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The article analyzes the Amherst papers in relation to development of Parsons' theory. A careful analysis of the Amherst papers reveals that the basic ideas and philosophical principles that Parsons followed throughout his life were already in place, some more fully developed than others, yet forming an integrally coherent pattern to a surprising degree. The clear existence in Parsons's Amherst papers of a metatheoretical framework predating his later professional writing calls into question some still existing myths about radical breaks in the development of Parsons's theory. In one version of this mythology, Parsons began his theory as a voluntarist, then became a structural-functionalist, later moved on to become a systems-theorist and ended up as a social evolutionist. Despite such claims, Parsons always was a voluntarist, even during his so-called structural-functionalist middle period. The Amherst papers reveal an amazingly complex and logically coherent theoretical system-in the mind of a twenty-year-young man-and testify to an extraordinary scope of philosophical depth, and intellectual maturity.

The article discusses economic and social theory of Talcott Parsons. Parsons's persistent attention to economic theory has been relatively neglected by critics of Parsons who, in attacking the alleged functionalism of Parsonian sociology, concentrated on the issues of value consensus and normative integration, believing that Parsons had relatively little interest in the economic base of society. This neglect of Parsons's economic sociology was probably intensified by the Marxist undercurrent of much so-called conflict theory. In recent years there has fortunately been considerable interest shown in Parsons's analysis of economic theory and more specifically in his economic sociology. At Amherst, Parsons came under the influence of the philosopher Alexander Meiklejohn, who prompted his students to consider broad questions relating to alternatives to industrial capitalist society and who created an educational environment within which students were involved in a general analysis of the social sciences. It was this engagement with institutional economics that marked Parsons's departure from biology into the social sciences as an academic career. Parsons was introduced to a broad spectrum of social theory relating to cultural and biological dimensions of human existence as explanations of social differentiation.

The place of Georg Simmel in the thought of Talcott Parsons has come under increasing scrutiny, a concern fuelled by a "Simmel Renaissance" on the one hand, and by a resurgence of interest in Parsons's early writings on the other. This paper raises some question, about Parsons's interpretation of Simmel in light of the discovery of a second manuscript on Simmel that Parsons wrote in 1939. This document (which was unknown until quite recently) may best be seen as an elaboration and reworking of the fragment on Simmel that had been left out of The Structure of Social Action (1937). After summarizing and comparing the two documents, the paper demonstrates that Parsons blurred them in his recollections. This means that interpretations of his engagement with Simmel--which have often drawn on Parsons's later testimony (19681979)--need to be reconsidered. The discovery of the second manuscript also underscores the importance of examining how Simmel fit into Parsons's evolving thought, rather than narrowly focusing on why he left Simmel out of the convergence in European social thought that he traced in Structure. Taking the former approach as a point of reference, the paper outlines some interpretive issues that arise from the discovery of Parsons's second Simmel document. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article relates the details of a meeting between sociologists Talcott Parsons and Ken'ichi Tominaga in 1978. The discussion between Talcott Parsons and Ken'ichi Tominaga took place at the Iwanami Shoten publishers office in Tokyo, Japan on the afternoon of December 12, 1978. Parsons arrived in Tokyo at mid-day, after having taken the train that had departed from Osaka around 9:00 a.m. that morning. In a letter written to Parsons, a few weeks before the Parsons' visit to Tokyo, Professor Tominaga described the Iwanami Shoten session as a colloquy with himself concerning the retrospection of Parsons on the formation of his own sociological thought. What Tominaga had in mind was something along the lines that Parsons had written for Daedalus. Iwanami Shoten had already shown some interest in Parson's work, having published in 1958 a Japanese translation of Economy and society, with an introduction by Tominaga. Parsons was paid an honorarium of 50,000 yen for the discussion, the same amount that he was given for his lecture later in the day. A few days prior to the discussion, Tominaga had supplied Parson with the following list of provisional questions: voluntarism vs. utilitarianism, motivation vs. value orientation, nature of system theory, relation between the Theory of Action and the Structural-functional theory, phenomenological approach.

The following section presents several papers focused on Talcott Parsons and Georg Simmel. The first is the fragment on Simmel of Ch. XVIII, Georg Simmel and Ferdinand Toennies. This chapter has been the subject of scholarly discussion since Parsons revealed in 1968 that he had drafted it for his early major work, The Structure of Social Action (1937), but had ultimately decided not to include it. The second, Simmel and the Methodological Problems of Formal Sociology, is a previously unpublished manuscript by Parsons--apparently written in 1939--that continues his engagement with Simmel's approach. The third is a commentary on the second Simmel manuscript that Edward Shils sent Parsons, in response to the latter's request. Finally, there is William Buxton's paper, From the Missing Fragment to the Lost Manuscript: Reflections on Parsons' Engagement with Simmel, which compares the two Parsons manuscripts and reflects on their significance. In addition, Simmel's second manuscript is also published for the first time along with ore famous missing fragment on Simmel, thereby facilitating scholarly analysis and comparison. Buxton's careful and searching analysis identifies as series of issues that merit further examination.

The article discusses the creation of an intellectual biography of the U.S. sociologist Talcott Parsons. The researcher discusses Parsons' doctoral dissertation dealing with capitalism that was analyzed by sociologist Max Weber, and how Parsons' work delivered sociology from social Darwinism at the turn of the twentieth century. The author supports Parsons' work on the basis that he was a thinker and academician who did not use inconsistent analysis. The author utilized Parsons' archives at Harvard University, such as Parsons' paper "The Problem of Controlled Institutional Change."

This section introduces the articles featured in the summer 2000 issue of The American Sociologist. As a new millennium unfolds, a global dialogue in sociology is underway that promises to enrich and renew culture-bound sociological imaginations. As Gary Marx notes, by 1911 Edward A. Ross, a towering figure in his day, had published a book for popular audiences about China as seen by a sociological traveler. Karl Marx brings this commentary up to date, and provides insight into a reality that Ross did not experience, namely, the teaching of sociology in Chinese universities. William Buxton has gathered together a fascinating set of materials about U.S. interest in Asia, with particular reference to Talcott Parsons, Harvard University and Japan. As he notes, these materials call into question simplistic views of Parsons as a Eurocentric thinker by documenting an ongoing encounter with Asia that extended from the 1940s through the late 1970s. One product of events at Harvard was a graduate-seminar paper written in 1941 by Marion Levy and rediscovered by him a half century later. In addition to its relevance for the emergent sociology of Asia, Levy's paper is a most interesting example of early functionalist analysis in U.S. sociology.

In striking contrast to the conflict surrounding his earlier studies of Japanese society and culture, an amicable climate of mutual respect developed between Parsons and Japanese scholars in the 1970s. During this time, Parsons made two visits to Japan, where he was hailed as a great theorist whose views were taken most seriously by Japanese sociologists. The data indicate that, shortly before his sudden death in the spring of 1979, Parsons had begun to reformulate his ideas about modernization as a result of his increasing knowledge of Japanese society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This articles presents the topics discussed in the June 1998 issue concerning sociology. All of the articles here are historical, but not merely so. All look beyond the bare chronicling of events to the larger and wider impact of those events on the sociological enterprise. Gary Jaworski examines receptions to Simmel's work at two universities in order to illumine the open-ended, constructed and contested nature of the sociological tradition. William Buxton presents one little known, and done previously unpublished, work by Parsons on Georg Simmel in an effort to expand dialogue on the significance of Simmel in Parson's thought. Bernard Barber takes up a similar theme by focusing on how Parsons' thinking about social systems gradually evolved. The editor's contribution, finally, points to the influence of developments in psychology on the famous experiment in Social Relations at Harvard. The emphasis in all articles is the unfolding of ideas and the consequence of interpretative decisions, including roads not taken. In view of Talcott Parson's worldwide reputation and influence, his lost manuscript on Simmel may attract considerable scholarly attention. Indeed, Professors Don Levine, Kiyomitsu Yui, Charles Camic and Hans Joas and others have been planning a series of papers on this manuscript that may appear at a special issue of Theory, Culture and Society or elsewhere.

The article presents a text of a memorandum sent by Talcott Parsons to Henry H. Fowler in 1944 regarding a study on the Japanese economy. The most significant suggestion that Parsons thinks he can make appropos of the plans for study of the control of the Japanese economy is that very special attention should be devoted to the prewar status of small and medium-sized business in Japan and of the prospects for stimulating its postwar development. His reason for special interest in this sector of the economy is not in its economic significance as such, but in its potential significance for the social structure and orientation of the country. It is a very striking feature of Japanese society that in modern times at least there has been no strong locally independent middle class which could form a stabilizing factor in the society. Japanese feudalism was highly centralized lacking a small and moderate-scale gentry with strong roots in the land of their local communities. The Samurai were directly dependent on the Daimyo and controlled from his court, and this circumstance largely explains the fact that it was possible to shift so abruptly from feudalism to a westernized capitalistic economy. There was no Japanese equivalent for the Chinese town-dwelling, land-owning gentry who were the real backbone of the traditional Chinese class structure.

This article discusses Talcott Parsons scientific world-view and how his theory gave expression to his more-than-merely theoretical reliance upon insights he gleaned from Whitehead and Weber. He developed 'social systems theory' not only with a structural-functional and evolutionary understanding of social action but also saw science, in these terms as well. The article seeks to trace his theory's reliance upon the system concept which gave his work a persistent focus throughout his scholarly career. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a contribution to the ongoing efforts to interpret the significant contribution to American sociology of Talcott Parsons (1902-1979). The author corrects an implication of his previous article in this journal by drawing attention to the profound impact of evolutionary cosmology upon Parsons' theoretical presuppositions. This ensured an inner and continuing complexity in his theory of the 'social system' from what we can identify as its earliest conceptual beginnings when Parsons was an under-graduate student at Amherst College. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores various engagements of system theory with Germany and Japan, looking in particular at the theories of Talcott Parsons and Niklas Luhmann. Talcott Parsons based his sociological theory on the idea of a system of the values of a given society. Niklas Luhmann's extended version was based on the idea of self-reproduction (or 'autopoiesis') of social systems within all modernized societies. Two studies have recently re-examined system theory on basis of its engagement with Japan: Günther Distelrath has subjected Parsonian theory on Japanese modernity to a structural revisioning in Die japanische Produktionsweise (1996); and Peter Fuchs has reconciled what he calls the 'dividualism' of the Japanese psyche with the Luhmannian theory of functional differentiation in Kommunikation - Japanisch (1995). Distelrath critiques the Parsonian school of thought for giving Japan the status of a backward 'follower' of the West. Fuchs, in contrast, endorses the universalist premise of Luhmann's concept of society and makes Japanese 'dividualism' the paradigm of effective modernization. Following on from Fuchs, I argue that system theory has the potential to overcome cultural limitations and become a global sociology. Its theoretical agenda in the twenty-first century includes the refinement of its concepts of the psychical system, the revision of its notion of the public and the mass media, as well as a systematic contribution to environmental protection and ecological communication in a functionally differentiated world society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the author takes a look at some aspects of sociologist Talcott Parsons's comparative and evolutionary analysis focusing on the analysis of dynamics of social change, evolution, and of comparative institutions, and above all on the analysis of modernity, of the modern social order, a subject central to his evolutionary analysis--from the point of view of "Multiple Modernities." Such an analysis will also enable one to examine critically some of Parsons's contributions to the problem of the relation between culture and social structure; or of the place of cultural components in the structure of social action. These contributions developed on several levels. The first and most general and crucially important such level was the emphasis that culture does not constitute a distinct "entity" but rather a central analytical component dimension of any action and social interaction. The second level was the analysis of the relations between the cultural and structural dimensions of social action in terms of the major pattern variables espoused above all in the book "Towards a General Theory of Action"--as well as later in "Social System."

This article presents information related to sociologist Talcott Parsons. It is no doubt very well known that Talcott Parsons was of New England ancestry. It may be less well known how pure this ancestry was. His father, Edward Smith Parsons (1863-1943), had a strong interest in genealogy and did quite a bit of work (evidently some of it with the help of other family members) tracing his ancestry and that of his wife, Mary Augusta Ingersoll Parsons (1863-1944). He verified that every line of the ancestry of both could be traced back into seventeenth-century New England. Several ancestors apparently came to Massachusetts Bay Colony in its earliest years, and it appears that one came on the Mayflower. Edward wrote out handwritten copies of the genealogy for his children. The one he gave to his son is now in the author's possession, but some years ago the copy was given to the Harvard University Archives, so that some people may have seen it. The earliest direct male ancestor who was traced is John Parsons, who is a couple of generations younger than those who came to New England in the 1630s. It is not known where or exactly when he was born. But it seems very likely that he was the first of the family to settle in York, Maine, on the coast six miles from the river dividing Maine from New Hampshire.

This article is about Bernard Barber's theory of the social system. The formulation of this theory given by Barber in his "late in career" essays brings to the fore a theoretical development that goes back, at least, to Barber's undergraduate education in the 1930s, and has been implicit in his published writings ever since, including seminal works in that subspecialty of sociology for which he is well-known, the sociology of science. In formulating this theory, Barber has had to give special and extended consideration to how his own thinking on the social system compares and contrasts with that of Talcott Parsons. Barber does write social system theory in a style that is more transparent than Parsons' prose, and it can be argued that this is an integral component of Barber's social system theory. But Barber's social system theory also needs to be considered as social system theory in it's own right. The article encounters various problems that Barber has encountered in his attempts to state his own theory. One can indeed derive certain valuable insights not only about social system theory, but also about the processes of theory construction and the way in which scientific work is a collective enterprise requiring careful rethinking of basic assumptions.

The article discusses the theory of Bernard Barber on social system. The formulation of this theory given by Barber in his late in career essays bring to the fore a theoretical development that goes back, at least, to Barber's undergraduate education in the 1930s, and has been implicit in his published writings ever since, including seminal works in that subspecialty of sociology for which he is well-known, the sociology of science. In formulating this theory, Barber has had to give special and extended consideration to how his own thinking on the social system compares and contrasts with that of Talcott Parsons. It might be possible to read Barber's theory writing since the 1980s as simply an attempt to restate Parson's prose, and we might even wish to argue that this is an integral component of Barber's social system theory. Barber's version of functionalist theory is a sophisticated and loyal formulation by a student of Parsons who has, over time, developed his own independent evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of the social system theory of his former mentor. The fact is that Barber did not give up structural-functionalism even if the immanent developments to social system theory prefigured by Parsons' own utterance did not take place.

This article traces the involvement of Talcott Parsons in research and teaching about Asian nations, especially China and Japan, in the period of World War II. The data indicate that, in contrast to his Eurocentric image, Parsons worked to develop a global perspective in studies on comparative institutions. This approach, inspired by the sociology of Max Weber, also addressed the practical needs of policy makers in connection with the war effort. Within Parsons's intellectual biography, it stands between the "voluntaristic" framework of his early treatise, The Structure of Social Action (1937) and the later non-historical formalism of The Social System (1951) for which he is perhaps most famous. An understanding of this relatively unknown phase of Parsons's work is therefore indispensable for an adequate appreciation of his career as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The history of sociology is marked by periods of theoretical pluralism and hegemony. Their interplay has resulted in the slow and uneven development of the discipline. Today, however, bodies of theory and practice have become so diverse that many scholars worry that sociology is in a state of disintegration. The theoretical career of Talcott Parsons provides a microcosm in which to explore similar processes. Building on the success of The Structure of Social Action, Parsons led a movement that transformed Harvard's Department of Sociology into the Department of Social Relations. There he attempted a grander, but failed synthesis in Toward A General Theory of Action. His case provides a situation in which to explore features of disciplinary integration and fragmentation, The comparison stimulates one to fashion an informed sense of whether sociology is now facing its latest crisis or may be in the process of decomposition as a corpus of study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of the author in this article is to stir up interest, to clarify and elaborate Talcott Parsons' Second Project, that is, his work on the concept of substance of the social system. Particularly, this article will dwell on the three subject matters: the sources, the development, and the limitations of Parsons' work on his Second Project. Parsons first mentioned the term social systems in his book The Social System (1951) but there exists unpublished materials where Parsons might have used the term social systems but did not. The first set of materials is the voluminous notes that the author took on the lectures in Parsons' two-semester undergraduate/graduate course, Sociology 6, Comparative Social Institutions in the academic year 1937-1938. The second set of materials consists of the notes the author took in the spring 1939 term, in Parsons' course in social theory. Given his strong conviction regarding the theoretical importance of the system concept, his turn in the 1939 theory course from the unit-act concept to the actor-situation concept and, finally, his realization that the actor's situation involved a social system, it is not surprising that Parsons eventually developed the social system approach fully and made it central to his work for the rest of his life.

This article outlines the history of the journal "The American Sociologist (TAS)." While the first few years of publication passed without incident, when Ray Mack became editor in 1968 he was threatened with a libel suit and a demand was made to the Council that he be replaced. Harold Pfautz became editor in 1970 and promised to emphasize research funding and relations to government as well as professional ethics. In 1972, five short years after its reemergence, the journal was put into a throwaway newspaper format. And if that was not enough, the executive director threatened to terminate the journal if it did not begin to devote itself to teaching. The second phase of TAS began in 1965 and lasted until 1982, but in hinds sight it appeared doomed from its inception. Talcott Parsons' initial editorial included the apparently expansive view that the welfare of the Association and the profession depend on the opportunity for all important points of view to receive adequate expression and to become known throughout the profession.

This article discusses Max Weber's Methodology, Lowell L. Bennion's (1933) published doctoral dissertation from the University of Strasbourg, France. This book is important because it is the first systematic English language treatment of Weber's work. It also suggests an early link between Weberian and Durkheimian scholarship and foreshadows later debates regarding Talcott Parsons' interpretation of Weber. Additionally the book provides a unique contribution by applying Weber's "Calvinism-Capitalism" thesis to the development of Mormonism. We explore the academic context in which the book was written and its reception by American sociologists at the time. After summarizing the text, we examine its perspective on the issues later raised about Parsons' account of Weber. We conclude by looking at Lowell Bennion as a sociologist and a devout Mormon, and the unique connection that he forged between his religion and Max Weber's ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been argued elsewhere that the 1950's witnessed proximate consensus within American sociology over the orthodoxy of a systemic image of the nature of the subject matter and that this in turn was supported by a self-image in which the sociologist identified himself with the value-free stance he associated with the natural scientist. B.F. Skinner's life-long marriage to an austerely natural scientific epistemology is as self-evident as his fathering of an operant behaviorism that focuses immediately upon the change that can be brought about through positive reward. The very anomaly that was the fatal flaw of the "system" presumption - change - becomes operant conditioning's fundamental aim. Skinner's foremost advocate within sociology is, of course, George Homans, strategically placed as he has been of late as chairman of Harvard's Department of Sociology. No one can claim a more "systemic" methodology than the founding chairman of a graduate program specializing in the elicitation of models of complex and ongoing social interaction from sociology's beast of burden, the digital computer.

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one by Charles Tilly on historical research, and one by Uta Gerhardt about her career and the biography of Talcott Parsons.