Theorist at work: Talcott Parsons and the Carnegie project on theory, 1949-1951

Journal of the History of Ideas

Volumn 71, Issue 2, 2010, Pages 287-311

  Isaac, Joel ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 77952156690     PISSN: 00225037     EISSN: 10863222     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jhi.0.0079     Document Type: Article

References (116)

1. My account of this meeting is drawn from George Caspar Homans, Coming to My Senses: The Autobiography of a Sociologist (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1984), 303.
2. Talcott Parsons and Edward A. Shils, eds., Toward a General Theory of Action: Theoretical Foundations for the Social Sciences (1951; New York: Harper & Row, 1962).
3. See Parsons et al., "Some Fundamental Categories of the Theory of Action: A General Statement," in Toward a General Theory of Action, 3-29. The signatories from the DSR faculty were Parsons, Gordon Allport, Clyde Kluckhohn, Henry A. Murray, Jr., Robert Sears, and Samuel A. Stouffer. The remaining signatories came from outside of the DSR: Richard Sheldon (Harvard's Russian Research Center), Edward Shils (University of Chicago), and Edward C. Tolman (University of California).
4. Talcott Parsons, "Preface," in Toward a General Theory of Action, v.
5. Talcott Parsons and Edward A. Shils, with the assistance of James Olds, "Values, Motives, and Systems of Action," in Toward a General Theory of Action, 50-51.
6. Clifford Geertz, "Passage and Accident: A Life of Learning," in Geertz, Available Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 8.
7. Homans, Coming to My Senses, 302.
8. Lawrence T. Nichols, "Social Relations Undone: Disciplinary Divergence and Departmental Politics at Harvard, 1946-1970," The American Sociologist 29 (1998): 92-94.
9. Jamie Cohen-Cole, "Thinking About Thinking in Cold War America" (Ph.D. Dissertation, Princeton University, 2003), 24-73.
10. Homans, Coming to My Senses, 303.
11. See Nichols, "Social Relations Undone," 90-91.
12. Bernard Barber, "Parsons' Second Project: The Social System. Sources, Development, and Limitations," The American Sociologist 29 (1998): 81.
13. Howard Brick, "Talcott Parsons' 'Shift Away from Economics', 1937-1946," Journal of American History 87 (2000): 498.
14. Department and Laboratory of Social Relations, Harvard University, Department and Laboratory of Social Relations, Harvard University: The First Decade, 1946-1956 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University, 1956), 34.
15. Talcott Parsons, "Clyde Kluckhohn and the Integration of Social Science," in Culture and Life: Essays in Memory of Clyde Kluckhohn, ed. Walter W. Taylor, John L. Fisher, and Evon Z. Vogt (Carbondale/Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973), 32.
16. idem, "On Building Social System Theory: A Personal History," Daedalus 99 (1970): 843.
17. Talcott Parsons, The Structure of Social Action: A Study in Social Theory with Special Reference to a Group of Recent European Writers (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1937).
18. Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, The Politics of Knowledge: The Carnegie Corporation, Philanthropy, and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 166-175
19. Jamie Cohen-Cole, "Instituting the Science of Mind: Intellectual Economies and Disciplinary Exchange at Harvard's Center for Cognitive Studies," British Journal for the History of Science 40 (2007): 573-578
20. See Jeffrey C. Alexander The Modern Reconstruction of Classical Thought, Vol.4: Talcott Parsons (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).
21. Charles Camic, "Introduction: Talcott Parsons before The Structure of Social Action," in Talcott Parsons: The Early Essays, ed. Charles Camic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), ix-lxix.
22. Uta C. Gerhardt, Talcott Parsons: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
23. Renee Fox, Victor M. Lidz, and Harold Bershady, eds., After Parsons: A Theory of Social Action for the Twenty-First Century (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2005).
24. See Howard Brick, Transcending Capitalism: Visions of a New Society in Modern American Thought (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006), 121-151
25. Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 72-94.
26. Hunter Crowther-Heyck, Herbert A. Simon: The Bounds of Reason in Modern America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 99-112.
27. See Brick, ''Talcott Parsons' 'Shift Away From Economics' '': 497-509.
28. Talcott Parsons, Talcott Parsons on National Socialism, ed. Uta Gerhardt (New York: Aldine, 1943).
29. William Buxton, Talcott Parsons and the Capitalist Nation-State: Political Sociology as a Strategic Vocation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), 81-145.
30. Samuel Z. Klausner, ''The Bid to Nationalize American Social Science,'' in The Nationalization of the Social Sciences, ed. Samuel Z. Klausner and Victor M. Lidz (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), 3-39.
31. Barber, ''Parsons' Second Project,'' 79-82.
32. Nichols, ''Social Relations Undone'': 84-86.
33. Talcott Parsons, The Social System (1951; Glencoe, Il.: Free Press, 1964).
34. idem, ''On Building Social Systems Theory,'' 844.
35. C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959).
36. Alvin Gouldner, The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (London: Heinemann, 1971).
37. See, e.g., Gerhardt, Talcott Parsons.
38. Brick, Transcending Capitalism, 135-151.
39. William J. Buxton and Lawrence T. Nichols, ''Talcott Parsons and the 'Far East' at Harvard, 1941-1948: Comparative Institutions and National Policy,'' The American Sociologist 31 (2000): 5-17.
40. Peter Galison ''The Americanization of Unity,'' Daedalus 127 (1998): 45-71.
41. Hunter Crowther-Heyck, ''George A. Miller, Language, and the Computer Metaphor of Mind,'' History of Psychology 2 (1999): 42-43.
42. David L. Szanton, ''The Origin, Nature, and Challenge of Area Studies in the United States,'' in David L. Szanton, ed., The Politics of Knowledge: Area Studies and the Disciplines (Berkeley, Calif.: author: u of California Press? 2002), available at (19 December 2008).
43. Cohen-Cole, ''Instituting the Science of Mind'': 575-576
44. Ralph Tyler, ''Study Center for Behavioral Scientists,'' Science 123 (1956): 406-407
45. Rolf Linder, The Reportage of Urban Culture: Robert Park and the Chicago School (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
46. Rebecca Lemov, World as Laboratory: Experiments with Mice, Mazes, and Men (New York: Hill & Wang, 2006).
47. Crowther-Heyck, Herbert A. Simon, 108-112
48. Robert K. Merton, ''Review of Harry Elmer Barnes, Howard Becker, and Frances Bennett Becker, eds., Contemporary Social Theory,'' American Sociological Review 6 (1941): 282-286
49. For further information on diverse meanings of theory in postwar sociology, see Joel Isaac, ''Tool Shock: Technique and Epistemology in the Postwar Social Sciences,'' in The Unsocial Social Science? Economics and Neighboring Disciplines since 1945, ed. Roger Backhouse and Philippe Fontaine (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, forthcoming 2010).
50. I explore this theme in greater detail in ''Tangled Loops: Theory, History, and the Human Sciences in Modern America,'' Modern Intellectual History 6 (2009): 397-424.
51. See, in particular, David Gooding, Trevor Pinch, and Simon Schaffer, eds., The Uses of Experiment: Studies in the Natural Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
52. Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
53. David Kaiser, Drawing Theories Apart: The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams in Postwar Physics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 8.
54. Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), 16-24.
55. Andrew Warwick, Masters of Theory: Cambridge and the Rise of Mathematical Physics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
56. Kaiser, Drawing Theories Apart.
57. Ursula Klein, ''Paper Tools in Experimental Cultures,'' Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 32 (2001): 265-302.
58. Ian Hunter, ''The History of Theory,'' Critical Inquiry 33 (2006): 78-112.
59. Steven Shapin, ''The Philosopher and the Chicken: On the Dietetics of Disembodied Knowledge,'' in Science Incarnate: Historical Embodiments of Natural Knowledge, ed. Christopher Lawrence and Steven Shapin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 21-50.
60. Parsons, ''Preface,'' v.
61. Gordon Allport, Clyde Kluckhohn, O. H. Mowrer, Henry Murray, and Talcott Parsons to Dean Paul H. Buck, June 10, 1943, section UAIII 5.55.26, box Soc Sci-Z, Papers of the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University Archives, Harvard University. Courtesy of the Harvard University Archives.
62. Gordon Allport et al. to Paul H. Buck, August 31, 1943, section HUGFP 15.2, box 1, Talcott Parsons Papers, Harvard University Archives, Harvard University. Courtesy of the Harvard University Archives.
63. ''Basic Social Science'' [among the notes of the Allport Committee on the Social Sciences at Harvard]. n. d. (c. 1943), section HUGFP 15.2, box 1, Parsons Papers. Courtesy of the Harvard University Archives.
64. Talcott Parsons to Paul H. Buck, April 3, 1944, section HUGFP 15.2, box 6, Parsons Papers. Courtesy of the Harvard University Archives.
65. Nichols, ''Social Relations Undone,'' 87.
66. Parsons to Buck, April 3, 1944. Courtesy of the Harvard University Archives.
67. For basic information on the social sciences at Harvard, see Paul H. Buck, ed., Social Sciences at Harvard: From Inculcation to the Open Mind, 1860-1920 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965).
68. Harvard University, The Behavioral Sciences at Harvard (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1954), 18-26.
69. Clark A. Elliot and Margaret W. Rossiter, eds., Science at Harvard University: Historical Perspectives (Bethlehem, Penn.: Lehigh University Press/London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1992), 121-45, 191-250.
70. Parsons, ''Kluckhohn,'' 32.
71. Parsons, ''Kluckhohn,'' Ibid., 32.
72. J. T. Dunlop et al., ''Toward a Common Language for the Area of Social Science,'' (Harvard University, 1941), 4-5.
73. Lagemann, Politics of Knowledge, 168-170
74. Benton Johnson and Miriam M. Johnson, ''The Integrating of the Social Sciences: Theoretical and Empirical Research and Training in the Department of Social Relations at Harvard,'' in Nationalization of the Social Sciences, 132.
75. On the BASR, see Craig Calhoun and Jonathan VanAntwerpen, ''Orthodoxy, Heterodoxy, and Hierarchy: 'Mainstream' Sociology and Its Challengers'' in Sociology in America: A History, ed. Craig Calhoun (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 390-396
76. Lagemann, Politics of Knowledge, 171.
77. Arthur J. Vidich, ''The Department of Social Relations and 'Systems Theory' at Harvard: 1948-1950,'' International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 13 (2000): 616.
78. George Mandler, Interesting Times: An Encounter with the Twentieth Century 1924-(Mahwah, N.J.: Erlbaum, 2002), 159.
79. David M. Schneider, Schneider on Schneider: The Conversion of the Jews and Other Anthropological Stories, ed. Richard Handler (Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 1995), 79, 81, 76.
80. Clifford Geertz, After the Fact: Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 101.
81. Nichols, ''Social Relations Undone,'' 94.
82. Talcott Parsons to John W. Gardner, January 19, 1949, section 42.8.4, box 6, Parsons Papers. Courtesy of the Harvard University Archives.
83. Talcott Parsons, ''Carnegie Project on Theory,'' n.d. box 6, section 42.8.4, Parsons Papers. Courtesy of the Harvard University Archives.
84. Parsons to Gardner, January 19, 1949, Parsons Papers. Courtesy of the Harvard University Archives.
85. For background on the Parsons-Homans relationship, see Lawrence T. Nichols, ''The Rise of Homans at Harvard: Pareto and the English Villagers,'' in George C. Homans: History, Theory, and Method, ed. A. Javier Treviño (Boulder, Col.: Paradigm, 2006), 43-62.
86. See also Isaac, ''Tool Shock.''
87. Parsons, ''Preface,'' v.
88. With the exception of Sears, who joined the Department in 1949.
89. Homans, Coming to My Senses, 302.
90. See Jamie Cohen-Cole, ''The Creative American: Cold War Salons, Social Science, and the Cure for Modern Society,'' Isis 100 (2009): 219-262
91. Carnegie Project Minutes, ''Meeting of Group 2 - Oct. 3, 1949'' box 6, section 42.8.4, Parsons Papers. Courtesy of the Harvard University Archives.
92. Ibid. Courtesy of the Harvard University Archives.
93. Ibid. Courtesy of the Harvard University Archives.
94. Ibid. Courtesy of the Harvard University Archives.
95. Carnegie Project Minutes, ''Meeting of Group 2. October 10, 1949,'' box 6, section 42.8.4, Parsons Papers; Carnegie Project Minutes, ''Meeting of Monday Group-October 24, 1949,'' box 6, section 42.8.4, Parsons Papers. Courtesy of the Harvard University Archives.
96. Carnegie Project Minutes, ''Meeting of Monday Group - October 24, 1949.'' Courtesy of the Harvard University Archives.
97. Homans, Coming to My Senses, 302.
98. Talcott Parsons, ''The Carnegie Project on Theory,'' n.d., box 6, section 42.8.4, Parsons Papers. Courtesy of the Harvard University Archives.
99. Ibid. Courtesy of the Harvard University Archives.
100. See, e.g., Paul Samuelson, The Foundations of Economic Analysis (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 3-6.
101. Talcott Parsons et al., ''Some Fundamental Categories of the Theory of Action,'' 3.
102. Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), ch. 6.
103. For the use of tables and diagrams in the Carnegie Project, see E. C. Tolman, ''Notes for a System of Psychology WhichWould (I Think) Be Congruent with Systems of Sociology and Anthropology,'' n.d., box 6, section 42.8.4, Parsons Papers; Tolman, ''A Psychological Model,'' Towards a General Theory of Action, 279-361.
104. Talcott Parsons and Edward Shils, ''Values, Motives, and Systems of Action,'' Towards a General Theory of Action, fig. 1-15.
105. Parsons and Shils, ''Values, Motives, and Systems of Action,'' 48-49.
106. Parsons and Shils, ''Values, Motives, and Systems of Action,Ibid., 48.
107. See Camic, Talcott Parsons.
108. Parsons and Shils, ''Values, Motives, and Systems of Action,'' 49.
109. Parsons and Shils, ''Values, Motives, and Systems of Action,Ibid., 77.
110. Parsons to John W. Gardner, December 13, 1949, box 6, section 42.8.4, Parsons Papers. Courtesy of the Harvard University Archives.
111. Parsons, ''A Narrative Account of Theoretical Developments: Dec. 3-18, 1949,'' n.d., box 6, section 42.8.4, Parsons Papers. Courtesy of the Harvard University Archives.
112. Carnegie Project Minutes, ''December 10, 1949,'' box 6, section 42.8.4, Parsons Papers; Carnegie Project Minutes, ''December 16, 1949,'' box 6, section 42.8.4, Parsons Papers. Courtesy of the Harvard University Archives.
113. Parsons, The Social System, x.
114. It appears that Robert F. Bales (an assistant professor) and M. Brewster Smith were approached to carry out the small group studies. For Smith's refusal to undertake such a study, see Smith to Talcott Parsons, January 3 1950, box 6, section 42.8.4, Parsons Papers. Courtesy of the Harvard University Archives.
115. Cohen-Cole, ''Creative American.''
116. See Quentin Skinner, ''Moral Principles and Social Change,'' in Visions of Politics, Vol.1: Regarding Method (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 148-155