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The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology

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A key event in the trivialization of sociology as a discipline was the bitter critique and rejection of Parsonian theory in the late 1960's and early 1970's. Almost no sociologist lamented the demise of Parsons' contributions and virtually every well-known sociologist of the day delighted in partaking of the crime and feasting on the corpse. Of course, rejecting Parsons' attempt to fuse the insights of Pareto, Weber, and Durkheim into a general theory of social order, and offering nothing of substance in its place, sociological theory wended its moribund way into the present. In this present, sociology is like fine art. Just as every painter creates his own aesthetic from an unshared private world, so the sociological theorist today weaves a complex story that does not build upon, nor does it have positive synergy with, the work of his predecessors. The situation would be amusing---so many intelligent men and women huffing and puffing and saying worth noting and building upon---where it not so tragic.

I have spent some of my time over the past few years trying to figure out how this sad situation came about. It became clear through the rereading of Parsons' major works that the path towards a cogent sociological theory that he began to forge in the writing of The Structure of Social Action (1937) he abandoned in the post-world-war II period, first by replacing a voluntaristic notion of action in favor of the notion of the individual as a compliant conformist to social norms, internalizing whatever the social system placed in from of him in the form of cultural structure, and second by locating the roots of social order in the functioning of institutions rather than in the active embracing of social norms by a critical and active body of social actors. This was a terrible mistake on his part, probably induced by Parsons' witnessing the astounding descent into abject conformity in the United States, and in a different by equally powerful way in the Soviet Union. The 1950's were indeed the era of the Man in the Grey Flannel Suit in the United States, and the paranoid apparatchik in the Soviet Union. We might forgive Parsons for abandoning an emancipatory social theory in favor of the soporific edifice that was structural-functionalism. Until the Viet Cong beat up the French, Rosa Parks sat in the front of the bus, and Daniel Cohn-Bendit's student movement almost brought Europe to its moldy knees, it was not completely implausible to believe in the unmitigated power of the ruling order to suffocate all creativity.

I now feel that if the world could have cut directly from 1945 to 1965, Parsons' own work would have taken a more fruitful turn. First, in politics we have the rise of emancipatory movements in the advanced world. Second, we have the rise of sociobiology, which when applied to humans, rejects the notion that people can be socialized in any arbitrary manner, but rather that there is a core of human nature, together with a core of universal human morality, that yearns for freedom, democracy, and autonomy, and hence will attempt to throw off the yoke of any oppressive culture, however ubiquitous, if it has the material means and social space to do so. Third, with the rise of behavioral game theory and its attendant implications for the rationality of prosocial and altruistic behavior, Parsons would have seen that the distinctions between the structures of self-regarding and other-regarding action (inherited from Pareto) are arbitrary, and therefore there is a deep link between economic rationality and moral social action.

Even without these insights, Parsons' contributions were monumental, and it remains to explain why they were so roundly rejected, rather than simply amended to correct their obvious weaknesses and biases. This is the tack I took in my Ph.D. dissertation (Harvard, Economics, 1969) which I dedicated to Talcott Parsons and Karl Marx, with the head quote: "Things are getting better and better; it's people I'm worried about." (Mose Alison) But even I abandoned the task of integrating Parsons into a defensible social theory, and doubtless behaved no better that the leading lights of sociology in dealing with Parsonian theory. My excuse: I was a kid behaving like a kid and they were grown-ups behaving like kids.

There were four major reactions to the demise of the Parsonian system. The first, and most productive, was the "retreat" to so-called Middle Level Theory (Merton et al.). Middle level theory has been very successful in my opinion. The number of absolutely brilliant and still insightful contributions to the analysis of specific social problems by middle level applied sociologists is large and growing. The second and completely unsuccessful reaction was the attempt by individual theorists to erect a complete alternative theory that denied all the insights of Parsons' synthesis. Homan's exchange theory, Giddens' structuration theory, and Coleman's rational choice sociology fit into this category. The case of James Coleman is particularly poignant. Coleman was a first rate middle-level applied sociologist whose analysis of social tensions in the United States were deeply penetrating and creative. His late-in-life attempt at doing high-level theory (The Foundations of Social Theory) was an embarrassing disaster. The third reaction was a "let one hundred flowers bloom" attempt to turn sociological theory into the History of the Great Masters of Sociology, with no attempt to adjudicate among these masters. Turner (J. H.) is probability the acknowledged master of this approach.

Gouldner's The Coming Crisis is the fourth approach, that of denying the status of objective science to sociology, criticizing Parsons for his 1950's-style conservatism, and arguing that the whole "problem of social order" reeks of an oppressive, anti-emancipatory conservatism. Gouldner was certainly not alone in taking this tack in the criticism of Parsons, but he was the most dedicated an eloquent. To any objective observer, Parsons hated Nazism and Communism bitterly and loved liberal democracy. If this is oppressive conservatism, then I am proud to join ranks with Parsons. Who are the Good Guys of the period: those who hated and fought against fascism and Communism. Who are the Bad Buys of the period: those who did not. It is that simple. Calling Parsons and his functional sociology "conservative" does a grave disservice to Parsons. Parsons consistently lent his weight to emancipatory social change, so long as it lay within the institutional boundaries of liberal democracy.

Gouldner's position is that Parsons' whole attempt at doing `objective' sociology is wrong-headed, because there can be no objective sociology. "Sociologists must surrender the human but elitist assumption that others behave out of need whereas they believe because of the dictates of logic and reason." (p. 26) This is an ancient idealist position that would be resurrected and blown into a full-fledged rallying-cry some years later by the Postmodernists. To my mind, this position is not beneath contempt. It is quite deserving of contempt. The observation that for each of us, the assessment of truth and falsity is biased by personal prejudice and social perspective is surely correct. However, a statement concerning social reality becomes accepts by a body of scientists only after the evidence in its favor is publicly vetted and accepted by all (or at least the overwhelming majority of) knowledgeable parties. Even then, it is not impossible that the collectively shared prejudices of the judges may lead to a false assessment, which is why it is important to have an open and non-exclusionary process of recruiting individuals into a scientific community.

Gouldner's subjectivist position is widespread in sociology, and it is poisonous indeed. Why bother pretending to learn the scientific method if objectivity is impossible? Why make mathematical models if they are just personal ideology in disguise? Why search for truth when it is so much easier just to express your opinions and heap invective on your enemies? Why find out the hidden structure of social life when you can so much more easily just join the ranks of the Socially Committed? Only a hypocrite believes in truth, anyway---or so the Gouldnerites and their supporters would have us believe.

The reason I spend so much time on this point is that Parsons' central goal was to solve the "problem of social order." Gouldner interprets this goal as one of trying to maintain the status quo. The goal could have no other purpose because there is no such thing as an objective solution to the problem of social order. But, this is just false. I deeply admired Parsons' theory of social order even when I was a radical Marxist SDS activist in the civil rights, anti-war, and student culture movements of the late 1960's and 1970's. I did not believe that his theory was correct, but I believed it was part of a correct theory, whatever the political differences between myself and Talcott Parsons. In order to be a good scientist, one must separate one's political, cultural, and social prejudices from the quest for objective truth, and one must be tolerant of others with whom we disagree. Why? Because they might be right, and if you give them the time, space, and courtesy, they may convince you.

In the present case, I gave Gouldner plenty of time and space (the book is over 500 pages long). I am not convinced.

When this book was first published it the early '70's it was widely read and influential. The time was right: Parsons, though his influence was diminishing, was still the high priest of social theory, celebrating an ostensibly equilibriating and fundamentally stable social system; Gouldner was a well known radical and academic critic of Parsons; and my instructor made The Coming Crisis of Western Scoiology required reading for a course I was taking.

In truth, as best I can remember after nearly thirty-eight years, The Coming Crisis ... was almost entirely a critique of Parsonian structural-functionalism. According to Gouldner, as well as many others at the time, Parson's theoretical work was intrinsically conservative, lacked the conceptual wherewithal to deal with social change, and couldn't begin to explain the source or dynamic of the radicalism that was then being fomented in response to the war in Viet Nam, the persistence of poverty and racism in a world that technology had made potentially abundant, and the onerous banality of everyday middle class life in the U.S.

On the other hand, there were those such as Robert Merton and Edwin Lemert who concluded that Gouldner's critical focus was too narrowly and intensely anti-Parsonian. Others thought he failed to see the promise in the dramatalurgical perspective of Erving Goffman and Harold Garfinkel's ethnomodology. There were new and promising ideas in American sociology, even if they were, for the most part, at the micro-level. Or so they argued.

Gouldner wrote much more than The Coming Crisis ... From Wild Cat Strike through The Two Marxisms, I've benefited from Gouldner's work. In retrospect, I think that The Coming Crisis ... was actually pretty much on the mark, and it's most vocal critics were still wed to the Parsonian status quo. Robert Merton and Harold Garfinkel, for example, had been Parsons' students. In any case, whether as cause or just a sign post, The Coming Crisis ... marked a turning away for the "everything will work out for the best" convergence hypothesis that was the primary theme of American sociology for too many decades.