Parsons and Pitirim Sorokin. Gordon Allport, Thomas Nixon Carver, Edwin F. Gay, Ernest Hooton and Arthur Schlesinger, Sr. joined as “interdepartmental colleagues.” Karl Bigelow, William Yandell Elliott and Edward Allen Whitney remained in their former academic departments. Three other members of the Department of Social Ethics moved into Sociology on a full-time basis: James Ford, an associate professor who specialized in housing issues, Sheldon Glueck, an instructor who did a thesis on insanity and criminal responsibility, and Paul Pigors (Cabot’s son-in-law), another instructor who did a dissertation on German sociology of knowledge. Niles Carpenter, meanwhile, had moved on to the University of Buffalo.

  2. It is interesting that Parsons uses the vocabulary of structure and function that would be associated with his publications of the 1950s. The concept of “function” was also adopted as the thematic issue of his Adams House discussion group in 1938. But this was not the vocabulary of his first major work, The Structure of Social Action. Parsons seems to have thought—simultaneously—along both “Weberian” (‘action theory”) and Durkheimian (functionalist) lines. One might say, as a useful oversimplification, that the Weberian approach dominated in the 1937 Structure of Social Action and that the Durkheimian approach dominated in the 1951 Social System.

  3. Brinton succeeded Henderson as the head of the famous interstitial group, the Harvard Society of Fellows, about which he would publish a history. Brinton was also nominated by Henderson for membership in the exclusive Saturday Club that had been organized in 1855 by Ralph Waldo Emerson and other local notables. Members included Louis Agassiz, Charles W. Eliot, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

  4. Copies of Parsons’s two papers are preserved in the Parsons Papers, Harvard University Archives, Pusey Library.

  5. Transcripts of these discussions can be found in the Parsons Papers, under the call number HUG(FP) 42.62, Box 1, Folders “Discussion Group Notes 1926–1937” and “Seminar 1938.” Harvard Archives, Pusey Library.

  6. Louisa Pinkham, under the name of her first marriage, Louisa Pinkham Holt, gave expert testimony in the historic civil rights case Brown v. Topeka Board of Education that was quoted approvingly in the decisions of both the federal district court and the United States Supreme Court. She later taught and did research at the Harvard Medical School and was also a founding member of the Massachusetts Sociological Association. Pinkham had been the first female graduate fellow in Harvard’s doctoral program in sociology, and she had been a teaching assistant to Parsons who was also the chair of her dissertation committee. Pinkham sometimes stayed as a guest at the Parsons home, and occasionally watched over the Parsons children, Charles and Anne. Matilda White Riley earned a master’s degree in sociology at Radcliffe and later did much to launch the field of the sociology of aging. She was elected president of both the Eastern Sociological Society and the American Sociological Association, which now confers an annual award named in her honor.

  7. Parsons also began to gain recognition by teaching summer school courses at other universities, including Columbia and Chicago. At Columbia he would very likely have met Robert Lynd and Robert M. MacIver. At Chicago, importantly, he appears to have met Edward A. Shils. Interestingly, many faculty members from around the U.S. likewise taught summer classes at Harvard. These linkages have yet to be systematically explored by historians and sociologists of sociology.

  8. Parsons carried on a substantial correspondence with Schutz at about this time. See The Theory of Social Action: The Correspondence of Alfred Schutz and Talcott Parsons, Edited by Richard Grathoff. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1978.

  9. Shortly before the end of World War II, Harvard issued a committee report on General Education in a Free Society that had a considerable impact on schools around the country, and whose recommendations are still reflected in contemporary requirements that undergraduates take coursework in the humanities, the natural sciences and the social sciences. President James B. Conant wrote an introduction, and led the effort to implement a new educational policy at Harvard based on the committee’s recommendation. The projects of “Area Studies,” the Department of Social Relations, and General Education shared important assumptions. See Harvard University, General Education in a Free Society: Report of the Committee. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1945.

  10. In the 1940s, Parsons introduced an undergraduate course on The Social Structure of the United States that attracted relatively large enrollments. This new offering was very likely rooted in the work of the Committee on Concentration in the Area of Social Science, as well as Parsons’s earlier course on Institutions, and even his efforts for the Committee on Sociology and Social Ethics.

  11. In the late 1940s this would occur in reverse, when Pitirim Sorokin, who had become alienated from the Department of Social Relations, launched the Harvard Center for Altruistic Creativity and Integration. Administering this project, funded by a grant from the Eli Lilly Foundation, allowed him to reduce his teaching to half time and to largely escape the authority of Talcott Parsons. Sorokin’s Center, of course, was also “interstitial” and similar to other projects that emerged at Harvard in the decade after World War II, such as the Center for Cognitive Studies established by psychologists Jerome Bruner and George Miller. The fact that Harvard administrators looked favorably upon such initiatives supports Isaac’s view of the importance of the interstitial in Harvard’s culture. Interestingly, while developing the altruism center, Sorokin looked beyond sociology and even beyond the social sciences as he attempted to create a new field of “amitology.”

  12. In correspondence, Bruner expressed concern that Parsons had entered a state of “auto-intoxication” in the early 1950s, and he worried how that might affect his field of psychology. A more sympathetic view would be that Parsons felt a euphoric glow of achievement and recognition following two decades of struggle.

  13. Parsons’s wife Helen also obtained a position at the Russian Research Center. Sorokin had published a related book on Russia and the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 1944), but he did not become involved with the Russian Center.

  14. As already mentioned, during World War II women became more prominent at Harvard. Radcliffe students had long been allowed to enroll in some courses at Harvard, though the general practice was for Harvard faculty to walk the short distance to Radcliffe and “repeat” their courses there, for supplemental pay. Unlike the other “seven sister” schools, Radcliffe did not have its own faculty. In the postwar era women began to join the Harvard faculty. In addition to Florence Kluckhohn, Social Relations gained a rising psychologist, Eleanor Maccoby (1917–2018) who received a Ph.D. in 1950 from the University of Michigan based partly on research she conducted in B. F. Skinner’s lab at Harvard. Maccoby taught as an instructor from 1950 to 1957 before departing for Stanford where she spent most of her career and became chair of the Department of Psychology. She was later elected to the National Academy of Sciences.

  15. Parsons’s belief that Toward A General Theory of Action was an extraordinary event was also reflected in a special session about the book at the 1950 national conference of the American Sociological Society that generated considerable debate. The actual extent of the volume’s influence is difficult to judge. George C. Homans (1984) recounts a department meeting in which Parsons presented the book for discussion and in which Homans asserted that it could not be considered official doctrine and that no pressure to read it should be exerted on any member of the faculty. Parsons was thus unable even in his own department to obtain unanimous agreement that sociologists should concur on a fundamental frame of reference, a step that he considered a prerequisite for the development of sociology as a science.

  16. Documents relating to the recommendation to hire MacIver and the decision not to do so can be found in the Faculty Papers of Lawrence J. Henderson, Baker Library, Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration and also in the Correspondence of the Department of Sociology, Harvard University Archives, Pusey Library.

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Nichols, L.T. The Interstitial Ascent of Talcott Parsons: Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration and Careerism at Harvard, 1927–1951. Am Soc 50, 563–588 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-019-09425-0

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