In light of the increasing dominance of the Parsonian school in the 1940s and 1950s, first in the United States and then internationally, one might have presumed that the age of utilitarian intellectual movements was finally past. Parsons' incisive arguments had demonstrated the inadequacy of utility-oriented models of action; in his first major work, The Structure of Social Action, he had already shown how the edifice of utilitarian ideas had disintegrated from within and how leading theoreticians from various disciplines had turned away from this theoretical model as a result. According to Parsons, this was because utilitarianism had never managed to conceptualize the existence of a stable social order in consistent and non-contradictory fashion. After this great feat of criticizing utilitarianism comprehensively yet precisely, there was some justification for Parsons' view that it was no longer possible to take models of utility-oriented action seriously as theoretical approaches within sociology. He did not dispute the applicability of these models to the discipline of economics. But he considered them unacceptable as an integrative theory of the social sciences.

Despite all that, utilitarianism underwent something of a renaissance in the late 1950s; its supporters even launched massive counter-attacks on the edifice of Parsonian thought. One of the reasons for the revival of an intellectual movement that had been presumed dead was that the concept of ‘utility’, which was constitutive of utilitarianism and gave it its name, was multifaceted and thus open to interpretation. Some believed that Parsons' objections could be got round if one understood ‘utility’ somewhat differently.