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III - Parsons on the road to normativist functionalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2014

Hans Joas
Affiliation:
Universitat Erfurt, Germany
Wolfgang Knöbl
Affiliation:
Georg-August-Universität, Göttingen, Germany
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Summary

The Structure of Social Action, which appeared in 1937, attracted a great deal of criticism precisely because Parsons had such great ambitions for it (see Charles Camic, ‘Structure aft er 50 Years: The Anatomy of a Charter’ and Hans Joas, The Creativity of Action, pp. 18ff. for comprehensive overviews). Some of the criticisms were made immediately after the book appeared, but many only after it had become very well known. As we pointed out in the previous lecture, Structure was received rather slowly at first. Over the course of time, however, coming to terms with Parsons became increasingly central to others' attempts to explain and contextualize their own equally ambitious theories, and inevitably criticisms became ever more systematic and comprehensive. In what follows, we shall present to you those criticisms that were of the greatest significance to the development of theory; in the second part of the lecture, we examine whether and to what extent Parsons answered or perhaps even anticipated these criticisms, as he attempted to refine his theoretical edifice.

If we look first at the debate on the so-called convergence thesis, it is apparent that it addressed a number of key problems; we examine these here. We can understand the sometimes passionate way in which scholars have grappled with this thesis only if we grasp that we are not dealing with a purely historiographical problem summed up by the question ‘Whose interpretation of the classical figures is (at least somewhat) better?’ Parsons claimed to have produced a synthesis of the work of these leading figures.

Type
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Social Theory
Twenty Introductory Lectures
, pp. 43 - 67
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2009

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