Classical Sociology

CHAPTER 9
TALCOTT PARSONS ON
THE SOCIAL SYSTEM
Introduction: Interpretative Difficulties
The general problem of The Social System is that it is both one of the most
influential and systematic textbooks of modern sociology, and one of the
most ferociously criticized books. Naturally its author has had a rather
similar career. Parsons’s first major publication – The Structure of Social
Action (1937) – has proved in the long run to have been one of the most
coherent and profound attacks on utilitarian theories of social action in the
social sciences, thereby establishing Parsons as, among other intellectual
roles, a leading contributor to the analytical problems of economic theory.
His next major book The Social System (1951), along with Toward a General
Theory of Action (Parsons and Shils, 1951), established Parsons as the central
figure in so-called structural-functionalism, which, as a style of theoretical
work, has been generally condemned as hyper-abstract, logically faulted,
and conservative. One paradox in the life of Parsons is, therefore, that here
we find an author of two major contributions to modern sociology which
are held to be mutually exclusive positions. This contradiction also partly
explains why, despite Parsons’s very obvious stature as a modern thinker,
‘the conventional attitude towards his theory is one of critical aloofness’
(Munch, 1981: 710).
The purpose of this chapter on Parsons’s The Social System is to see
whether this contradiction or tension in fact exists and whether it can be
resolved in any way. Because Parsons’s prose (especially in his later work)
is notoriously dense and cumbersome, my aim here is also to facilitate the
reader’s access to the text. One of Parsons’s severest critics once wrote that
Parsons’s work is ‘full of sham scientific slang devoid of clear meaning,
precision and elementary elegance’ (Sorokin, 1996: 56). While I do not
share that view of Parsons’s work, it would be misleading to pretend The
Social System is an exciting piece of prose or an elementary introduction to
sociology. Part of the task of this chapter is, therefore, to answer the question:
why read Parsons?
Those who are already familiar with Parsons’s work will note the irony
of this question. Parsons’s The Structure of Social Action starts with the notorious
question, adopted from Crane Brinton’s English Political Thought in
the Nineteenth Century: ‘who now reads Herbert Spencer?’ The answer was
of course, nobody, but, since Parsons’s subsequent work had at least some
resemblance to Spencer’s functionalism (Peel, 1971), Parsons’s own question
was ironically prescient. Fortunately, the answer to the question 'who