2. isaac 2010 - theorist at work. parsons

8/10/2019 2. Isaac 2010 - Theorist at Work. Parsons...

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Theorist at Work: Talcott Parsons and theCarnegie Project on Theory, 19491951

Joel Isaac

INTRODUCTION

One day in 1951, a routine staff meeting in Harvard Universitys Depart-ment of Social Relations (DSR) became the scene of a high-stakes academicstandoff. 1 Talcott Parsons, chairman of the department, opened proceed-ings by placing before his colleagues the newly published Toward a General Theory of Action (1951). 2 Edited by Parsons and the University of Chicagosociologist Edward Shils, the General Theory was a collaborative productof the DSR: all full professors in the department, including representativesof the DSRs core elds of sociology, social psychology, cultural anthropol-ogy, and clinical psychology, had contributed chapters to the book and co-

signed its methodological mission statement. 3 Both senior departmental

For helpful comments on earlier drafts of this essay, I should like to thank Duncan Bell,Howard Brick, Jamie Cohen-Cole, Andrew Jewett, and the referees for the JHI .1 My account of this meeting is drawn from George Caspar Homans, Coming to MySenses: 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: Theo-retical 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 GeneralStatement, in Toward a General Theory of Action , 329. The signatories from the DSRfaculty were Parsons, Gordon Allport, Clyde Kluckhohn, Henry A. Murray, Jr., RobertSears, and Samuel A. Stouffer. The remaining signatories came from outside of the DSR:Richard Sheldon (Harvards Russian Research Center), Edward Shils (University of Chi-cago), and Edward C. Tolman (University of California).

Copyright by Journal of the History of Ideas, Volume 71, Number 2 (April 2010)

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JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS APRIL 2010

faculty and the untenured junior professoriate had taken part in the so-called Carnegie Project on Theorya series of seminars, sponsored by theCarnegie Corporation of New York, devoted to assaying the theoreticalresources of the eld of Social Relations. 4 Running throughout the autumnof 1949 into January 1950, these seminars had been the forcing house of the General Theory . The message of the book, as nessed by Parsons andShils, was clear: with a system of categories for the analysis of action inplace, social scientists were on the brink of formulating the general laws of social relations. 5 The chairman exhorted his staff to read the volume, andsuggested that the tenets of action theory might guide their future teachingand research.

Parsons was not preaching to the choir. Despite the support of severalsenior DSR faculty members, the Carnegie Project on Theory had not beena unanimous enterprise. There were, as a graduate student of the time laterrecalled, several insurrectionists on staff who opposed the drive for ageneral theory: elder statesmen Pitirim Sorokin and Carle C. Zimmermanmade no attempt to hide their hostility toward Parsonss grand design;many junior faculty, meanwhile, felt alienated from the Project and fromthe cohort of senior professors who supported it. 6 In addition, some psy-

chologists in Social Relations worried that the embrace of action theorypushed them further away from the biological wing of their discipline,which they had left in the hands of Harvards Department of Psychologywhen the DSR was established in 1946. 7 As soon as Parsons concluded hisrecommendation, George Homans, a leading member of the restive juniorfaculty, leapt in with a rebuttal. There should, he stated, be no implicationthat this document is to be taken as the ofcial doctrine of the department,and no member shall be put under any pressure to read it. A pregnantsilence followed. Homans had touched a raw nerve: was the department tocoalesce around the General Theory as a theoretical resource and pedagogi-cal guide, thereby realizing the promise of basic social science adum-brated in the organizational fusion of the DSR itself; or would dissenting

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, Mo-tives, and Systems of Action, in Toward a General Theory of Action , 5051.6 Clifford Geertz, Passage and Accident: A Life of Learning, in Geertz, Available Light:Anthropological Reections on Philosophical Topics (Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 2000), 8; Homans, Coming to My Senses , 302.7 Lawrence T. Nichols, Social Relations Undone: Disciplinary Divergence and Depart-mental Politics at Harvard, 19461970, The American Sociologist 29 (1998): 9294; Jamie Cohen-Cole, Thinking About Thinking in Cold War America (Ph.D. Disserta-tion, Princeton University, 2003), 2473.

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voices deny Parsonss programmatic ambitions and conrm a looser inter-disciplinary principle as the guiding ethos of the department? At length,one of the senior faculty contributors to the Project on Theory, the statisti-cian Samuel Stouffer, intervened. The General Theory , Stouffer conceded,was not to be taken as ofcial doctrine. The question of a general theorywas quickly dropped, at least at the departmental level. 8

Judged by its consequences, the Homans-Parsons confrontation seemslike a minor academic spat. In its wake, Parsons moved quickly on to newtheoretical pastures, and his colleagues returned to the ad hoc collabora-tions and eclectic research projects that had characterized the DSR from itsinception. 9 In no sense did [the Carnegie Project on Theory] result in an

ofcial theoretical line for the Department, Parsons wrote in his decen-nial departmental review of 1956. The Carnegie seminars, he now breezilyrecorded, had been an act of intellectual housekeeping of the sort that mightbe carried out at intervals of every ten or fteen years. 10 As the DSRlimped toward dissolution at the beginning of the 1970s, Parsons becameeven more low-key about his early ambitions for the department: SocialRelations, he observed, had been nothing more than an experiment. 11

In fact, it had been much more than that. As I shall demonstrate in thisarticle, Parsonss retrospective modesty obscures the deep commitments

and soaring ambitions that animated the Project on Theory and the Depart-ment of Social Relations. In the late 1940s, Parsons was committed to theview that the unication of the social sciencesespecially the DSRs combi-nation of social and clinical psychology, cultural anthropology, and sociol-ogywas a matter of scientic necessity. This integration, for Parsons, hadbeen preordained by the disciplinary convergence represented by the DSR,and by the conceptual convergence of modern social theorists on the mastersocial-scientic concept of action. 12 The Carnegie Corporation, meanwhile,

8 Homans, Coming to My Senses , 303.9 See Nichols, Social Relations Undone, 9091; Bernard Barber, Parsons Second Proj-ect: The Social System. Sources, Development, and Limitations, The American Sociolo- gist 29 (1998): 81; Howard Brick, Talcott Parsons Shift Away from Economics,19371946, Journal of American History 87 (2000): 498.10 Department and Laboratory of Social Relations, Harvard University, Department and Laboratory of Social Relations, Harvard University: The First Decade, 19461956 (Cam-bridge, Mass.: Harvard University, 1956), 34.11 Talcott Parsons, Clyde Kluckhohn and the Integration of Social Science, in Cultureand 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; idem, On Building Social System Theory: A Personal History, Daedalus 99 (1970):843.12 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).

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was dedicated to the promotion of interdisciplinary, problem-oriented re-search in what were only then coming to be called the behavioral sci-ences: Harvard University, and the DSR in particular, had been selectedby Corporation leaders as the testing ground for this interdisciplinary pro-gram. 13

For Parsons, his closest collaborators, and his sponsors, the Project onTheory was designed to produce nothing less than an enduring synthesis inthe study of human behavior. The present article assesses this bold enter-prise. In section I, I offer some remarks on the place of theory in the historyof American social science and outline the view of theoretical practices thatinforms my analysis. In section II, I sketch the institutional background at

Harvard against which the Project on Theory unfolded. Sections III and IVexplore the organization and conduct of the Project itself. In what follows,I shall pursue two related goals. First, I want to put theory back into ourpicture of the development of the human sciences during the Cold War.Historians have rightly underscored the centrality of empiricist, behavior-ist, and mathematical methodologies in the making of the postwar humansciences. But alongside these expressions of positivism, a concern for theoryand conceptual schemes also marked the development of several disci-

plines. Nowhere was this concern more self-consciously expressed in theCold War academy than in Parsonss Department of Social Relations. Mysecond aim is to demonstrate that the theory envisioned in the CarnegieProject is not to be analyzed as a body of doctrine, but rather as a materialpractice. Indeed, I shall argue that the primary challenge that Parsons andhis collaborators faced was that of making theorizing a salient and legiti-mate scientic practice.

I. HISTORICIZING THEORY

The genesis of the General Theory is a topic little studied by historians.This is perhaps surprising in view of the so-called Parsons revival thathas been underway since the early 1980s. Social theorists now discuss Tal-cott Parsonss writings with the forensic intensity traditionally reserved for

13 Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, The Politics of Knowledge: The Carnegie Corporation, Phi-lanthropy, and Public Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 16675; JamieCohen-Cole, Instituting the Science of Mind: Intellectual Economies and DisciplinaryExchange at Harvards Center for Cognitive Studies, British Journal for the History of Science 40 (2007): 57378.

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the works of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim. 14 Parsons has also bulked largein historical accounts of modernization theory and the fate of social-demo-cratic thought after the New Deal. 15 Why have his labors on behalf of thegeneral theory of action failed to attract similar historical scrutiny?

One reason is that this period in Parsonss career, which stretches fromthe publication of The Structure of Social Action in 1937 to the mid-1950s,is generally viewed as one of false starts and sideline projects. Parsonssinterests spread wide after Structure : the sociology of the medical profes-sion; political sociology; the postwar legislation for the National ScienceFoundation; culture and personality analysis; and the establishment of the DSR. 16 It is a short stepone made by Parsons himselfto conclude

that the conceptual scheme put forth in the General Theory and elaboratedin Parsonss companion treatise The Social System (1951) was at best a testrun for later, more long-lasting theoretical paradigms. 17 The wary attitudetoward Parsonss writings of the early 1950s is also due to the famousbroadsides issued by C. Wright Mills and Alvin Gouldner against The So-cial System and related works. 18 These attacks have tended to encouragethose with more sympathetic views toward Parsons to emphasize the empir-

14 See Jeffrey C. Alexander The Modern Reconstruction of Classical Thought, Vol. 4 :Talcott Parsons (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); Charles Camic, Intro-duction: Talcott Parsons before The Structure of Social Action , in Talcott Parsons: TheEarly Essays , ed. Charles Camic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), ix-lxix;Uta C. Gerhardt, Talcott Parsons: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2002); Renee Fox, Victor M. Lidz, and Harold Bershady, eds., AfterParsons: A Theory of Social Action for the Twenty-First Century (New York: RussellSage Foundation, 2005).15 See Howard Brick, Transcending Capitalism: Visions of a New Society in ModernAmerican Thought (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006), 12151; Nils Gilman,Mandarins of the Future: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Baltimore: JohnsHopkins University Press, 2003), 7294; Hunter Crowther-Heyck, Herbert A. Simon:The Bounds of Reason in Modern America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,2006), 99112.16 See Brick, Talcott Parsons Shift Away From Economics : 497509; Talcott Parsons,Talcott Parsons on National Socialism , ed. Uta Gerhardt (New York: Aldine, 1943); Wil-liam Buxton, Talcott Parsons and the Capitalist Nation-State: Political Sociology as aStrategic Vocation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), 81145; 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: Universityof Pennsylvania Press, 1986), 339; Barber, Parsons Second Project, 7982; Nichols,Social Relations Undone: 8486.17 Talcott Parsons, The Social System (1951; Glencoe, Il.: Free Press, 1964); idem, OnBuilding Social Systems Theory, 844.18 C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press,1959); Alvin Gouldner, The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology (London: Heinemann,1971).

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ical and socially engaged aspects of his oeuvre and minimize his theoret-icism. 19

Historians should be less reticent about Parsonian Grand Theory. Thefollowing examination of the conduct and context of the Carnegie Projecton Theory reveals that Parsonss engagement with pure theory had itself several practical dimensions. At stake for those invested in the fortunes of the Project on Theory was the very meaning of theory in the social sci-ences: its modes, proper domain, and utility as a tool for forging ties acrossdisciplines. For what made Parsonss postwar vision for the study of humanbehavior signicant was not his concern for interdisciplinary synthesis perse: the team-based, task-oriented research culture of the World War II erahad made interdisciplinarity a dening feature of the postwar rise of thebehavioral sciences. 20 Rather, what made Parsons and his supporters standout was precisely their insistence that the widely touted integration of thesocial-scientic disciplines should be guided by a comprehensive system of theory .

During the late 1940s and early 1950s, there were more popular routesto interdisciplinary synthesis in the social sciences. Survey research insti-tutes and area studies programs offered a model of integration based on

empirical studies. The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sci-ences, on the other hand, exemplied the belief that social scientists wouldmake common cause when given the time and space for the free exchangeof ideas, methods, and research ndings. 21 In addition, prevailing attitudestowards theorizing among American social scientists were not positive. Dis-ciplines like psychology, sociology, and anthropology had been founded onempiricist principles. The teeming metropolis, with its ghettos, suburbs, andbusiness districts; the laboratory of tests, subjects, and measuring devices;

and the artefact-rich museum of ethnologythese were the most common19 See, e.g., Gerhardt, Talcott Parsons ; Brick, Transcending Capitalism , 13551; William J. Buxton and Lawrence T. Nichols, Talcott Parsons and the Far East at Harvard,194148: Comparative Institutions and National Policy, The American Sociologist 31(2000): 517.20 Peter Galison The Americanization of Unity, Daedalus 127 (1998): 4571; HunterCrowther-Heyck, George A. Miller, Language, and the Computer Metaphor of Mind,History of Psychology 2 (1999): 4243.21 David L. Szanton, The Origin, Nature, and Challenge of Area Studies in the UnitedStates, in David L. Szanton, ed., The Politics of Knowledge: Area Studies and the Disci- plines (Berkeley, Calif.: author: u of California Press? 2002), available at http://repositories.cdlib.org/uciaspubs/editedvolumes/3/1 (19 December 2008); Cohen-Cole, Insti-tuting the Science of Mind: 57576; Ralph Tyler, Study Center for Behavioral Scien-tists, Science 123 (1956): 4067.

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theaters of inquiry in American social science during the early decades of the twentieth century. 22 In a research culture disposed toward empiricscalculations carried out, testimonies collected, artefacts cataloguedtheorizing was a dubious activity. Only in the 1930s had a signicantproportion of American social scientists come to see value in theory forits own sake, and only then in the face of mounting evidence from themathematical and biological sciences that theoretical abstraction and sym-bolic manipulation could produce signicant results. 23 As late as 1941, theyoung Robert Merton was lamenting the lack of clarity and agreement onthe denition of theory in sociology. 24

Given this resistance to theory, and the availability of alternativemodes of interdisciplinarity, Parsonss claim that theoretical researchshould be the motor of disciplinary integration stood in pressing need of legitimation. The Carnegie Project on Theory was therefore charged notjust with producing a theory, but with making the practice of theory, theidentity of the theorist, and the scientic value of theorizing salientin therst instance within the local context of the DSR, but also for the behav-ioral sciences as a whole.

In order to grasp this crucial reexive dimension of the Project on The-

ory, we must forsake a doxography of the General Theory : we cannot readoff Parsonss attempts to legitimize theory from the content of the theory of action itself. To make theory a legitimate and transparent scientic practice,Parsons and his collaborators had to undertake the task of institutionalizingan academic subculture: a set of conceptual tools and skills that wouldallow action theory to be learned, taught, and carried out. 25 At rst blush,this may seem a curious manner in which to talk about an abstract the-ory. We have long since learned that experimental knowledge in science is

rooted in the material, everyday practices of the laboratory, with its instru-22 Rolf Linder, The Reportage of Urban Culture: Robert Park and the Chicago School (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Rebecca Lemov, World as Laboratory:Experiments with Mice, Mazes, and Men (New York: Hill & Wang, 2006).23 Crowther-Heyck, Herbert A. Simon , 10812.24 Robert K. Merton, Review of Harry Elmer Barnes, Howard Becker, and Frances Ben-nett Becker, eds., Contemporary Social Theory , American Sociological Review 6 (1941):28286. For further information on diverse meanings of theory in postwar sociology, see Joel Isaac, Tool Shock: Technique and Epistemology in the Postwar Social Sciences, inThe Unsocial Social Science? Economics and Neighboring Disciplines since 1945 , ed.Roger Backhouse and Philippe Fontaine (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, forth-coming 2010).25 I explore this theme in greater detail in Tangled Loops: Theory, History, and theHuman Sciences in Modern America, Modern Intellectual History 6 (2009): 397424.

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ments, displays, and technical know-how. 26 Yet, as David Kaiser has ob-served, when it comes to the study of scientic theories, the age-old tropeof minds versus hands has been at play: a purely cognitive realm of ideashas been pitted against a manual realm of action. 27 Even as sophisticateda commentator on the sociology of intellectuals as Pierre Bourdieu imposeda constitutive distinction between scientic or scholarly pursuits and thepractical engagements of everyday life. 28

But why should we suppose that theorists are devoid of their own kindsof equipment and material practices? Recent scholarship has shown thattheorists in the physical sciences engage in all manner of practical activi-ties: fashioning tools and techniques, calculating, drawing models and dia-

grams, writing and circulating papers. They learn how to perform thesetasks by mastering the tools of their trade under historically and geographi-cally variable pedagogical regimes. They give shape to their social role astheorists and philosophers through their everyday comportments in semi-nars, in correspondence, and even in their attitudes toward the quotidiandemands of their bodies. Much like experimentation, then, theorizing, thevery acme of disembodied knowledge, may be viewed by the historian asan assemblage of tools, skills, and material practices. 29 The Carnegie Project

on Theory offers a promising topic for the extension of these accounts of theory into the history of the modern social sciences. Its leaders were self-conscious about the need to make theory happen in their inchoate eldof research; they explored and sought to exploit the material culture of theory. I shall examine this delicate enterprise in sections III and IV. In thenext section, however, I will assess the institutional conditions at Harvardthat precipitated these theoretical engagements.

26 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); Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1997).27 David Kaiser, Drawing Theories Apart: The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams in Post-war Physics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 8.28 Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations , trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Polity, 2000),1624.29 Andrew Warwick, Masters of Theory: Cambridge and the Rise of Mathematical Physics(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Kaiser, Drawing Theories Apart ; UrsulaKlein, Paper Tools in Experimental Cultures, Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 32 (2001): 265302; Ian Hunter, The History of Theory, Critical Inquiry 33(2006): 78112; Steven Shapin, The Philosopher and the Chicken: On the Dieteticsof Disembodied Knowledge, in Science Incarnate: Historical Embodiments of Natural Knowledge , ed. Christopher Lawrence and Steven Shapin (Chicago: University of Chi-cago Press, 1998), 2150.

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II. LUMPING, SPLITTING, LEVELLING:SOCIAL SCIENCE AT HARVARD

Conceived as a service to the social sciences generally, the Carnegie Proj-ect on Theory was born of a local failure. 30 When Parsons began discussinga prospective theoretical research program with Carnegie Corporation of-cials in the fall of 1948, it was already evident that the two-year-old de-partment was not living up to its founding principles. The DSR had beenestablished on grand promises. Five faculty members had approached theHarvard administration in the summer of 1943 with a demand for a funda-mental reorganization of the social sciences. Led by the psychologist Gor-don Allport, this group included Parsons, then a professor in theDepartment of Sociology, the psychologists Henry A. Murray and O. H.Mowrer, and the cultural anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn. 31 Existing de-partmental divisions, they claimed, were impeding the development of basic social science. Asked to expand on their views by the Dean of theFaculty of Arts and Sciences, the group formed a committee composed of the same ve men. The Allport Committee, as it was known, maintainedthat there existed an independent eld of human social development, in-

teraction, and social integration. This study of individuals and their adjust-ment to each other and to the impersonal environment may be said to bebasic to the more specialized studies of economics, government, and thelike.32 The lines of basic social science, the Allport Committee contended,do not follow present departmental disciplines with any exactitude, butthe nucleus of knowledge involved is at present dealt with mainly in theelds of social and clinical psychology, social and cultural anthropology,and institutional sociology. 33

Parsons was particularly bold in his support of this view. I will stakemy whole professional reputation, he wrote Dean Paul Buck in 1944, onthe statement that [the emergence of basic social science] is one of the really

30 Parsons, Preface, v.31 Gordon Allport, Clyde Kluckhohn, O. H. Mowrer, Henry Murray, and Talcott Parsonsto Dean Paul H. Buck, June 10, 1943, section UAIII 5.55.26, box Soc Sci-Z, Papersof the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University Archives, HarvardUniversity. Courtesy of the Harvard University Archives.32 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.33 Basic Social Science [among the notes of the Allport Committee on the Social Sci-ences at Harvard]. n. d. (c. 1943), section HUGFP 15.2, box 1, Parsons Papers. Courtesyof the Harvard University Archives.

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great movements of modern scientic thought, comparable, for instance, tothe development of Biology in the last third of the 19th century. 34 Buckeventually acknowledged the Allport Committees demands, although forreasons more pragmatic than scientic: he wished to keep a promising cropof junior social scientists at Harvard, and the creation of an umbrella socialscience department to house them all seemed the most practicable means of doing so. 35 Thus the DSR was born.

The Project on Theory was intended to provide conceptual foundationsfor the basic social science promisedbut yet to be deliveredby theAllport Committee. This already heavy burden was increased by two localinstitutional legacies. First, the Project had to bring to fruition interdisci-plinary commitments forged among a cohort of Harvard social scientistsduring the 1930s. As Parsons pointed out to Buck in 1944, Harvards bigthree social science departmentsHistory, Government, and Econom-icshad dominated the social sciences situation at Harvard for a genera-tion. 36 The new social sciences, meanwhile, lived on the margins of theorganizational chart. 37 Psychology gained departmental standing at Har-vard in 1934, decades later than other American universities, and was rivenfrom its birth by a split between biotropic and sociotropic factions.

Sociology was likewise a late addition to Harvards departmental structure.Although the Department of Anthropology had existed since 1903, itstayed close to its roots in the Peabody Museum and remained out of touchwith the ourishing of the discipline under Franz Boas, Alfred L. Kroeber,and Ruth Benedict.

The underdevelopment of the new social sciences at Harvard forcedtogether those with grander ambitions for these elds into a series of semi-nars and ad hoc committees. In the mid-1930s, a group of young, non-

tenured faculty calling themselves the Levellers began an informal shopclub in which they discussed matters of shared scientic concern. 38 Al-

34 Talcott Parsons to Paul H. Buck, April 3, 1944, section HUGFP 15.2, box 6, ParsonsPapers. Courtesy of the Harvard University Archives.35 Nichols, Social Relations Undone, 87.36 Parsons to Buck, April 3, 1944. Courtesy of the Harvard University Archives.37 For basic information on the social sciences at Harvard, see Paul H. Buck, ed., Social Sciences at Harvard: From Inculcation to the Open Mind, 18601920 (Cambridge,Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965); Harvard University, The Behavioral Sciences at Harvard (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1954), 1826; Clark A. Elliotand Margaret W. Rossiter, eds., Science at Harvard University: Historical Perspectives(Bethlehem, Penn.: Lehigh University Press/London and Toronto: Associated UniversityPresses, 1992), 12145, 191250.38 Parsons, Kluckhohn, 32.

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though the nod to the dissidents of the English Civil War was no doubtintended to signify their own insurgent status within Harvard, Parsons laterobserved that the name was chosen in consideration of the many levels onwhich behavioral phenomena required consideration. The Levellers hadrst gathered in the biochemist Lawrence J. Hendersons interdisciplinaryseminar on Pareto and Methods of Scientic Investigation, which ran from1932 until 1934. Among the core group who went on to form the shopclub were Parsons, Kluckhohn, Mowrer, and Murray. In 1939 they foundan ofcial organ for their concerns when Parsons became chair of the Com-mittee on Concentration in the Area of Social Science. Under the auspicesof this omnibus major in the social scienceswhich included history,

government, and economics as well as sociology, anthropology, and psy-chologyParsons, Mowrer, and Kluckhohn collaborated (with others) ona 1941 report entitled Toward a Common Language for the Area of SocialScience, which Parsons later called a kind of theoretical charter of basicsocial science.39 We urgently require a conceptual scheme, the reportstated, whereby behavior, culture, society, property, authority, (andmany other well-known abstractions of the existent social sciences) can bereduced to or articulated with certain elementary categories which can thenbe integrated in a single coherent framework. 40 Long before the AllportCommittee made their approach to the Harvard administration, an identi-able core of young social scientists was mobilizing extra-departmental tiesand resources to forge a consensus on the need for basic social science.The establishment of the DSR effectively elevated this insurgent network todepartmental rank.

The second institutional legacy faced by the Project on Theory fol-lowed from this institutional victory: the Harvard administration had ac-ceded to the foundation of the new department before a consensus had been

reached either on the nature of basic social science or the means by whichthat prospective science should be practiced. Moreover, as would becomecommon in the early days of the Cold War, this new social-scientic venturewas ush with nancial support. Attracted by the rhetoric of interdisciplin-arity and scientic synthesis, the Carnegie Corporation issued grants to theDSR totalling $335,000 in the rst decade of its existence. $275,000 of theCorporations money went to the Laboratory of Social Relations to supportinformal, interdisciplinary pilot studies. 41

39 Ibid., 32.40 J. T. Dunlop et al., Toward a Common Language for the Area of Social Science,(Harvard University, 1941), 45.41 Lagemann, Politics of Knowledge , 16870.

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late 1940sKluckhohns Ramah Project in Mexico and the Mobility Proj-ect in Greater Bostonwere, like the diverse research ventures of the Labo-ratory, contingent accretions to the department rather than carefullyworked out testing grounds for basic social science.

The DSRs fragmented research prole was further exacerbated by alack of unity among the faculty. This fragmentation had a physical dimen-sion: the department had no single building of its own and consequently itsstaff was scattered across Harvard Square. 45 Ideologically, moreover, s-sures were opened both among the founding members of the departmentand between senior and junior faculty. George Mandler recalls of his dayson staff that there was little collaborative research among its members. 46

His views are echoed by the anthropologist David Schneider, one of the rstgraduate students in Social Relations and later a lecturer in the department.[T]here was a sense, he recalled in a later interview, that [Clyde] Kluck-hohn was competing with Parsons. Battle was joined over students andthe conceptual primacy of culture (i.e. anthropology) versus social sys-tems (sociology). Stouffer, meanwhile, tended to want statistics to ex-plain everything. Schneider found these conceptual struggles one of thedepartments strengths, for they produced an unintentional methodological

pluralism.47

Clifford Geertz was even more forgiving in his assessment of the disorganization of the department, which he found as a graduate stu-dent to be a maze of grand possibilities, only loosely related, and someeven in serious tension with one another. 48 But such tensions would provedecisive. The founders failed utterly to win over the next generation of DSRfaculty to their way of thinking. Early junior members of the departmentsuch as George Homans and Jerome Bruner were skeptics from the outset.Little effort was made to integrate subsequent cohorts of non-tenured staff.During the 1950s, when the youngest tranche of Social Relations facultyshould have been rising through the ranks, an major proportion of juniorstaff resigned their posts for positions elsewhere. 49

45 Arthur J. Vidich, The Department of Social Relations and Systems Theory at Har-vard: 194850, International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 13 (2000): 616.46 George Mandler, Interesting Times: An Encounter with the Twentieth Century 1924 (Mahwah, N.J.: Erlbaum, 2002), 159.47 David M. Schneider, Schneider on Schneider: The Conversion of the Jews and OtherAnthropological Stories , ed. Richard Handler (Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press,1995), 79, 81, 76.48 Clifford Geertz, After the Fact: Two Countries, Four Decades, One Anthropologist (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 101.49 Nichols, Social Relations Undone, 94.

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III. PLANNING THEORY

Whereas the Levellers had thrived as an insurgent group in informal set-tingsclubs, dinner parties, interdisciplinary seminars, and workshopsthe DSR Project on Theory had to formalize this theoretical interchange inorder to translate the organizational combination of the department into aninterdisciplinary scientic program. In his grant application to the CarnegieCorporation, Parsons explicitly connected the theoretical project with thedisciplinary matrix represented in the DSR. The funds, he told his sponsors,were intended for the purpose of working with assistance on the best pos-sible general formulation of the theoretical fundamentals of the eld of so-

cial relations, that is, of Sociology, Social Anthropology, and Psychology,insofar as they converge in terms of a common conceptual scheme. 50 AsParsons put the matter elsewhere, the Project was designed to show thatserious concerted effort directed to theoretical work as such pays off. 51

Acutely aware of the daunting task faced by the Project on Theory,Parsons showed a fatal lack of foresight in his plans for its conduct. Hisrst tactical error was the failure to include any member of the DSR besideshimself on the full-time staff of the Project. Initially, Parsons hoped to in-

clude the social psychologist and Harvard Ph.D. M. Brewster Smith, butSmith decamped Harvard for Vassar in 1949. 52 Ultimately, Parsons re-cruited three men to form the core staff: the eminent behavioral psycholo-gist Edward C. Tolman from Berkeley; the sociologist Edward Shils fromthe University of Chicago; and the social anthropologist Richard Sheldon;a graduate student and fellow of Harvards Russian Research Center. Thischoice of collaborators expressed pre-existing ssures within the DSR. Thechoice of Shils gave Parsons what he would otherwise have lacked: anothersocial theorist on the Project. He might have chosen the only other socialtheorist on staff in the DSR, George Homans, but differences of tempera-ment and theoretical outlookvisible as early as the 1930s, when both menwere involved in Hendersons Pareto seminarblocked collaboration. 53

50 Talcott Parsons to John W. Gardner, January 19, 1949, section 42.8.4, box 6, ParsonsPapers. Courtesy of the Harvard University Archives.51 Talcott Parsons, Carnegie Project on Theory, n.d. box 6, section 42.8.4, ParsonsPapers. Courtesy of the Harvard University Archives.52 Parsons to Gardner, January 19, 1949, Parsons Papers. Courtesy of the Harvard Uni-versity Archives.53 For background on the Parsons-Homans relationship, see Lawrence T. Nichols, TheRise of Homans at Harvard: Pareto and the English Villagers , in George C. Homans:History, Theory, and Method , ed. A. Javier Trevin o (Boulder, Col.: Paradigm, 2006),4362. See also Isaac, Tool Shock.

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Tolmans presence was likewise a tacit admission of a constitutive exclusionin the Project. Harvard was home to three of the leading experimental psy-chologists in the United States: Edwin G. Boring, B. F. Skinner, and S. S.Stevens. In the early 1940s, however, Allport had bridled at Borings domi-nance of the Department of Psychology and led the secession of the socialpsychologists in 1946. The DSR had been born in revolt against Harvardsbiotropic psychologists, and could scarcely incorporate them into theProject on Theory.

Parsonss next move was equally maladroit. He formed two workinggroups that met weekly to discuss the themes and problems raised by theProject staff. The rst was composed of the Project leaders and Allport,

Murray, Kluckhohn, Stouffer, and Robert Searsand thus encompassedthe six tenured professors in the DSR. A second seminar, again includingParsons, Tolman, Shils, and Sheldon, was designed to solicit the opinionsof interested parties among those Parsons euphemistically called theyounger members of the department. 54 The symbolism of this distinctionwas not lost on the junior membership: there was a senior seminar, com-posed of Levellers and/or founding members of the DSR, 55 and a generalseminar for the junior faculty. This view was conrmed by the reading pro-

tocol followed by both seminars. In almost every case, the texts providedfor discussion were written by the senior staff: Kluckhohn, Murray, Par-sons, Tolman, and Shils. 56 Junior faculty played no role in setting the theo-retical agenda.

What could have led Parsons to exacerbate the departmental fragmen-tation that the Project was supposed to mitigate? The composition of thesenior seminar suggests that Parsons saw the Project on Theory as a contin-uation, albeit in a more formal setting, of the work of the Levellers, the

Area of Social Science group, and the Allport Committee. In other words,Parsonss solution to the fragmentation of the DSR was a heavy dose of thesame conceptual kibitzing that had dened his own most valued intellectualexperiences at Harvard. This is not as solipsistic as it sounds. Despite theongoing bureaucratization of American academic life and scientic researchduring the 1940s, research and funding in the social sciences duringthe early Cold War years relied upon strikingly informal but tightly over-lapping networks of scholars, foundation ofcers, and government con-tractors. The academic commons, with its seminars and freewheeling

54 Parsons, Preface, v.55 With the exception of Sears, who joined the Department in 1949.56 Homans, Coming to My Senses , 302.

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interdisciplinary exchange cultures, was viewed by many of its members asa model for an equilibrated and democratic society. 57 Academia was its ownsolution to the problem of integration. By no means, therefore, would ithave been aberrant for Parsons to believe that the route to consensus in theDSR lay in the extension and formalization of the template established bythe shop club.

In the practice, however, Parsons seems to have been less interested inextending the Leveller template than in merely replicating it. Expected toll the role of underlaborers for the Project on Theory, several members of the junior faculty revolted. One after the other, David McClelland, AlexInkeles, Richard Soloman, Leo Postman, Jerome Bruner, and George Ho-

mans stepped forward to dispute with Parsons about the conceptual prem-ises of the Project. Parsons held that the question of the functionalsignicance of a given pattern of behavior was central to the understand-ing of social systems qua systems. The notion of function, relative to acomplex social structure, was necessary in order to have a generalized andsystematic frame of reference. 58 The dissidents refused to acknowledgethat the concept of function did any explanatory work in social science,and cast doubt on the validity of the systems perspective that underpinned

Parsonss vision of theory.A report on the meeting of Group 2 (the general seminar) held on

October 3 noted

a feeling of uneasiness about the term functional: Ordinarily bythe term functional is meant that actions produce consequenceswhich will maintain structure. An empirical question immediatelypresents itself: Are all actions functional? Do they maintain the

system?59

In the same meeting, McClelland and Bruner pointed out that in theirrecent joint seminar they tried to think of examples of behavior that werenot adjustive or adaptive in some sense and could not do so. The problem,as McClelland saw it, was that any sort of behavior could be viewed asfunctional from one or another perspective:

57 See Jamie Cohen-Cole, The Creative American: Cold War Salons, Social Science, andthe Cure for Modern Society, Isis 100 (2009): 21962.58 Carnegie Project Minutes, Meeting of Group 2 Oct. 3, 1949 box 6, section 42.8.4,Parsons Papers. Courtesy of the Harvard University Archives.59 Ibid. Courtesy of the Harvard University Archives.

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the results of functional analysis all depend on what you are look-ing at. Take as an example the training of Army ofcers. If it isgood training it is functional to the army, disfunctional to the of-cers families (the ofcers get killed), and what would be the func-tion to personality. [sic] 60

Homans pressed the point further. Far from being necessary to theoreticalexplanation, he argued, the concept of function had to be redundant if itcould not characterize exclusively a given form of action. 61 The most itcould do was pick up on independent variables in social behavior. Homansmade similarly trenchant criticisms in the seminars of October 10 and 24. 62

At the 24 October meeting, questions about the explanatory utility of the concept of function were extended to the idea of a system, withoutwhich functional analysis could not be undertaken at all. Parsons had par-ried criticisms of functional explanation by suggesting that only the conceptof function could relate isolated instances of behavior to the wider aggrega-tion of interlocking institutions that formed a total society. This claimrested on Parsonss belief that the structure of social systems could be statedindependently and, as it were, pre-theoretically, before any functionalhypotheses about this or that pattern of behavior had been made. Bruner,Inkeles, and Soloman voiced skepticism that structure could be stated in atheoretically neutral fashion, or that talk of functions did not presuppose asubstantive theoretical understanding of the operation of a system. Re-sponding to Parsonss attempt to give a structural description of two differ-ent social systems, Bruner noted that Parsons had invoked notions of disfunction, threat, and injury. Such talk presupposed some kind of in-ternal economy of the structure, some kind of equilibrium; and it followsthat you have to state, very precisely, what its characteristics are or else

decide that you dont want to play that way. Given a further example of structure by Parsons, Dr. Soloman said that these categories did not derivedirectly out of functional theory, and that other students, approaching thesame problem, would arrive at different categories, depending upon theirpast experiences in the eld. 63

60 Ibid. Courtesy of the Harvard University Archives.61 Ibid. Courtesy of the Harvard University Archives.62 Carnegie Project Minutes, Meeting of Group 2. October 10, 1949, box 6, section42.8.4, Parsons Papers; Carnegie Project Minutes, Meeting of Monday GroupOctober24, 1949, box 6, section 42.8.4, Parsons Papers. Courtesy of the Harvard UniversityArchives.63 Carnegie Project Minutes, Meeting of Monday Group October 24, 1949. Courtesyof the Harvard University Archives.

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Having made little effort to bring junior members of the DSR staff intothe Project on Theory, Parsons found little encouragement for his theoreti-cal enterprise in the general seminar. Mired in debates on fundamental is-sues that Parsons hoped would be taken for granted, the seminar peteredout before the Project came to a conclusion. 64 Parsons and Shils concen-trated their efforts in the senior seminar among the Levellers. Even here,however, a certain narrowing of scope was visible. Whilst this group didagree upon the General Statement with which the General Theoryopenedalbeit with some major caveats from Sheldon and KluckhohnParsons seems to have fallen back upon his own singular vision of integra-tion; the practical dimensions of collaboration and team research within

the DSR were gradually omitted. It was Parsons who drafted the almosttwo hundred-page centerpiece in the General Theory , Values, Motives,and Systems of Action. Accounting for nearly half of the book, this co-authored ParsonsShils monograph was eloquent testimony to the designaws visible in the Project while it was still on the drawing board.

IV. THEORETICAL PRACTICES

Organizational problems notwithstanding, a key challenge remained: howto make theorizing seem a legitimate and discrete professional activity, ona par with the small group studies and macroscopic data collection projectsalso sponsored by the philanthropic foundations? At times, Parsonss at-tempts to provide some bona des for his precariously balanced enterprisewere endearingly ingenuous. Asked by the Carnegie Corporation to de-scribe the procedures used to derive the results of the Project, he repliedthat they were

essentially those of cogitation in relation to many types and eldsof empirical knowledge. This cogitation was partly individual, inthe solitude of the study, partly a deux in prolonged and intimatediscussions, partly in completely informal groups of two, three, orfour, and partly in formal meetings of eight to fteen persons. . . .The relevant individuals racked their brains as best they could,and attempted to mobilize their empirical knowledge in relation tothe theoretical problems. 65

64 Homans, Coming to My Senses , 302.65 Talcott Parsons, The Carnegie Project on Theory, n.d., box 6, section 42.8.4, ParsonsPapers. Courtesy of the Harvard University Archives.

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Perhaps aware that such accounts made it sound as if the procedural normsof the theorist got no more scientic than kicking around campus and at-tending the odd seminar, Parsons used other occasions to stress the practicalsignicance of the Projects activities. The theoretical propositions ad-vanced in the Project on Theory, he insisted, should admit of operationaltesting outthat is, they would stand or fall on their consequences forempirical analysis. 66 This operational denition of theoretical statementswas common in the postwar American social sciences, especially in eco-nomics. 67 But Parsons and his staff placed more scientic weight than usualon the conceptual side of the epistemological equation. Theory did not justgo cap in hand to the data, asking for its measure of legitimacy; it also actedas tutor or director to the unruly play of bare empirics. According to theGeneral Theory , a system of scientic theory was uniquely able to codifyour existing concrete knowledge, and thereby promote the process of cumulative growth of our knowledge. As such, it could act as a guide toresearch and as a source of hypotheses to be applied and tested in socialinquiry. On this reckoning, the theorist was the master synthesizer and or-chestrator of scientic research. 68

The theorists importance in principle still had to be demonstrated in

practice. The Project on Theory deployed a variety of mechanisms to makethe elusive practice of theory into an event similar to those captured oneldwork assignments and in the laboratory. One technique, especially fa-vored by Parsons, Shils, and Tolman, was the construction of tables anddiagrams. These abstract representations and cross-categorizations were in-tended to reify the occurrence of theory. A prominent example was theParsonsShils diagram of the Components of the Action Frame of Refer-ence (see Figure 1, page 306). This was designed to display the symmetries

and transformations inherent in the system of categories that underpinnedthe general theory of action as a whole. Capturing in a single spatial organi-zation of statements the key elements of the action frame of reference, thegure was designed to display how the same two subsystems of an actionsystemnamely, the personality system and the social systemcould showup both among the features of an actor-subject in a given action systemand among the objects toward which an actor-subject might need to orientthemselves. The gure also showed how a third kind of system, the cultural

66 Ibid. Courtesy of the Harvard University Archives.67 See, e.g., Paul Samuelson, The Foundations of Economic Analysis (Cambridge: Har-vard University Press, 1983), 36.68 Talcott Parsons et al., Some Fundamental Categories of the Theory of Action, 3.

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FIGURE 1: Components of the action frame of reference. From Toward a General Theory of Action: Theoretical Foundations for the Social Sci-ences, ed. Talcott Parsons and Edward A. Shils (Cambridge, Mass.:Harvard University Press, 1951), 247. Reproduced with the kind per-mission of Harvard University Press.

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system, cut orthogonally across the subject/object distinction in all actionsystems, and was thus to be deployed in the analysis of systems that com-posed actor-subjects and the objects to which they oriented themselves.

Instruments of theory such as those represented in Figure 1 were meantto serve as what Bruno Latour calls a center of calculation in which theaccumulated empirical materials of a social scientic research networkcould be processed; they were intended as material contributions to socialscience.69 Such instruments, moreover, wore their materiality on theirsleeve, because they were also, by virtue of their very existence, proof of something: they were evidence that theorizing in the eld of social relationscould produce fruitful instruments and mechanisms for organizing the data

of social science. In the Carnegie seminars, theoretical tools had to be pro-duced for the rst time as evidence of the scientic status of the generaltheory of action. That bid to embody pre-existing theoretical and institu-tional commitments in a set of tools and practices of thinking was a centralfeature of the Project on Theory.

Nowhere was this clearer than with respect to the so-called patternvariables. The pattern-variable scheme was developed by Parsons andShils in response to the challenge of nding patterns in the orientations

of actors.70

Given the complexity of the situations in which actors foundthemselves, how methodically to determine their orientations? Drawing onhis earlier analysis of professional roles in modern societies, Parsons elabo-rated a series of ve dichotomies that dened the possible value-orienta-tions an actor could have in performing any kind of action. These patternvariables attempted to formulate the way each and every social action,long- or short-term, proposed or concrete, prescribed or carried out, can beanalysed into ve choices (conscious or unconscious, implicit or explicit)formulated by these ve dichotomies. 71 This was tantamount to the claimthat all actions were oriented toward a system of values, a position thatParsons had sought to vindicate in his earlier work in economic sociologyand the nature of social action. 72 On the face of it, the pattern variables

69 Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers ThroughSociety (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), ch. 6. For the use of tablesand diagrams in the Carnegie Project, see E. C. Tolman, Notes for a System of Psychol-ogy Which Would (I Think) Be Congruent with Systems of Sociology and Anthropology,n.d., box 6, section 42.8.4, Parsons Papers; Tolman, A Psychological Model, Towardsa General Theory of Action , 279361; Talcott Parsons and Edward Shils, Values, Mo-tives, and Systems of Action, Towards a General Theory of Action , g. 115.70 Parsons and Shils, Values, Motives, and Systems of Action, 4849.71 Ibid., 48.72 See Camic, Talcott Parsons .

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were themselves uncontroversial. It seemed reasonable to ask of an action(1) whether or not it was carried out with regard to its consequences be-yond the personal gratication of the actor concerned; (2) whether it wasundertaken only in terms of its personal signicance for the actor or withregard to its consequences for a collective; (3) whether the actor assessedthe object of orientation in a disinterested manner or from the perspectiveof its personal importance for the actor as a private individual; (4) whether,if the object of action was social, it was viewed as a composite of particularsorts of contingent action or of xed, ascribed qualities; and (5) whetherthe social object could make only a specic claim on ones own activities,and vice versa, or whether diffuse demands could be made and received

with respect to that object. Modern medical doctors, for example, wouldbe expected in their professional duties to assess the consequences of theiractions, consider the implications of those actions for the collective goodand accepted moral codes, treat their patients in a disinterested manner,and ask and receive only specic claims related to their expertise as medicalprofessionals. Outside of their medical practice, however, the same doctorsactions towards family members in the home would likely be marked bypersonal and diffuse orientations. Here was one way of marking the distinc-

tions between professional and kinship roles.What made these categorical distinctions important in the context of the General Theory , however, was that Parsons attempted to make theminto one of his key theoretical tools. He and Shils reported that the patternvariables have proved to form . . . a peculiarly strategic focus of the wholetheory of action. 73 They couched their ve dichotomies in a new jargon,in which the pattern variables were listed as follows:

1. AffectivityAffective neutrality.2. Self-orientationCollectivity orientation.3. UniversalismParticularism.4. AscriptionAchievement.5. SpecicityDiffuseness.

These dichotomies were presented as transcendental conditions of action,one side of which must be chosen by an actor before the meaning of asituation is determinate for him, and thus before he can act with respect to

the situation. Parsons and Shils also asserted the logical completeness of the variables with respect to the action frame of reference; as such, in the

73 Parsons and Shils, Values, Motives, and Systems of Action, 49.

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sense that they are all of the pattern variables that so derive, they constitutea system. 74 As a systematic set of variables that dened all possible formsof social action, Parsons and Shils conceived the pattern variables as ananalytic machine. A series of boxes dening the value components of bothactors (the domain of psychology) and social roles (the object of sociology)were designed as tools for deriving the value patterns of any general systemof action taken as an object of empirical analysis. Insofar as they appearedto demonstrate the systematic interrelation of the pattern variables, thesecategorizing grids bore witness to the technical sophistication of the generaltheory of action as a whole.

In addition to building an instrumentarium for action theory, Parsonsalso deployed distinctive rhetorical strategies to give theorizing a temporaland scientic specicity. Time and again, in grant reports, intra-groupmemos, and the publications of the Project, Parsons used the classic scien-tic rhetoric of the breakthrough or unexpected resultthe Eurekamoment so often invoked in the history of scientic discovery. While still inthe midst of the Project meetings, Parsons sought to tantalize (and no doubtalso to mollify) his contact at the Carnegie Corporation with the claim thatwithin the last two weeks a very important theoretical break-through has

occured [sic] which will allow us to attain a level of order and clarity of thewhole eld which I dont think any of us thought possible when webegan. 75 Soon after, Parsons prepared for the Project members A Narra-tive Account of Theoretical Developments: Dec. 318, 1949, in which thesheer sequence and timing of breakthrough events in the theoretical debateswere recounted with the precision of date-and-time lab results. 76 This con-cern for the happening of theory was carried through into the meetingsthat were held in December, during which Parsons dramatized the lunch-

time discussions and post-seminar encounters in which this or that revisionof a problem was hammered out. 77 In both the General Theory and TheSocial System , Parsons was emphatic that theorizing was subject to patternsof discovery and advance similar to those in experimental-technical re-search. He excused any inconsistencies in his theory of social systems with

74 Ibid., 77.75 Parsons to John W. Gardner, December 13, 1949, box 6, section 42.8.4, Parsons Pa-pers. Courtesy of the Harvard University Archives.76 Parsons, A Narrative Account of Theoretical Developments: Dec. 318, 1949, n.d.,box 6, section 42.8.4, Parsons Papers. Courtesy of the Harvard University Archives.77 Carnegie Project Minutes, December 10, 1949, box 6, section 42.8.4, Parsons Pa-pers; Carnegie Project Minutes, December 16, 1949, box 6, section 42.8.4, ParsonsPapers. Courtesy of the Harvard University Archives.

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the boast that [t]he development of theoretical ideas has been proceedingso rapidly that a difference of a few months or even weeks in time may leadto important changes. 78

This obsession with making theory into a scientic-empirical eventmarked the Project from the outset. Parsons arranged to have the discus-sions of the two weekly seminars taped, summarized (later, simply tran-scribed), and then analyzed as two studies in small group dynamics. 79

Neither study, so far as I know, was completed. The collapse of the juniorseminar no doubt made such self-scrutiny less enticing. But the existence of the transcripts testies the desire to give the nascent subculture of socialrelations theory a spatio-temporal embodiment: they were designed as evi-

dence of work of a certain sort. Moreover, the belief that such records couldbe evidence of science-in-action underscores the faith that Parsons andsome of his colleagues placed in the signicance of academic conversationsand tool sharing as substantive scientic practices in themselves. PostwarAmerican social scientists were invested with a profound condence in theirown normative signicance. 80

CONCLUSION

This article has examined some of the obstacles faced, errors made, andsolutions proffered by Talcott Parsons and his associates as they sought tobring about the theoretical integration of the disciplinary complex repre-sented in the DSR. My aim has not been to provide an interpretive accountof the general theory of action, or to offer a case study of a more generaltheoretical turn in the postwar social sciences. Rather, I have sought toreveal the kinds of projects and labors involved in practicing theory in onehighly inuential community of academic social scientists. I have tried toshow how Parsons, even at his most theoretical, can be viewed as engagedin a number of practical activities. As an avowed incurable theorist, Par-sons was performing the cultural work of an innovating ideologist. The actof theorizing was for Parsons an attempt to legitimize his view of how thesocial sciences should be conducted, and the manner in which they might

78 Parsons, The Social System , x.79 It appears that Robert F. Bales (an assistant professor) and M. Brewster Smith wereapproached to carry out the small group studies. For Smiths refusal to undertake such astudy, see Smith to Talcott Parsons, January 3 1950, box 6, section 42.8.4, Parsons Pa-pers. Courtesy of the Harvard University Archives.80 Cohen-Cole, Creative American.

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be integrated. 81 This essay thus contributes to the work of those commenta-tors who have brought Parsons down from the Ivory Tower in which hiscritics have placed him.

I have also attempted to indicate the wider benets of viewing theoryin the social sciences from the perspective of material culture. To be sure,historians can and must take different perspectives. We can certainly askhow Parsons understood modernity; we can assay his views on the profes-sions and the status of the economic activity in advanced Western socie-tieswe can, that is to say, undertake critical doxographies of Parsonsssociological writings. But, if we wish to get at the historical context inwhich Parsons articulated these views, we must forsake the historical evalu-

ation of particular conceptual claims and take an instrumental, metatheore-tical approach. To understand what kind of a historical activity theorizingwas in the postwar social sciences, we should assess the local, institutional,and material contexts in which theory was practiced. While this may robus of the thrill of elucidating a grand theoretical Weltanschauung , or of tracing a conceptual genealogy, it promises to reveal the operations of thought in their quotidian and material dimensions. For historians, thisprize is compensation enough.

Queen Mary, University of London.

81 See Quentin Skinner, Moral Principles and Social Change, in Visions of Politics , Vol.1: Regarding Method (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 14855.

2. isaac 2010 - theorist at work. parsons

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