Abstract
This paper illuminates, in a discussion of my relationship with him, how Talcott Parsons acted out his commitment to the values of cognitive rationality, how he implemented those values when working with students who did not share his liberal politics. I illustrate how students may learn not only from divergences in perspective with one professor, but also from the contradictions between their teachers’s work. There are two contentions here. One concerns the importance of professors encouraging students to encounter points-of-view divergent from the professor’s viewpoint, and then the significance of supporting them when they do so. This is possible only when the values of cognitive rationality regulate activity within a university setting. I illustrate these contentions in a discussion of my work with the political sociologist, Barrington Moore, Jr., the economic theorist, Kenneth Arrow, and the political philosopher, Judith Shklar, each of whose work diverged greatly from Parsons’s theoretical perspective. Lastly, I contend that an understanding of our teachers’s work is manifest in our extension of it, not in criticisms of their ideas, their texts. I show how this was the case in my own work.
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Notes
Victor Lidz has suggested to me that “In the two little Prentice-Hall books [Societies: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives and The Systems of Modern Societies, and later in a combined format, The Evolution of Societies] and in some papers he did develop stage theories of the structures of societies, especially the modern industrial type that results from the revolutions, industrial, democratic, and educational. He also developed a four-function theory of change (or transformation) from one stage to another.” This is fair, but I think that the developmental model implicit in these (and other) discussions is ill-developed theoretically and not grounded adequately in his general theory.
There are several places in this text where I surround comments with quotation marks. These should not be taken to be exact quotations, repeating the exact words spoken. Instead, they convey, to the best of my recollection, the sense of what was spoken.
As part of my research for my senior thesis, I met with a group of meth users at Reed. They scared the bejeebers out of me; most of us at Reed believed that “meth kills.”
I had spent a lot of time in Barrows Hall, where the Berkeley sociology department was housed. It was and is ugly and off-putting. Someone had told me that the Harvard Social Relations Department was in Emerson Hall, a wonderful old building in the Yard. My informant had old information. William James Hall was newly constructed, a 15-floor white building, an embarrassment to the people who occupied it. Professors had corner offices with outer offices for the secretaries provided to all full professors. They fought for the seminar room between the two corner offices on the short side of the building. Parsons used that seminar room for his survey research project on the university. I knew enough to avoid this project, both because I was uncomfortable with how it had been designed and executed, and because I was even less comfortable with how the collected data was analyzed.
They cared not at all that, for me, Widener was the proverbial candy store for the proverbial kid. It was, and it remains, along with the old British Library, then in the British Museum, the greatest research library I have ever used.
I had been rejected for an NSF Fellowship. The application asked if candidates had been arrested or convicted of a crime. I was awaiting trial after an arrest during an anti-war demonstration. Somehow, . . . Later, I applied for a NIMH grant after the deadline (I think during my first year of graduate school). I wrote to Wilbur Cohen, then head of HEW, and the father of an acquaintance at Reed, asking if he could arrange for my application to be considered. I received a note explaining that this was not possible, but someone submitted it the following year, and I was surprised to hear from them when I was awarded a four-year fellowship beginning my third year of graduate studies. I had somehow been awarded a National Defense Education Act Fellowship for my second year.
I did have much more money at Harvard than I would have had at either Berkeley or Chicago. I always had a fellowship, which required no work on my part, and I often was both a teaching fellow and Parsons’s research assistant. Harvard would not let me receive three stipends, but I always received two (the fellowship and either a research or a teaching grant).
Smelser tried to convince me to attend Berkeley. When we spoke, he did not know that Bob Bellah would leave Harvard for Berkeley my first year in graduate school; this would have strengthened his argument. Several years later, when Jeff Alexander, who had been my student at Harvard, returned to Cambridge dissatisfied after his first year in graduate school, both Herb Gintis and I advised him to put politics aside and to work with the ablest people in the Department, Smelser and Bellah. When Jeff later sent me early drafts of what became his first four volumes, I was critical because it seemed to me that he had accepted what Bellah and Smelser had taught him! Over the years, I have also been accused of too uncritically accepting what Parsons taught me.
My senior year in college, I got to know George Joseph, a Reed graduate and an assistant D.A. in Portland. My senior year in college, George and I did a dog-and-pony show, debating drug laws across several venues. George was a friend of Howard Jolly, my mentor Reed. George became head of Reed’s alumni association my first year in graduate school. I attended an alumni event (I think at MIT), during, I think, the fall of my first year at Harvard. When talking after the event, George asked if I had met Parsons. I looked at him quizzically, suggesting that I had told him of Parsons’s promises, that I was assisting him in his General Action Theory course and taking an independent study with him. “Really?! Howard told me that was all bull-shit, that you would never see Parsons.” I was grateful that Howard never shared this belief with me.
Renée Fox attended the General Action Theory course, and she told me later that when Parsons introduced me the first session, and I stood up, she thought that Parsons was keeping up with the times. In fact, the West coast was in many respects ahead of the East coast and there were not at that time many people at Harvard who looked like me.
It was usually the first, that my arguments were ill conceived. As will become clear later, I constructed arguments that fell outside of the paradigm he created; this did not disconcert him, but it led to arguments about the wisdom of my constructions. Even when I was working, if only broadly, within his paradigm, he was often skeptical of my arguments. This was, for example, the case when I constructed a developmental model. He believed, incorrectly, that it violated the logic of his functional argument, that the stable reproduction of any social system required the fulfillment of four functions.
Parsons once described to me a trip that he and Helen were taking to Italy. His excitement and joy in contemplating the trip were palpable as he described things they were going to see. He then stopped and looked at me seriously, suggesting, something like, “Of course you understand that I will write every morning, just like at home.” I suggested that he was crazy, that if I were in Italy, I would not contemplate working. Maybe I am only imagining, many years later, that he frowned at me as if I were insufficiently serious about our calling.
The Hicks-Hansen model was formulated to characterize Keynes’s arguments, in The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, about equilibrium conditions in real and monetary markets in a few equations. It was, for many years, taught in intermediate macroeconomics courses. I respecified the variables in the model, e.g., consumption, savings, investment, and the transaction and liquidity demands for money, within the systems paradigm, which enabled me to characterize the conditions for the equilibrium level of political as well as economic output.
The headpiece on the syllabi for my “Foundations in Social Theory” seminar, which serves as the introduction to the discipline at Haverford, quotes Kaspar Naegele: “One must create some sociology before one can know what it is; and one must know, at least, what it might be, before one can help create it.” Students read, over the course of the academic year, a fair amount of Marx (mainly from volumes one and three of Capital), Weber, Durkheim, Freud, Hegel, Mead, Piaget, Habermas, Lenin, Lukács, Althusser, and Parsons. The first three chapters of The Structure of Social Action help them to differentiate between theory that necessarily generates error and theory that need not generate error.
As an undergraduate, I spent many hours talking to John Tomsich, an American intellectual historian, about social science and history, and about how to teach social science and history. He was much more comfortable than I in teaching history courses analytically, presuming, as I came to presume, that it was much easier to read history outside of the class than to read theory/historiography without the tutelage of an instructor.
I have known only one other person like this, someone who thought naturally, commonsensically, within a theoretical framework, and did so brilliantly. That person was Kenneth Arrow. I used to joke that I could ask him a question that required a theoretical argument, and he would construct a neoclassical model resolving the problem implicit in my question off the top of his head, an argument more sophisticated than the one I would have constructed in 30 years. It was not, in fact, a joke; he could and did… The correlative point is that both Parsons and Arrow were reflective about the nature of the theories/models they were constructing and therefore both were willing to engage dialogically with critics of their theories/models. In both instances, the theories provided Archimedean points that enabled them to incorporate other perspectives into their thinking. While my orientation to the economics was different, much more critical, than to Parsons’s sociology, and while Arrow thought quite differently than Parsons, the differences taught me a great deal about the commonalities involved in doing theory. Many years later, this lesson, that theorists are theorists, and that our commonalities enabled dialogue, was reinforced at Haverford in the “Coleman Lectures,” a series of presentations of their current work by theorists in physics, economics, math, anthropology, and sociology (organized with Stephon Alexander, a physicist, and Indradeep Ghosh, an economist).
I did not understand that even the inconsequential role of “teaching fellow” gave me a status that I did not deserve. I was a “teacher.”
Frank Sampson, who was then Head Tutor in sociology, told me, after seeing the grades I gave in the seminar, that it was the ablest group of students he had ever seen in a class, and that I gave them the lowest grades he had ever seen in a class. He expressed surprise that I was still alive, that they had not exacted revenge. If any of the students complained to Parsons, he never shared their complaints with me.
The image I used was that students hid under their chairs and Renée and Willy helped me to get them to, once again, sit on them.
They included, among others, Franklin Ford, who was then Dean of the Faculty or Arts and Sciences, two Nobel Prize winners, Edward Purcell and Robert B. Woodward, and Radcliffe’s President, Mary Bunting. While a contemporary article suggested that they met with President Johnson (Bryce Nelson, “LBJ Meets Professors on Vietnam,” Science, 13 Oct 1967, vol. 158, issue 3798, p 231), Victor Lidz has informed me that “The group of Harvard faculty did not actually meet with Johnson. They had a long talk with Bundy, who then thanked them for coming and had them shown out of the White House. TP told me about that, and that they were disappointed not to be able to speak with Johnson” (in his comments on a draft of this essay).
The other professor who made a similar calculation was Barrington Moore, Jr. He once asked me to serve as a thesis examiner for one of his politically-radical students. He did this because he knew I would take the thesis apart, and that I would do so “academically.”
Parsons characterized the position by suggesting that I would do what Victor (Lidz) had been doing. Some years later Victor and I both found ourselves in Philadelphia. I have benefited greatly from both his wisdom and friendship, and more narrowly, by his comments on this paper.
I have argued that good theory has three dimensions, a functional theory, which formulates social universals, propositions intended to be valid for all social systems, a structural theory, which formulates tendential, structural models intended to be valid for only one type of social structure (think Capital), and a developmental theory (think Piaget). Parsons’s work formulated the first and made motions to the third, but he was very critical of the developmental model I articulated.
Homans once called me into his office, where he began a conversion by expressing his regret that I was not going to get a degree. He explained that there was a “theory requirement” when I entered the program, and that I had not met the requirement; I had not taken the requisite courses. I explained that I had taught several of the courses, and he suggested that this was not good enough. Somehow, perhaps because of Parsons’s intervention, this attempt to get rid of me simply disappeared into the ether. I never heard about it again.
I read The Critique for the first time, seriously, while sitting in, somewhat irregularly, on a Harvard summer school course taught by Charles Parsons, Parsons’s son, who at the time was teaching at Columbia, although he later moved to Harvard. For me, The Critique was always mediated through Durkheim. More recently, I have become interested in the relationship between Cassirer and Heidegger, in the relationship between a theory of natural law as a necessary counterweight to moral relativism.
Over the years, I have learned, with the death of friends, that their passing meant that there were conversations that I was never going to be able to have. I feel this especially about my Harvard teachers (in addition to Parsons, Kenneth Arrow, Barrington Moore, Jr., Karl Deutsch, Shmuel Eisenstadt, and Judith Shklar), but, of course, the absent conversations are different. I never discussed either Cassirer or Heidegger with Parsons (I read Cassirer in Cambridge because a fellow graduate student was a fan and prodded me to do so, but I read Heidegger more seriously only when I got to Haverford), but many of my memories of him relate to imagined conversations we might have had.
The above discussion does not, for the most part, discuss the content of my work with Parsons. The core of that work focused on the generalized media and on analyses of the genesis of disorder. I have also slighted Parsons’s own discussions of the values that regulated his life as an academic. The most sustained of these is, with Gerald Platt, The American University. However, my favorite discussion is found in Parsons’s analysis of Weber’s understanding of value freedom and value relevance, where he characterizes “value freedom” as a commitment to the values that regulate scientific activity. See “Evaluation and Objectivity in Social Science,” reprinted in (Parsons 1967), and for an insightful recharacterization, (Lidz 1981).
Neither have I written about my work with Parsons about his work. I was a sounding board; he shared with me whatever he was writing and we talked about it, and sometimes I wrote extensive critiques of what he argued. For example, I tried to integrate into his “Postscript on the Concept of Influence” my systematic understanding of the media, and, to a considerable extent, I succeeded in doing so. This meant that this paper is a bit out-of-step with other of Parsons’s essays, and in that way is, I think, indicative of how seriously, perhaps, on occasion too seriously, Parsons treated his graduate students.
Later, in Germany, I had similar conversations with Jürgen Habermas. Like Moore, he was disappointed in the political sagacity of (German) students, including many of his own students. Like Moore, he looked for ways to be both critical and supportive, although he was, perhaps, more concerned with how criticism might have the consequence that students would not attend to what he was saying.
We talked during this walk about what it would be like teaching at Haverford. I think that he thought that I would be bored teaching undergraduates, but concluded, “At least it isn’t Swarthmore.”
I sat in on Robert Dorfman’s advanced graduate course on macroeconomic theory and spent a lot of time in his office talking about the course. There was not one word out-of-place in his lectures, and in consequence, they were easy to follow and, at least for me, difficult to assimilate. When an assistant professor gave one of the lectures, it seemed to me to be incoherent, but I suspect that my difficulty assimilating it was my problem, not a problem with his presentation.
Dorfman once expressed his pleasure that I was attending his course, suggesting that it was valuable for me, a sociologist, to learn some economics. I agreed, and then suggested that it would be valuable for economics graduate students to learn some sociology. He looked at me as if I had just demonstrated to him that I was dimwitted. The time I spent talking with Dorfman helped me a lot, but it seems to me, now, perhaps unfairly, that continuing those conversations would not have accomplished my goal. He was too much of an economist.
Samuelson, who was the most influential economist of the post-WW II era, was correct about Arrow; Arrow was the greatest living economic theorist. They were equally brilliant, but talking to each of them was a quite different experience. As I suggest in the text, Arrow was always thinking like an economist, while Samuelson often thought like an extraordinarily-intelligent layperson.
The Arrow-Debreu model completed (in Heisenberg’s sense) the development of general equilibrium analysis. By assuming perfect information, it demonstrated an equilibrium solution that was a Pareto Optimum. Many of my conversations with Arrow focused on the consequences of relaxing the assumption of perfect information, although, at the time, I did not fully understand the implications of these preliminary discussions.
I still read Arrow’s essay and the Parsons chapter with my students, and I recently wrote an essay that relies heavily on them, while criticizing them both (Gould 2017).
Arrow and Hicks were jointly awarded the 1972 Nobel Prize in economics. I have always thought that each of them deserved to win the prize separately.
Moore had earlier suggested to me that serious people did not write about theory, they wrote about history (data). Even though neither Arrow nor Moore nor Parsons much liked the theoretical arguments I made, they all insisted that I make theoretical arguments subject to empirical evaluation. Each, in very different ways, modeled this expectation, if only implicitly, in every conversation I had with them.
As I have noted, neither Parsons nor Arrow was sympathetic to this type of structural argument, to the formulation of models applicable only to particular types of social structure. Both constructed theories intended to have universal applicability, one grounded in methodological individualism and the other in Durkheim’s presumption that social action needed to be explained sociologically, that the social was sui generis.
She had completed her Rousseau book (1969), was working on her Hegel book (1976), and was to write, over a decade later, her Montesquieu book (1987). None of her other books was such a detailed analysis of a set of texts.
Victor Lidz reminded me that Du Bois’s appointment was originally at Radcliffe. “In 1954, she accepted an appointment at Harvard University as the second person to be the Samuel Zemurray Jr. and Doris Zemurray Stone-Radcliffe Professor at Radcliffe College.…She was the first woman tenured in Harvard’s Anthropology Department and the second woman tenured in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cora_Du_Bois, 21 July 20).
I have recently published a paper, with three commentaries, contending that (almost) all historical sociology, post-Moore, and in many ways in his shadow, is logically fallacious. If all arguments are counterfactuals, and I contend that they are, to construct counterfactuals we need general theories (Gould 2019).
As I noted above (fn. 1), Victor Lidz has noted, fairly, in his comments on this paper that Parsons constructed his own developmental model. This is correct, but Parsons never formalized the developmental aspects of this model, instead emphasizing the evolutionary universals that emerged out of it.
I also worked closely in graduate school with Karl Deutsch and Shmuel Eisenstadt. I took a seminar with Deutsch my first semester; Parsons got me admitted to the seminar, along with advanced graduate students in Government, during Deutsch’s first semester at Harvard. After the seminar, Deutsch asked me to work as his research assistant, but, instead, agreed to give me independent studies over the following two semesters. Deutsch had more ideas in any five-minute period than anyone else I have ever known. Parsons also set up an independent study for me with Eisenstadt when Shmuel visited Harvard. Shmuel and I read Weber’s writings on religion, which proved invaluable for me once I started writing about the logic of religions commitment in Islam, Christianity and Judaism. Both Deutsch and Eisenstadt fit nicely into my story; they were critical of my work, and facilitated greatly my ability to do it.
References
Arrow, K. J. (1963). Uncertainty and the welfare economics of medical care. The American Economic Review, 53, 941–973.
Gould, M. (2017). Professional Autonomy: The Reconciliation of Principal Agent Conflicts in Professional Relationships. In Presented at the Bi-Annual Meeting of the Group on the Professions (RC52) of the International Sociological Association.
Gould, M. (2018). Rationality, Norms, and the Sociological Reconstruction of Economic Theory. In H. Staubmann & V. Lidz (Eds.), Rationality in the Social Sciences: The Schumpeter/Parsons Seminar (pp. 149–166).
Gould, M. (2019). History is sociology: All arguments are counterfactuals. Journal of Historical Sociology, e1–e10.
Lidz, V. (1981). Conceptions of value relevance and the theory of action. Sociological Inquiry, 51, 371–408.
Parsons, T. (1967). Sociological theory and modern society. New York: Free Press.
Acknowledgements
This paper benefitted from comments from Victor Lidz and Clif Emery. Clif, who was my student, heard the paper delivered at Peking University and reconstructed my argument more precisely than I had articulated it in that preliminary version. He motivated me to make more overt the argument implicit in this informal narrative. Victor corrected some errors of fact and interpretation, and shared with me some of his memories of Parsons, Moore and Shklar. I am grateful to both of them.
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Gould, M. Working through Contradictions: Parsons and the Harvard Intellectual Community during the Late 60s and Early 70s. Am Soc 52, 38–62 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-020-09467-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12108-020-09467-9