Talcott Parsons

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Talcott Parsons : biography

December 13, 1902 – May 8, 1979

1940s: Intellectual exchange with Schutz, Vögelin, Dodd and other debates

Parsons met Alfred Schutz (Schütz) during the rationality seminar, which he conducted jointly together with Joseph Schumpeter at Harvard in the spring of 1940. Schutz has been close to Edmund Husserl and was deeply embedded in his phenomenological philosophy.Alfred Schutz’s phenomenology is not a simple "copy" of Husserl yet it is still pretty close; how close is a debated issues. For one discussion see Helmuth R. Wagner, "The Limitation of Phenomenology: Alfred Schutz’s critical dialogue with Edmund Husserl." Husserl Studies Vol.1. No.1. December 1984. Schutz who had been born in Vienna and had moved to the US in 1939, had for years worked on the project of developing a phenomenological sociology primarily based on an attempt to find some fixpoint between Husserl’s method and Weber’s sociology.Alfred Schutz, Der sinnhafte Aufbau der Sociale Welt: eine Einleitung in die verstehende Soziology. Wien: J. Springer, 1932. The work appeared in English under the title: Alfred Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World. Northwestern University Press, 1967. Parsons had asked Schutz to give a presentation at the rationality seminar, which he did on April 13, 1940 and Parsons and Schutz had lunched together afterward. Schutz was fascinated with Parsons theory, which he regarded as the state of the art of social theory and he had written an evaluation of Parsons’ theory which he kindly asked Parsons to comment on. This led to a short but intensive correspondence, which generally revealed that the gap between Schutz’s sociologized phenomenology and Parsons concept of voluntaristic action was far too great.Richard Grathoff (ed.) The Correspondence between Alfred Schutz and Talcott Parsons: The Theory of Social Action. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1978 (German version, 1977). From Parsons’ point of view Schutz’s position was too speculative and subjectivist of nature and he felt that Schutz was essentially a philosopher, who tended to reduce social processes to the articulation of a Lebenswelt consciousness, while for Parsons the defining edge of human life was action as a catalyst for historical change. For Parsons it was essential that sociology as a science should pay strong attention to the subjective element of action but it should never become completely absorbed in it, since the purpose of a science was to explain causal relationships, whether by covering laws or by other types of explanatory devices. Schutz’s basic argument was that sociology cannot ground itself and that epistemology was not a luxury but a necessity for the social scientist. Parsons agreed but stressed the pragmatic need to demarcate science and philosophy and insisted moreover that the grounding of a conceptual scheme for empirical theory construction cannot aim at absolute solutions but need to take a sensible stock-taking of the epistemological balance at each point in time. However, there is no doubt that the two men shared many basic assumptions about the nature of social theory, which have made the debate simmering ever since.Bennetta Jules-Rosette, "Talcott Parsons and the Phenomenological Tradition in Sociology: An Unresolved Debate." Human Studies, vol.3. 1980. pp. 311–330.Matthew M. Chew, "The Theoretical Quandary of Subjectivity: An Intellectual Historical Note on the Action Theories of Talcott Parsons and Alfred Schutz." Review of European Studies. Vol.1.No.1. June 2009. By request from Mrs. Ilse Schutz, after her husband’s death, Parsons gave on July 23, 1971 permission to the publication of the correspondence between him and Schutz. Parsons also wrote "A 1974 Retrospective Perspective" to the correspondence, where he characterized his own position as a "Kantian point of view" and still found that Schutz strong dependence of Husserl’s "phenomenological reduction" would make it very difficult to reach the kind of "conceptual scheme," which Parsons found essential for theory building in the social sciences.Talcott Parsons, "A 1974 Retrospective Perspective." in Richard Grathoff (ed.) The Correspondence of Alfred Schutz and Talcott Parsons: The Theory of Social Action. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1978. pp. 115–124.