{"id":103244,"date":"2017-12-11T12:00:30","date_gmt":"2017-12-11T12:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=103244"},"modified":"2017-12-10T16:07:09","modified_gmt":"2017-12-10T16:07:09","slug":"talcott-parsons-13-dec-1902-8-may-1979-the-promise-of-transdisciplinarity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2017\/12\/talcott-parsons-13-dec-1902-8-may-1979-the-promise-of-transdisciplinarity\/","title":{"rendered":"Talcott Parsons (13 Dec 1902 – 8 May 1979): The Promise of Transdisciplinarity"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Talcott Parsons was a leading US sociologist usually considered a member of the structural-functional analysis school.\u00a0 Some of his major theoretical writings are The Structure of Social Action <\/em>(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1937), Essays in Sociological Theory Pure and Applied <\/em>(Glencoe, The Free Press, 1949), The Social System <\/em>(Glencoe: The Free Press, 1951), and Talcott Parsons and Edward Shils (Editors). Toward a General Theory of Action <\/em>(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954).\u00a0 Parsons taught at Harvard University and was the doctoral thesis advisor of students who went on to became important figures in the same tradition such as Robert K. Merton Social Theory and Social Structure <\/em>(Glencoe: The Free Press, 1949), Marion J. Levy Jr The Structure of Society<\/em> (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952) and Clifford Geertz The Interpretation of Cultures <\/em>(New York: Basic Books, 1973). He also had students who went on to have radically different approaches and who became strong critics of Parsons\u2019 approach such as C. Wright Mills in his The Sociological Imagination <\/em>(New York: Oxford University Press, 1959).\u00a0 Parsons\u2019 approach was also attacked by George Gurvitch (1894-1965) a Russian-born French sociologist who spent the Second World War years in New York City and became knowledgeable with the schools of US sociology.<\/p>\n

There are two aspects of Parsons\u2019 work that merit attention.\u00a0 The first is the role of Parsons in introducing and championing the work of the German sociologist Max Weber in the USA.\u00a0 The second is the role of Parsons in helping create transdisciplinarity in area studies in the USA.<\/p>\n

Parsons was unusual for his time in that he did all his graduate university studies in Europe. Many American students would spend a year at a European university but because of differences in degree programs would do their degree work within a US university.\u00a0 However, Parsons did his MA at the London School of Economics and his doctorate at the University of Heidelberg. In London, he studied under R.H. Tawney who was interested in the link between Calvinist Protestant thought and the development of capitalism.\u00a0 This was a topic of great interest to Parsons who came from a long line of Calvinist ministers who had gone from England to New England in search of religious liberty in the late 1600s.\u00a0 Parsons\u2019 father was a Protestant minister as well as president of a University, and Parsons kept a life-long interest in liberal Protestant theology.\u00a0 In London, he also participated in a seminar led by the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski in which also participated as students E.E. Evans-Pritchard and Meyer Fortes who went on to be the leading British anthropologists on African societies. Parsons always kept an interest in anthropology and some of his students went on to be professional anthropologists.<\/p>\n

In Heidelberg, he studied under Alfred Weber (Max Weber\u2019s brother) and got to know the widow of Max Weber who was a champion of Max Weber\u2019s thought.\u00a0 Parsons was taken by Max Weber\u2019s thinking, especially the analysis of the link between religious thought and economic organization.\u00a0 When Parsons returned to the USA, he started translating Weber and then getting his colleagues like Edward Shils and his students like C. Wright Mills to translate works of Weber.\u00a0 Thus Max Weber went from being virtually unknown in the USA to being probably the most-often quoted sociologist in the USA.<\/p>\n

After his doctorate, Parsons went to teach at Harvard, which is a leading New England University.\u00a0 In 1931, sociology which had always been taught in the Department of Social Ethics became the basis for a new three-man Department of Sociology with the Russian-born Sociologist Pitrim Sorokin as chairman.\u00a0 Sorokin and Parsons did not get along; both men had a high opinion of his own work, little tolerance for the work of others, and no sense of humor.\u00a0 Parsons, who was always very good at university administration infighting was able to have created a new Department of Social Relations with himself as chair.\u00a0 There he was able to develop a transdiciplinary approach by bringing in people from economics, anthropology, and psychology. By the late 1930s Parsons had become very interested in the work of S. Freud and was trained and underwent analysis at the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute.<\/p>\n

One of the important ideas that Parsons had drawn from Max Weber was the idea of the \u201cethic of responsibility\u201d. What distinguishes responsibility from merely good intentions is the ability to foresee as far as possible the consequences of action and to make decisions based on this foresight. Thus, Parsons from his years of study in Germany continued to follow closely political evolution there.\u00a0 He was a \u201cpremature\u201d anti-Nazi and helped find jobs in US universities for German professors forced out of teaching by the Nazi government.\u00a0 At Harvard, he set up a working group on the study of Germany in order to understand how the Nazis had come to power.\u00a0 During the war, the group was transformed into a group to study what should be done after the war and to train people for the occupation of Germany which was to follow.<\/p>\n

Likewise, as the US entered the war against Japan, Parsons organized working groups to study the societies of Japan and China.\u00a0 While there had been people who specialized in the arts of the Far East in US universities, the study of the structure of their societies was largely unknown.\u00a0 Harvard became a leading center for the study of Japan and China.\u00a0 To his credit, Parsons continued his interest in Japan after the end of the war. One of the last things he did before his death was a lecture tour of Japanese universities.<\/p>\n

With his responsibility for training people for the occupation of Germany, he had gone back several times to Germany to interview and to help set up sociological studies.\u00a0 During these trips he had interviewed Soviet prisoners who had been members of the anti-Stalinist Vlasov movement \u2014 what some have called \u2018Stalinists without Stalin\u2019.\u00a0 Parsons felt that relations with the Soviet Union would go from bad to worse and that Americans had little knowledge of Russian society.\u00a0 Thus he pushed for the creation of a Soviet\/Russian studies program at Harvard which became a leading center for Russian studies in the USA.<\/p>\n

Parsons died in 1979 on a trip to Germany to celebrate the 50th<\/sup> anniversary of his Heidelberg degree.\u00a0 While he had a difficult personality and relations with people who did not agree with him were often tense or broken off when Parsons realized that the other could not be converted, he did make important contributions to the study of society with his emphasis on a \u201ctheory of action\u201d.\u00a0 Most important, I believe, was his ability to create working groups focused on crucial world areas with a transdisciplinary approach which acknowledges that there is no hierarchy of research disciplines.\u00a0 Rather transdisciplinarity transgresses these boundaries to provide original and creative outcomes.<\/p>\n

____________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>Ren\u00e9 Wadlow is a member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation\u2019s Task Force on the Middle East, president and U.N. representative (Geneva) of the Association of\u00a0World\u00a0Citizens,<\/em> and <\/em>editor of <\/em>Transnational Perspectives. He is a member of the <\/em>TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment<\/a><\/em>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There are two aspects of Parsons\u2019 work that merit attention. The first is his role in introducing and championing the work of the German sociologist Max Weber in the USA. The second is helping create transdisciplinarity in area studies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":55053,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[214],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-103244","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-biographies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103244","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=103244"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103244\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/55053"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103244"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=103244"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=103244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}