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104 P. F. Lazarsfeld
taken we must seek separately the efficient cause which precedes it and the func-
tion it fulfills’. French students of Durkheim followed up his ideas, but these
ideas really became best known internationally in the 1920s through the work
of British anthropologists. Their positions are well known. Malinowski stated
that social facts could be explained by their ‘function, by the part which they
play within the integral system of culture.’ And Radcliffe-Brown was sure that
‘a social system has a certain kind of unity which we may speak of as a functional
unity’. Social analysis of a particular ‘social usage’ consists in showing ‘the
contribution it makes to the total social life as a functioning of the total social
system’.
The entry into sociology came about through a collaboration of Talcott
Parsons, then a young teacher at Harvard, with his senior colleague, L. J.
Henderson, a biologist, who jointly studied and admired the books of Wilfred0
Pareto. From the Harvard group a galaxy of sociologists emerged, mainly
Americans now in their fifties (Davis, Merton, Moore, Whyte, etc.) but also
some Europeans, like Bourricaud. The ‘official’ publication for this period is
Parsons’ The Social System (1951 ; the introduction explains the relatively late
date of publication).
The position of the younger men was established in Robert Merton’s ‘Mani-
fest and Latent Functions’.60 It represents an historical turning point inasmuch
as it takes a functional position but at the same time tries to carve out yet
unsolved problems. Practically every subsequent publication quotes Merton’s
paper. It consists of two main parts. The first summarizes and criticizes what
one might call early radical functionalism. It may be reduced to three prevailing
postulates:
a. Specific social items are functional for the entire social system;
b. All social items fulal sociological functions;
c. The items are consequently indispensable.
A careful reading of Merton’s text shows that he does not at all claim that such
radical functionalism ever existed. He constructs a kind of ideal type by quoting
specific sentences mainly from anthropologists and often stated in their polemics
against historical ethnography and diffusion theory. Merton himself always
adds others of their statements which show that at best they considered such
postulates as tentative ideas which deserve exploration. His ten pages are often
cited as the main reference to what early functionalism was. Actually, it would
be more correct to say that Merton paints the picture of what early functionalism
was imputed to be by those who read the pioneers superficially.
The second part of the essay consists of a ‘paradigm for functional analysis in
sociology’. It consists of I I parts which codify functional procedures and simul-
taneously raise problems arising in their application. To give the general idea,
I quote one of the II elements which I shall be using in a subsequent context.61
No. 6. Concepts of the mechanisms through which functions are fulfilled.
Functional analysis in sociology, as in other disciplines like physiology and psychol-
ogy, calls for a ‘concrete and detailed‘ account of the mechanisms which operate to
perform a designated function. This refers, not to psychological but to social, mech-
anisms (e.g, role-segmentation, insulation of institutional demands, hierarchic order-