Herbert Gintis on Talcott Parsons

“Sociology did have a period of core theory consolidation, in the person of Talcott Parsons, whose contributions in the three decades starting in 1937 were systematically geared towards synthesizing the greats of traditional sociology (Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, and Vilfredo Pareto), as well as indicating precisely how the sister disciplines of psychology, economics, and political science might articulate with core sociological theory. There is no doubt but that Parsons' body of theory is seriously flawed, but there was much more than enough to build on in forging a core sociological theory. Parsons correctly started with the division of social life into roles occupied by actors who internalize the norms and values associated with these roles. However, he made the mistake of identifying the rational actor model of economic theory with Homo economicus, the socially isolated selfish material maximizer. It is true that this is how the rational actor model was depicted in economic theory, but only by happenstance, not intrinsic logicality. Extending the rational actor model to include moral elements as well as material elements, self-regard as well as other-regard, would have given Parsons exactly the tool he needed to create a core sociological theory. However, he did not take this step, probably because (a) Pareto had convinced him that the economics/sociology split was just the norms and values/material self-interest split, and (b) he was a poor mathematician can couldn't handle the sophistication of the rational actor model. So he moved on to structural-functionalism, which is useful and insightful, but quite incapable of supporting an analytically cogent sociology.”

“My analysis of Parson's failure, however, was not the reaction of other leading sociologists of the time. Rather, Parsons was bitterly criticized and rejected whole cloth. The offenders---and I here choose my words carefully---were mostly crusading left-wing sociologists who considered sociology an instrument of social change first, and a science only second. They include Alvin Gouldner, Theda Skocpol, George Homans, Lewis Coser, Ralf Dahrendorf, C. Wright Mills, Tom Bottomore, and many others. These pseudo-theorists in fact had no idea what social theory should look like, and railed against Parsons because he did not directly deal with social oppression and his language was not inherently emancipatory. To my mind, this is like criticizing da Vinci's studies of human anatomy because they don't deal with cancer and the plague---infinitely shortsighted and even risible. Habermas and others criticized Parsons on the grounds that systems theory is inherently hostile to action theory. This too is just a terrible mistake, since Parsons' theory of action was from the very first a pillar of his social theory. And what have these critics given us in place of Parsons' core theory? Some entertaining stories and a little credible philosophy, but nothing in the form of social theory.”

“Parsons, who published his first synthesizing works in economics journals, had always seen himself as a synthesizer who might do for sociology what Samuelson did for economics. Why did he fail?Part of the problem was undoubtedly the mind-set of sociologists of his time (and ours), which was to attach political messages to rather pedestrian observational and statistical material, and to reject any notion that there might be a "general theory" of sociology. But part of the problem was also Parsons' failure to articulate the close affinities of biological and economic theory with sociology.”