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Reply to Professor Knight

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2014

Talcott Parsons*
Affiliation:
Harvard University
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Extract

It is, perhaps, at least partly an unfortunate consequence of the pressure for brevity in the formulation of titles that Professor Knight begins his critical discussion of my article with the statement that though it “in terms of bulk consists of sound and valuable insights” it is “utterly misleading with respect to the main question at issue.” It may be permissible to suggest that for Professor Knight and myself the main questions at issue are not identical, as so often happens in intellectual discussion. To help clarify the question I shall attempt to state more explicitly than was done in the article itself what it was designed to accomplish.

The aim of this tentative outline was overwhelmingly positive rather than critical. It contained, in the introductory paragraphs, only sufficient statement of the historical and interdisciplinary aspects of the problem of “self-interest” to give a very broad orientation to the setting of the problem. The bulk of the article, which it may be hoped includes at least partly the “sound and valuable insights” of which Professor Kjiight speaks, was devoted to the outlining of what seems to the author, in the light of the present state of development both of economic and of sociological theory, to be the closest attainable approach, in such broad outline, to a satisfactorily usable account of the subject.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association 1940

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References

1 In The Structure of Social Action (New York, 1937).Google Scholar

2 Defined on page 190 of the article.

3 See above p. 464.

4 See Structure of Social Action, chaps, II, III.

5 Wants and Activities in Marshall” (Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 46, pp. 101–40).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 See the author's article, Reflections on the ‘Nature and Significance of Economics’” (Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 48, pp. 511–45).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 As shown by his emphasis (pp. 461) that the import of such words as “self-interest” is primarily ethical. I am prepared to grant this as true of most usage, but not for purposes of my own technical analysis.