The Anthem Companion to Talcott Parsons

By Anthem Press

‘The Anthem Companion to Talcott Parsons’ offers the best contemporary work on Talcott Parsons, written by the best scholars currently working in this field. Original, authoritative and wide-ranging, the critical assessments of this volume will make it ideal for Parsons students and scholars alike.

‘Anthem Companions to Sociology’ offer authoritative and comprehensive assessments of major figures in the development of sociology from the last two centuries. Covering the major advancements in sociological thought, these companions offer critical evaluations of key figures in the American and European sociological tradition, and will provide students and scholars with both an in-depth assessment of the makers of sociology and chart their relevance to modern society.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Jun 19, 2016
• ISBN: 9781783085453

Book preview

ANTHEM COMPANIONS TO SOCIOLOGY

Anthem Companions to Sociology offer authoritative and comprehensive assessments of major figures in the development of sociology from the last two centuries. Covering the major advancements in sociological thought, these companions offer critical evaluations of key figures in the American and European sociological tradition and will provide students and scholars with an in-depth assessment of the makers of sociology and chart their relevance to modern society.

Series Editor

Bryan S. Turner—City University of New York, USA and Australian Catholic University, Australia

Forthcoming titles in this series include:

The Anthem Companion to Hannah Arendt

The Anthem Companion to Pierre Bourdieu

The Anthem Companion to Auguste Comte

The Anthem Companion to Everett Hughes

The Anthem Companion to Karl Mannheim

The Anthem Companion to C. Wright Mills

The Anthem Companion to Robert Park

The Anthem Companion to Phillip Rieff

The Anthem Companion to Georg Simmel

The Anthem Companion to Gabriel Tarde

The Anthem Companion to Ferdinand Tönnies

The Anthem Companion to Ernst Troeltsch

The Anthem Companion to Thorstein Veblen

The Anthem Companion to Max Weber

The Anthem Companion to Talcott Parsons

Edited by A. Javier Treviño

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2016

by ANTHEM PRESS

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or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA

© 2016 A. Javier Treviño editorial matter and selection; individual chapters © individual contributors

The moral right of the authors has been asserted.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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.

Title: The Anthem companion to Talcott Parsons /

edited by A. Javier Treviño.

Description: London; New York, NY : Anthem Press, 2016. | Series: Anthem

companions to sociology | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016002467 | ISBN 9780857281838 (hardback : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Parsons, Talcott, 1902–1979. | Sociologists—United States. |

Sociology—United States—History.

Classification: LCC HM479.P38 A58 2016 | DDC 301.092—dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016002467

ISBN-13: 978 0 85728 183 8 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 0 85728 183 6 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

CONTENTS

Introduction

A. Javier Treviño

Contributors

Index

INTRODUCTION

A. Javier Treviño

There is perhaps no sociologist whose theories, sentiments and political activities have been more misunderstood and subject to mistreatment than Talcott Parsons. This state of affairs stems partly from Parsons’s seemingly inscrutable communicative style and partly from ideologically motivated libel—but it is perhaps mostly due to an actively pursued ignorance of his ideas, stemming from any number of reasons. And while Uta Gerhardt’s splendid book Talcott Parsons: An Intellectual Biography has done much to clarify and put into proper perspective Parsons’s thinking and actions, it has yet to command the attention it deserves in all quarters of the sociological community.¹

In light of these circumstances, this volume is intended to achieve several objectives. First, it is the latest in a continued effort to inform a rising generation of scholars about the life and work of one of, if not in fact, the most influential American sociological theorist of the twentieth century.² Second, it is meant as a corrective to the misinformed but still pervasive notion that Parsons was no more than a mindless structural functionalist, a tool of elitist interests and a grand theorist who had no understanding of actual social problems. And while it took only one generation of sociologists to unjustly characterize Parsons in these ways, it will doubtlessly take several years more before a full rectification, a truly balanced and fair treatment of him, can be realized. Finally, it is, to say the least, regrettable to have to begin a book on the social thought of a prominent thinker by stating what he is not, and so the third and main reason for this volume is an affirmative one: to enter into an earnest discussion of the many important contributions that Parsons made to sociology, sociological theory and particularly to understanding the various social events of the day—then and now.

Before discussing the 11 original chapters that constitute this volume, written by scholars enlisted to address the aforementioned three objectives, I first present a brief life-and-work profile of Parsons for the purpose of providing context for the chapters. For good or ill, the following intellectual portrait (if I may use such a lofty term for what follows) is composed of information derived from one source: Harvard University’s daily newspaper, The Harvard Crimson.³ While hardly an exhaustive or even a supposedly accurate record of Parsons’s ideas and engagements, the Crimson did chronicle many events, some highly significant, other less so, that directly or indirectly involved him throughout his four decades—from the 1930s through the 1970s—as a faculty member at the university. Admittedly, exclusive reliance on the Crimson admits of a certain selectivity given that the portrait rendered is limited to information about Parsons that the editors of the newspaper deemed worthy of printing and given that I depend only on those articles in which Parsons’s involvement figures prominently or that pertain to an event that was of some significance to him. All this notwithstanding it nonetheless provides, I think, a good aperture into Parsons and his lifework. What follows is a chronological account arranged by decade.

1930s

The first mention of Parsons in The Crimson is perhaps in an article that appeared in 1930, the year that his English translation of Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism was published and three years after he first arrived at Harvard as a young instructor in the department of economics.⁴ In the article Talcott Parsons, Instructor in Economics and Tutor in Sociology and Social Ethics, Parsons is listed as having been appointed as a nonresident tutor at the newly founded undergraduate residence Adams House.⁵ Robert K. Merton, who attended the first course in sociological theory offered by Parsons the year Adams House opened in 1931, recalls that in an effort to better understand Parsons’s nascent ideas, his students induced him to form an informal study group. That group, writes Merton, met for some years in his tutorial quarters in Adams House—as I remember, in G-34—which inevitably became tagged as the Parsonage.⁶ Although not then known to the students, and indeed even to Parsons himself, the lectures that he gave in that theory course—with the impossibly long title Sociological Theories of Hobhouse, Durkheim, Simmel, Toennies and Max Weber—along with the Adams House discussions, would eventually provide the material for his first book, The Structure of Social Action.⁷

Despite his small frame and relatively short stature, the 29-year-old Parsons was no mere geeky intellectual. Indeed, in addition to publishing several articles on institutional economics, including two essays on capitalism in the prestigious Journal of Political Economy, to say nothing of his grueling teaching load, he evidently found time to participate in intra-house tournaments of League C squash at which he represented Adams House.⁸ In two Crimson articles from 1932, Parsons is listed as playing in two matches; the first article notes that the deciding match with his opponent from Leverett House was not completed.⁹ The reason for the incompletion is not given, but the outcome was recorded as a 2–2 tie between Leverett and Adams. The match, however, was concluded the following day, with the outcome that Parsons lost 3–1, thus giving Leverett the overall advantage, 3 to 2.

By mid-decade, whatever his skills as a squash player, Parsons’s interests had increasingly turned from the then current mathematical and utilitarian-oriented study of economics toward greater engagement with sociology proper. Indeed, by 1935 he had written the entry on Society for the groundbreaking Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences,¹⁰ two articles examining the sociological elements in economic thought¹¹ and published one of his most cited pieces The Place of Ultimate Values in Sociological Theory¹² in which he argues against a strictly positivistic view of human behavior and one that considers its more subjective dimension—a theme that was to reach fuller expression in The Structure of Social Action. In any event, around this time we learn from an article in the Crimson that leaves of absence for the first half of 1935–36 were granted, for purposes of research to three faculty members, one of whom was Talcott Parsons, instructor in Sociology.¹³

There are several pieces of information that this article’s passing mention of Parsons does not reveal. The first refers to something that the ambitious young instructor could not have foreseen at the time: his published writings up to this point, including the forthcoming The Structure of Social Action, would chart the decisive initial phases by which one of [the twentieth] century’s major approaches to sociological theory took shape.¹⁴ The second is that he would use this leave of absence to undertake final preparations on the landmark Structure. Third, and perhaps most consequential to Parsons’s professional career at Harvard, is that he was no longer housed in economics but was now a full-fledged member in Pitirim A. Sorokin’s department of sociology.

1940s

Despite his prodigious output and popularity with students, Parsons’s advancement through the academic ranks has to be one of the most protracted in the history of sociology, topped perhaps only by Simmel’s even slower professional ascent. In all, Parsons served nine years as instructor, first of economics and then of sociology, before finally being promoted to assistant professor in late 1936. By 1940 the Crimson identified his newly achieved rank of associate professor of Sociology in an article announcing a course he was slated to give the following year titled Economics and the Social Structure.¹⁵

Recognizing that sociology, and particularly the sociological analysis of the social system, required paying attention to the relationships between various institutions—the political, religious, legal and so on—the new course was to focus on the extent to which economic theory is an abstract conceptual scheme which must be related in its action to other elements in society. In addition, treatment would be given to the economic institutions of property and market, occupational roles and the relations of the institutional structure of authority in the occupational sphere. Indeed, Parsons had already seriously considered the occupations and professions, and especially the problem of motivation in the professions, in several previously published essays.¹⁶ For example, he argued that medical professionals, given that they based their fees on the sliding scale, were obviously not motivated by the rational pursuit of self-interest, but by a system of moral sentiments. The course will wind up, the Crimson article states, with a consideration of the problem of motivation. Parsons believes that the traditional economic doctrine of self-interest is now untenable. He will attempt to analyze all the elements which enter into motivation in economic activities, emphasizing that self-interest is only one factor.

By the fall of 1940 Europe was in the throes of war with much of it under the jackboot of fascism as Germany invaded, first, Poland and then Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium and the Battle of Britain had begun. And while the Axis powers formed the Tripartite Pact with Japan, strong isolationist sentiment in the United States had so far kept the country out of the European war, as it was referred to then. On 5 December of that year the Crimson ran an article reporting that a meeting sponsored by the Committee for Militant Aid to Britain would be held at Emerson Hall that evening at which three professors, one of them being Parsons, would speak in favor of intervention on behalf of Britain.¹⁷ The article also reported that the meeting would be heavily picketed by representatives from all the student houses, the Teachers’ Union, the law and architecture schools, several area colleges and universities, 10 labor unions, the Cambridge high schools, the Women’s Neighborhood League of Cambridge and the Pacifist League. Over 150 people were expected to gather in Harvard Yard in protest of the meeting. Quoting a statement made by a student supporter of the Committee for Militant Aid to Britain, the Crimson stated that Parsons and the other two speakers will probably urge that the United States ‘recognize the fact that we are in the war and that whatever pressures may be necessary, the Axis must be defeated.’ What Parsons did say that evening is that Americans basically faced two choices. The first was to accept that even though violent changes were inevitable they would be mitigated from home. From this point of view the outcome of the present war is a matter of quite secondary importance, it will make only a superficial difference anyway. The other choice was for the intervention that he favored. From this other view, Parsons let his audience know that we may be at one of the great turning points in the history of civilization.¹⁸ This rally at which Parsons spoke urging the defense of democracy took place precisely one year and two days before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that ended US isolationism.¹⁹

During the war Parsons published in 1942 an astonishing number of scholarly articles pertaining to the contemporary world strife on the problem of anti-Semitism,²⁰ on a Weberian analysis of Hitlerian Germany’s charismatic type of authority structure,²¹ on the structural factors that made for a precarious democracy in pre-Nazi Germany,²² on social features of fascist movements²³ and on the types of propaganda prevalent in authoritarian and democratic settings.²⁴ By 1944 he was anticipating an Allied victory and put in print his ideas on the postwar restructuring and the democratization of Germany²⁵ and Japan.²⁶

And like many in various quarters of business, government and academe, Parsons was also already looking to the postwar restructuring of municipal government and civic life in the United States, including the industrial and commercial redevelopment of its cities. To this end, he along with four Harvard colleagues—an architect and three social scientists (including his friend, the political theorist Carl J. Friedrich)—in addition to a real estate manager, won funding for their proposed master program of the Greater Boston metropolitan area. And though only the architect had previous experience in planning, all on the team, according to Friedrich, shared a common outlook on social and political problems—an outlook which might perhaps be described as slightly left of center.²⁷ For effective development of the metropolitan area, the team proposed the creation of a Boston Metropolitan Authority as a self-governing federation of all the local government authorities in the area. A Crimson article of 1944 reporting on the team’s Boston Plan focused on the issue of transportation—Twelve to 15 new express highways, radiating from downtown Boston, are among the professors’ suggestions for improving upon Boston’s limited accessibility by automobile—and on residential and recreational development—Many other phases of urban planning are covered in the far-reaching plan, including an extensive new park development, a redesigning of the market district and extensive reforms in municipal taxation.²⁸

But Parsons’s attention soon turned to a different sort of restructuring: the reorganization of the social and behavioral sciences at Harvard by consolidating the disciplines of sociology, social psychology and cultural anthropology. And on 29 January 1946 the Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted to establish a single, comprehensive department of social relations organized along interdisciplinary lines and made Parsons its first chair, a position that he would hold for the next 10 years.

The new department’s formation seems to have gone largely unnoticed by the Crimson, but a few months after its founding an article²⁹ appeared declaiming that undergraduate opinion has won its first postwar victory: the department would not abolish the tutorial system of instruction as it had previously announced but would instead offer modified tutorial sessions for students concentrating in Social Relations. It was an insistent demand on the part of the Committee on General Education as well as undergraduate students that pressed for reversal and, as the article noted, it fell to Parsons as chair to overturn the department’s previous decision against tutorials. Such was the tenor of student demands and dissension at the time.

Decade’s end saw Parsons’s election as president of the American Sociological Association, and for his presidential address he delivered the paper The Prospects of Sociological Theory, which served as a transition between his earlier work and a new phase in the development of his thinking in the field of general theory. For Parsons the basic reason for the importance of general social theorizing is "that the cumulative development of knowledge in a scientific field is a function of the degree of generality of implications by which it is possible to relate findings, interpretations and hypotheses on different levels and in different specific empirical fields to each other."³⁰ Such an organizing framework, or conceptual scheme, was being refined and developed by Parsons and would soon be made public in his landmark volumes Toward a General Theory of Action³¹ and The Social System.³²

1950s

Toward a General Theory of Action and The Social System, published almost simultaneously in 1951, constitute a highly ambitious effort at devising a generalized conceptual scheme through integrative theorizing. Toward a General Theory of Action involves systematic treatment of the interdependence of the three systems of action—the cultural system, the personality system and the social system; its companion volume, The Social System, involves a systematic analysis of the structure and functioning of social systems primarily. These two books constitute a major theoretical breakthrough for Parsons in that fateful year of 1951 and together they comprise one of the most important and far-reaching theoretical statements of twentieth-century social thought.

Almost immediately, however, the volumes were subjected to stinging criticism and mired in controversy. Indeed, shortly after their publication Sorokin wrote a seven-page memorandum, about two hundred copies of which he distributed widely, including to all members of the social relations faculty, accusing Parsons of plagiarism. Sorokin stated that he found in parts of Parsons’s two books a striking concordance to his Russian two-volume System of Sociology that he had written 30 years earlier. The Crimson reproduced a short excerpt from Sorokin’s memo in which he had listed point-by-point similarities between his conceptual perspective and that of Parsons. But in a statement to the Crimson Sorokin was eager to correct any impressions that he was angry about the incident. The newspaper quoted him as saying: I have noticed in the last month that Professor Parsons has made a definite shift from the positions of Max Weber to mine. I only wish that he had credited me in the footnotes.³³

The next day the Crimson printed a follow-up noting that Parsons had reacted to Sorokin’s missive with ambivalence.³⁴ Parsons explained to the daily that Sorokin’s framework concerning the concepts of personality, culture and society had been part of an ongoing general discussion among numerous sociologists and that it had been merely a regrettable oversight that he had not credited Sorokin in his books. Whatever bad feelings may have lingered, Sorokin, at least in the pages of the Crimson, seemed to want to defuse the controversy he had started. In a letter to the newspaper he backpedaled, stating that he had expressed deep satisfaction about the similarity of his and Parsons’s theoretical approaches and that their convergence signaled a very good omen for the emergence and development of Harvard sociology.³⁵

Parsons’s next book Working Papers in the Theory of Action, written in collaboration with Robert F. Bales and Edward A. Shils, led to another phase in the development of his systems–functional theory and in particular the pattern variables and the AGIL scheme.³⁶ Though Parsons had acquired a keen interest in the ideas of Sigmund Freud since the late 1930s, this interest culminated in the 1950s with its most obvious display in Working Papers, particularly in the first paper where he places the idea of the superego in the context of social systems, and in the last paper where he further develops the paradigm of social control as demonstrated in psychotherapy.³⁷

At the time that Parsons and his colleagues were preparing Working Papers, the Crimson ran a piece reporting on Parsons’s announcement that Anna Freud would be offering an undergraduate noncredit course in the department of social relations during the fall of 1952.³⁸ Parsons was all hands-on regarding her visit: not only did he invite Freud to Harvard but also he determined which students to admit into her course and even introduced each of her lectures, which were on the psychoanalytic theory of child development.³⁹

By 1956 Parsons was at the pinnacle of his career, and the Crimson assigned a reporter Peter R. Breggin (who later became famous as a psychiatrist critical of psychopharmacology) to interview him for a 950-word article with the imperious title The Empire Builder.⁴⁰ The profile basically consists of anonymous sources commenting on Parsons and his work, interspersed with a few scattered responses from Parsons himself. The piece opens with a sampling of sensational reactions to Parsons’s oeuvre:

A professor scoffs, "He’s groping for a comprehensive theory of the universe with Newton’s Principia as his ideal. A social relations tutor observes, His followers are as avid as Marxists." And Pravda replies, He’s a tool of capitalistic warmongers. But while the scholarly tempest brews, Professor of Sociology Talcott Parsons answers for himself—Heavens, let’s not go off the deep end.

Breggin observes that while there was high interest in Parsons’s work, hardly anyone seemed to understand it—with some claiming that sociology was not yet ready for such broad generalizations and others rejecting it on grounds that it could not be empirically tested. But everyone seems impressed with the vastness of Parsons’s knowledge and his theoretical analyses of such specific subjects as the development of American romantic love, the causes of McCarthyism, professional roles in medicine and the family unit in America, writes Breggin.

As for Parsons’s literary style—the eponymous Parsonian Prose as it was sardonically referred to by the Harvard faculty—the newspaper reported that the publisher of Toward a General Theory of Action had to call in a graduate student to clarify the writing and quotes an unidentified professor as saying, If I were [Parsons], I’d spend a whole year revising each book. He just doesn’t stop to sweat out expressions.

Concerning Parsons’s personality—or impersonality—Breggin writes:

Despite his popularity, many feel Parsons presents a cold, rather impersonal exterior. As one graduate student in sociology explains, while his overt behavioral manifestations are not warm, his great interest in students indicates otherwise. Nearly all who know him attribute his reserve to excessive modesty and shyness. […] Parsons’s intense absorption in his studies may further account for his apparent impersonality. Any questions directed at his personal accomplishments are invariably answered with generalized evaluations of progress in sociology. When asked to pinpoint a significant experience in his life, he brushes over a few nice and heartwarming honors, and emphasizes the sheer excitement of being in the middle of what seem to be important new ideas.

Breggin goes on to state that Parsons was coauthoring Economy and Society and without offering specifics, adds that it was already embroiled in controversy. The article then ends with a quote from another unnamed professor declaring that no one can be a serious sociologist without being influenced by Talcott Parsons.

The Crimson rounded out the decade of its mention of Parsons in its pages with two announcements on public talks that he gave early in 1959 and that reveal the catholicity of his interests in sociology.⁴¹ The first of these was for an upcoming event at which Parsons was to deliver a couple of lectures at the Harvard Medical School on the doctor–patient relationship. The initial lecture was titled Social Aspects of Illness and the Role of the Physician and the description of the other was not given. The daily stated that the Medical School would sponsor the event in an effort to communicate recent findings in the promising field of medical sociology to a wider audience. The other article reported on a talk that Parsons had given the previous evening on religious pluralism in which he explained that the distinctions among denominations can be attributed to occupational, communal and political differences in society. Despite this diversity, however, Parsons notes that the various religions have more in common than is typically assumed and predicts that there would be no radically different change in religion in the near future. But predictions were not Parsons’s strong suit and little could he have anticipated what the coming decade would bring—to him personally and to society in general.

1960s

The dawn of the 1960s set in motion a series of mass movements, protest marches, boycotts, sit-ins and other forms of social activism that were beginning to disrupt the white-bread 1950s and indelibly alter the character of American society. Already, sociologists like C. Wright Mills had been condemning the political complacency that had pervaded the post–World War II period. The new decade would give rise to the New Left and other progressive social movements ultimately culminating in the events of 1968, the year of student revolutions, that spawned the disobedient generation of young sociologists who not only transformed the discipline but also its theoretical endeavors; endeavors that however profitable in themselves were to deliberately or inadvertently, ignore, simplify or distort Parsons’s contributions.⁴²

But all this was still in the distant future, and in 1960 the Crimson ran a story about a lecture that Parsons had given in defense of social conformity; a sacrifice of freedom to be sure, but one, Parsons said, that is essential to the realization of the higher freedoms most people value.⁴³ The article opens with the line, Writers and sociologists who have denounced increasing conformity in American society received some quiet criticism yesterday afternoon from Talcott Parsons, professor of Sociology. Parsons was credited with pointing out that complex forms of social organization are only possible when everyone abides by the rules of the game. The article ends with Parsons explaining the beneficial exchange of freedoms through conformity: [I]n return for abandoning our freedom (for example, to treat our own diseases) we obtain some other freedoms, such as the freedom of action which comes from being healthier.

All this support for conformity notwithstanding, it is disingenuous to cast Parsons, as some from the disobedient generation have done, as an advocate of propriety and an apologist for the status quo. Indeed, in 1961 the Crimson posted an account more revelatory of Parsons’s liberal political leanings.⁴⁴ The newspaper stated that 19 Harvard professors had recently signed an American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) petition advocating the abolition of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) that had for years been investigating US citizens and organizations suspected of involvement in subversive and disloyal activities. In fact, Parsons himself had previously been the subject of an extensive security-type investigation by the FBI, during 1952–54, accusing him of being the leader of a Communist cell at Harvard.⁴⁵ The Crimson article relayed that the ACLU petition charged HUAC with abridgement of academic freedom and of being unrelenting in its harassment of teachers. The signatories to the ACLU statement declared that they found it deplorable that many teachers, in the colleges and universities, as well as in the public schools, have grown timid about stating, even for classroom discussion, ideas which someone later might interpret as subversive. Along with Parsons, some of the other Harvard professors who signed the ACLU document included Oscar Handlin, Caleb Foote and Mark DeWolfe Howe.

Another document of protest, one endorsing multicultural integration, that Parsons signed around that time was an advertisement published in the local newspaper of Belmont, the Boston suburb where he lived. The Crimson reported that more than 350 residents of Belmont, including over a dozen members of the Harvard faculty and administration, had signed A Declaration of Fair Housing in Belmont.⁴⁶ The advertisement was intended to show that in any given neighborhood of the town there would be support for the idea of housing without discrimination in regard to race, religion or national origin.

Yet another protest in which Parsons was involved, this one back at Harvard, pertains to a letter he wrote to the editors of the Crimson at the height of the Vietnam War, which he opposed.⁴⁷ Again on the subject of academic freedom, he objects to the armed forces determining the curriculum content for ROTC instruction and to the Pentagon appointing ROTC faculty according to its own standards. I think that these two invasions of University independence (academic freedom) are out of place, writes Parsons, and that such elements of ‘training’ of officers in the armed services as there is, should be abolished. But in the same opinion piece he also argues against the resolution by Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) that had been presented at a faculty meeting calling for ROTC’s complete expulsion from Harvard on moral grounds, charging that ROTC training supports America’s policy of suppressing popular revolutions. Parsons opposed the SDS resolution for the same reason that he had previously opposed HUAC: The rationale for such a position is not generated inside the academic world from academic considerations, but would be imposed upon it from without by a particular politically committed group. Parsons fought against all forms of doctrinal orthodoxy—from the Right and the Left—that he saw as interfering with the academic affairs of the university.

Parsons along with Gerald M. Platt, then lecturer in sociology, had for some years been conducting an empirical study of faculty members in American universities. According to the Crimson, the research project that had begun in 1964 was now being completed in the spring of 1967.⁴⁸ This pilot study revealed, among other things, that the large research-oriented university was the prevalent model in American higher education, that faculty members did not want to specialize excessively and that they preferred a quasi-democratic structure of governance where they could have a say in the running of their universities. Parsons and Platt intended to substantiate these and other findings in an expanded study that they expected to complete in 1969. Their extended efforts eventually culminated in the magisterial The American University, which is an empirical, theoretical and highly technical analysis of the organizational phenomenon they call the cognitive complex.⁴⁹

To their credit Parsons and Platt give due consideration to the dynamics of student dissent prevalent among undergraduates at the time and identify several of their discontents that implicate the university. These discontents of students stemmed generally from university complicity in societal involvements judged immoral, the competitive character of academia, student powerlessness and the preventing of self-expression and self-fulfillment.⁵⁰

Yet, for all his efforts at a time of trying to understand student-motivated behaviors, the then 67-year-old Parsons, when the symbolic slogan among young people was Never trust anyone over 30, could never feel completely at ease with the new generation’s sentiments and actions. This disquiet is illustrated in a story the Crimson ran relating events at the weekly social relations cocktail hour one afternoon in 1969.⁵¹ The article opens with: Talcott Parsons, professor of Sociology, walked into the Soc Rel sherry party yesterday afternoon and said, with significant experiential overtones, ‘Is this something special, or is this the same old Friday afternoon? Parsons and the handful of faculty members who showed up found that all the chairs in the lounge had been moved out into the hallway and all the tables had been turned upside down. Some of the social relations graduate students, in an attempt to upend the traditional party atmosphere, were sitting on the floor with their shoes off, drinking wine, eating bread and beating out rhythms on upturned trash cans. What we are aiming toward, a student explained, is a thing where people are more into grass than alcohol, where there’s more flowing speech than barking, where the atmosphere is smooth and relaxed, not sharp and biting. Parsons and his colleagues were not the only ones who felt uncomfortable at the new-style sherry hour as about half of the 40 students in attendance did not remove their shoes or sit on the floor. The Crimson recounts that Parsons and another professor did not participate but spent the time chatting near the door. Long a keen professional observer of students (both high school and university), Parsons nevertheless kept his distance from all forms of student revolt, and during the late 1960s