sorokin and parsons at harvard: institutional conflict and the origin of a hegemonic tradition

Journal of the Hisrory of the Behavioral Sciences Volume 22, April 1986

SOROKIN AND PARSONS AT HARVARD: INSTITUTIONAL CONFLICT AND THE ORIGIN OF

A HEGEMONIC TRADITION BARRY JOHNSTON

The early history of Harvard sociology is closely entwined with the careers and per- sonalities of Pitirim Sorokin and Talcott Parsons. The processes and conditions that led to Parsons’s rise and Sorokin’s decline are essential to understanding the development of Harvard sociology. Edward Tiryakian’s work on theory schools and hegemonic traditions in the social sciences is a useful framework for analyzing and discussing these developments. Following Tiryakian, one can simultaneously trace the operating factors in Sorokin’s failure to achieve lasting power and the development of a Par- sonian sociology which would vie for hegemony in the discipline. Personality, milieu, forms of theorizing, and sociology’s movement toward maturation are keys to the major changes in Harvard sociology during the 1940s. Analysis of this case deepens understanding of the conditions that contribute to the emergence of important intellectual traditions.

The intellectual relationship between the United States and Europe underwent important transformations between 1914 and 1945. A stream of emigrC scholars, fleeing the tyrannies of authoritarianism and the excesses of war and revolution, enriched the quality of American intellectual, scientific, and aesthetic life. Significant minds came to the United States in the fields of astronomy, aerodynamics, aviation, botany, biology, zoology, physics, chemistry, mathematics, technical science, music, literature, painting, philosophy, history, economics, and theology. Sociology also benefited from this intellectual influx, and the contributions of German and Austrian scholars to the discipline have been widely noted.’ A Russian emigre, Pitirim Sorokin played an important role in the development of American sociology. Sorokin came to Harvard in 1930 and re- mained there until his retirement from active teaching and research in 1959. He was not only the founding chairman of Harvard sociology but played a unique part in shap- ing the direction and development of the discipline at a national and international level. Indeed, Harvard provided extensive capital and intellectual resources for both the development of a theory school and a hegemonic tradition in the sense understood by Edward Tiryakian.

The Parsonsian school emerged as dominant, however, and Sorokin had no sus- tained hegemonic influence on the development of the discipline. To answer the question, “Why Parsons?” one must examine not only the situation at Harvard but also the status of the discipline and the position of each of these scholars in the wider sociological community. A useful model for this analysis is Tiryakian’s notion of the theory school.’

*This research was supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities Grant FS 20713-82 and Indiana University Foundation Grant UROC 23-601-43. Documents cited are by permission of the Harvard University Archives and the Department of Sociology at Harvard. I thank Robert K. Merton, Edward A Tiryakian and Norbert Wiley for their contributions to this research.

BARRY V. JOHNSTON is Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Indiana Univer- sity Northwest, 3400 Broadway, Gary, Indiana 46408. He studied for the Ph.D. at the University of Notre Dame and his writings have appeared in the American Journal of Sociology and the Review of Social Theory, among others.

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108 BARRY JOHNSTON

The Tiryakian variant of the school approach allows one to examine the development of idea systems within a discipline in terms of their substance, significant theoretical figures, social structure, relationship to the profession, and relationship to the larger scholarly community. It points to a satisfying sociological dimension in the study of theoretical development and diffusion. The school is a group of scholars, integrated around an intellectually charismatic leader. The founder-leader’s function is to develop the group’s mainframe of ideas or, as discussed by Imre Lakatos, its “Scientific Research Program” (SRP).3 The SRP as a model of empirical reality is subject to both investiga- tion and falsification. Although the core formulations are those of the founder-leader and are usually expressed in that person’s exemplar, the full-blown theory typically is a collective effort.

The status-role structure that defines the organization of the school consists of the founder-leader and various colleagues and fellow intellectuals. Of central importance in the inner circle of the founder-leader is the position of the interpreter. This scholar has a mastery of the SRP and insights into the founder-leader which allow him to ex- plain and defend the program so outsiders can understand its significance.

The remainder of the initial inner circle is drawn from a group of converts who are cogenerationalists of the founder-leader. Being of the same generation these scholars share similar historical backgrounds with the leader. Although these “converts” are often successful, recognized scholars in their own right, they find something in the work of the founder-leader that either reinforces and refines the direction of their own work or is a revelation for them. These fellow professionals contribute actively to developing, elaborating, and testing the group paradigm. Their established position within the professional structure gives the emerging school visibility and often prestige.

Younger members of the school, usually students or those recently entering the lower academic ranks, are “lieutenants.” They, too, are active in spreading the message. They participate in professional organizations, pursue grants, and publish from within the paradigm and often the social network of the school. When they are away from the center of activity, they send their students back to the founder-leader for further education and professional de~elopment.~

A school can and often does receive support from the ancillary structures of academia. Foundation executives, publishers, and journal editors frequently may be pro- ponents of a school’s vision of the world. Additionally, the school may find that a patron assists its activities financially while other supporters advocate them politically and socially.

Tiryakian further develops the school concept into that of a hegemonic school; a school exerts hegemony when the profession accepts their SRP as the way to perform “normal science.” That is, the discipline finds that the general theoretical accounting and methodological guidelines for research produces substantial new increments in knowledge. As a result, scholars spend their energy toiling in the vineyard of the master’s SRP.’

If Sorokin would have formed a school in the Tiryakian sense, or more specifically a hegemonic school, he would have done so at Harvard University between 1930 and 1946. This article elaborates the Tiryakian school concept by applying it to that situation. Although many of the major dimensions of the school model will be discussed, the emphasis in on the intra-institutional dynamics of school formation.

SOROKIN AND PARSONS AT HARVARD 109

THE HARVARD OFFER Most sociologists are aware that the years between 1929 and 1959 at Harvard en-

capsulate a substantial period in the careers of two seminal sociologists: Pitirim Sorokin and Talcott Parsons. In the spring of 1929, Sorokin received an invitation from the Department of Economics and the Committee on Sociology and Social Ethics at Har- vard to deliver a series of lectures on a topic of his choice. The lectures were well received, according to Sorokin, and he came into contact with several important members of the Harvard faculty including Frank W. Taussig, Edwin F. Gay, Charles J . Bullock, and Alfred North Whitehead. On this occasion he also had his first meeting with a young instructor in the economics department, Talcott Parsons.6

Sorokin returned to the University of Minnesota where he continued to work on the early volumes of Social and Cultural Dynamics. The Minnesota years were very productive ones. Sorokin reported congenial relationships with members of the faculty and the department’s graduate students. Among the Minnesota faculty were F. Stuart Chapin, Carle C. Zimmerman, Malcolm Willey, and Edwin H. Sutherland. Significant graduate students of the period included T. Lynn Smith, C. Arnold Anderson, Otis Durant Dun- can, and Conrad and Irene Taeuber. The relationships between Sorokin and many of these scholars were so congenial that several followed him to H a r ~ a r d . ~

During his six years at Minnesota, Sorokin published widely, establishing himself, in his words, as “a better-than-average sociologist.” During that period, he produced Leaves from a Russian Diary (1924), The Sociology of Revolution (1925), Social Mobility (1927), Contemporary Sociological Theories (1928), Principles of Rural Sociology with Carle C. Zimmerman, and the first volume of A Systematic Source-Book in Rural Sociology with Zimmerman and Galpin (1929). In addition, he published a number of articles and coauthored several papers with Minnesota graduate students.

Sorokin arrived at Harvard in late August of 1930 and immediately went to work organizing a sociology department. President A. Lawrence Lowell had earlier appointed a committee that would aid him in this purpose; many of its members continued to have voting privileges in departmental affairs for years to come.8 By the end of the first semester of 1930, the committee had completed its work, submitted its final report to President Lowell, and established the department as an entity within the University.

The specifics of Harvard’s offer to Sorokin are worth reiterating, for they illustrate certain opportunities and limitations in developing a school. In Sorokin’s account, he was first offered a chair of sociology. In further discussion with President Lowell, he was able to expand the new chair into a full Department of Sociology. His success was partly a result of Harvard‘s strong desire for such a department. Sorokin’s recollection of a December 1929 conversation with Lowell is suggestive of the University’s interest:

Among other things, at this meeting President Lowell told me that Harvard had already decided to establish a chair of sociology some twenty-five years before. They had not done so until then because there was no sociologist worthy to fill the chair. Now, in their opinion, such a sociologist had appeared, and they had promptly made the decision.’

Sorokin’s success in obtaining leadership of a department, however, had its limitations. He was required to recruit the teaching and research staff from the Harvard faculty and was unable to bring sociologists in from outside the University. Yet, Harvard had no ex-officio sociologists - that is, sociologists working in other departments - for him to recruit. Sorokin observed that “one could easily understand the difficulties in building

110 BARRY JOHNSTON

a first class sociology department without sociologists.”” The new department also was required to absorb and replace the Department of Social Ethics.

In addition to these restrictions, Sorokin’s initial desire to create only a graduate program did not prevail. The Department was to be open to superior undergraduates and graduate students who would be instructed by a core faculty consisting of himself, Richard C. Cabot, and James Ford as senior members; Carl Joslyn and Talcott Par- sons as faculty instructors; and W. Lloyd Warner and Paul Pigors as tutors.

Sorokin was given a $10,000 grant by the Harvard Committee for Research in the Social Sciences to continue and complete his work on Dynamics. He used a substantial portion of this grant to employ an “eminent” group of specialists to do “spade work” to be incorporated into the book. Most of the consultants that he hired for this project were Russian. Among them were N. S. Timasheff, J. W. Boldyreff, N. G. Lossky, I . I . Lapshin, N. Okuneff, P. Struve, the Russian Generals N. N. Golovine and A. A. Zaitzoff, and economists and economic historians P. A. Savitski, S. G. Pushkareff, and E. F. Maximovitch.”

The only obstacle Sorokin reported in developing the basic sociology program was that the Harvard administration was reluctant to appoint Parsons as the department’s faculty instructor. Sorokin reports his personal impressions of Parsons as “rather favorable.” Parsons “displayed a good analytical mind and a discriminating knowledge of the theories of Durkheim, Pareto, Weber, and other sociologists. Duly impressed, I strongly recommended Parsons’s appointrnent.”l2 After further discussion Parsons’s appointment to the faculty was confirmed by the administration.

Sorokin’s memories of the Department’s beginnings are supplemented in a recent interview with Robert K. Merton. Merton recalls certain sociological observations on this event as he learned them from E. B. Wilson and E. F. Gay, who were major participants in this great transition. Merton suggests that given the Harvard culture of the time, the founding of the Department was in several ways “a quite implausible event which had a Lowell, then President of Harvard, actually displacing a Cabot with a Rus- sian emigre, Pitirim Sorokin - all this in the course of transforming a venerable Depart- ment of Social Ethics into a newfangled Department of So~iology.”’~ By way of providing social and cultural context for this improbable event to the readers of an Italian j o ~ r n a l , ’ ~ Merton quotes the old jingle about the stratum of Boston Brahmins:

And this is good old Boston,

Where the Lowells talk to the Cabots

Having made this revolutionary decision, Lowell probably had second thoughts and sought to safeguard the University and the Department from possible future difficulties. His solution ushered in a golden age for the early graduate students in the Department: Lowell decided to appoint some of the most widely known and celebrated members of the Harvard faculty to the new sociology department. Not only would their profound knowledge and reputations enhance the Department, but they would see to it that departmental decisions were in accord with University traditions and practice^.'^

For students, this meant access to some of the best minds and teachers within the University. According to Merton, several of these great teachers helped to shape the contours of his own thinking. Significant among them were economic historian Edwin F. Gay; world authority on the blood and renowned physiologist, biochemist, and enthusiastic student of Pareto, Lawrence J . Henderson; entomologist William M. Wheeler

The home of the bean and cod

And the Cabots talk only to God.


who, with the cooperation of other experts on a great variety of social species, gave a memorable course entitled “Animal Sociology”; the polymathic mathematician- physicist-statistician E. B. Wilson; noted anthropologists Earnest A. Hooton and Alfred M. Tozzer; the great, demanding, and erudite economist Joseph Schumpeter; philosopher Alfred North Whitehead; and American historian A. M. Schlesinger. Some of these scholars not only contributed their expertise to the new department but also gave Sorokin gentle guidance into the traditions of Harvard University.

Merton points out that Sorokin was able to bring one sociologist with him: Carle C. Zimmerman, who came from the University of Minnesota. Sorokin in Long Journey does indicate that Zimmerman was on board for the 1932-1933 academic year.

Merton also reports that, according to E. B. Wilson, economists J. D. Black and E. F. Gay were most significant in the appointment of Parsons. Knowing that Parsons was not likely to receive a continuing appointment in Economics and knowing of his deep interest in sociology, they supported his candidacy in the new department. Sorokin was somewhat in awe of both of these stalwarts in the faculty and took note of their good opinions of Parsons. To these he added his own endorsement as chairman and senior member of the department.16

THE EARLY AND MIDDLE YEARS The Harvard sociology department opened its doors in the 1931-1932 academic year.

The department began with twenty-nine concentrators, four graduate students, and 330 students enrolled in various courses. Sorokin had been successful in establishing a rule that only honor students would be allowed to major in the Department. As a result, Sociology had an impressively high number of honor graduates in its first cohort. However, this happy situation did not last for long. Under pressure from other departments, the honor student rule was dropped by June 1932. The change opened the department to all students, and the quality of concentrators declined. Indeed, Sociology would struggle for years to keep the quality of its concentrators on a par with the rest of the ~ol1ege.l’

The number of graduate students and concentrators grew consistently until World War I1 intervened. Sorokin noted that graduate students were selected with the most stringent requirements in mind. Midway in his tenure as chairman (1936-1937), the department had twenty-four graduate students, many of whom later made substantial contributions to the discipline. Indeed, Robert Park, who taught at Harvard in the summer of 1936, made the following observation in a letter to Sorokin:

I was very much impressed with the quality of your graduate students. The undergraduates who took my course were not very high grade. They, I suppose, were students who had been compelled to do time in the summer school because of their deficiencies. But the graduate students, a very considerable number of them at any rate, I was very glad to meet. I think you are probably getting a higher grade of graduate stupfnt at Harvard than we are getting in Chicago, from my judge of the samples.

The period from 1935 to 1937 was an important one, not only in the careers of Parsons and Sorokin but also in the relationship between the two men. In 1935 Parsons was in his ninth year of college teaching. Although he had been at Harvard for eight years, he was still an instructor. However, he was working on and publishing what were to be his most significant early works. As Robert Bierstedt observes, Parsons’s first im-

112 BARRY JOHNSTON

portant theoretical statement was not the Structure of Social Action, but his paper “The Place of Ultimate Values in Sociological Theory.””

Parsons’s early career at Harvard was a rocky one. He preceded Sorokin, having arrived in 1926 to teach in the economics department. His early background is well- known: after completing his basic education at Amherst in 1924, Parsons went to the London School of Economics for advanced study. There he worked with Harold Laski, R. H. Tawney, L. T. Hobhouse, and B. K. Malinowski, the Polish anthropologist who most influenced the young Parsons during his stay in England. In 1925 Parsons left Lon- don and began his studies at Heidelberg. There, in the city of Max Weber, Parsons came to focus on the works of this great sociologist. He had the opportunity to work with Karl Mannheim, Alfred Weber, and, most important, Karl Jaspers. Through Jaspers, he received a proper introduction to Durkheim and did important methodological and philosophical work on Immanuel Kant. With the aid of Edgar Salin, “an iconoclastic economist close to both Weber brothers,” he pursued his study of capitalism in recent German literature. For that work, he received the Dr. Phil. degree in 1929.20

By the time Sorokin arrived at Harvard, Parsons had been in the Department of Economics for more than three years. His future there, however, was not bright. The shift in the field toward more technical issues apparentIy did not interest Parsons, and his work in that area was less than competitive with other members of the Department. Parsons observes that it was also his unlucky fate to be subject to two “unsympathetic” chairmen: H. H. Burbank in economics and later P. A. Sorokin in sociology.21 This meant that professional advancement was slow and difficult.

Shortly after publishing his article on ultimate values in 1935, Parsons completed a substantial portion of what became The Structure of Social Action. He circulated the work, at first titled Sociology and the Elements of Human Action, to Sorokin and later to selected members of the Harvard Committee on Research in the Social Sciences. This project originated out of his doctoral studies and had been in the process of continuous development over the years. He discussed’many of the ideas in his course “The Sociological Theories of Hobhouse, Durkheim, Simmel, Tonnies, and Max Weber” and less formally in the context of the Adams House group.” They were also an interest he shared with other members of the Pareto Ci r~ le .~’ Parsons intended to use this book and his earlier essays as the foundation for promotion to assistant professor. In Octo- ber of 1935, he wrote to Sorokin asking for promotion. He argued that he had spent an inordinate amount of time in the probationary status of instructor and asked that Sorokin press the issue with the Department. Parsons pointed to his teaching and his developing reputation outside of Harvard as the basis for a promotion. Although he had not yet published a major work or any empirical research, his articles had been well received within the institution and the profession. Based on his record, he felt that he had done well in sociology and deserved a promotion. If the Department did not share his judgment, he would go elsewhere. All he asked was “a fair trial and a decision.” A month later, he sent Sorokin a copy of his manuscript for review.24

Sorokin’s response to the manuscript may mark the beginning of the difficulties between the two scholars. In a 11 November 1935 letter to Parsons, Sorokin made a series of observations:

In general your work is to be commended and heartily congratulated. If it is not too pretentious I would say that your work has many good tokens. But in all sincerity and frankness-good tokens, not a fruitful harvest, as yet; and not a very large


scientific building, as yet, in which we can live and work. This means it has several weak points. Please accept these criticisms in the same friendly spirit in which they are written.

Sorokin saw two major types of difficulties in Parson’s work which he called essential and technical. On the technical side, he felt Parsons’s writing was too long and slow. The style was difficult and the main points were hard to follow. Indeed, the more important the point, the more difficult the reading. Sorokin found the style of the manuscript more difficult than Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason or Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology:

I may be wrong but I feel that your work would be “unreadable” for say, ninety per cent of the sociologists of the USA. Perhaps it is a plus, ununderstandable work creates a myth of being particularly great . . . but you hardly want such prestige - not to mention it is usually shortlived. The reason for such difficulty in communication may be your writing style, but it may also be due to the unclearness of the ideas in your mind. Which of these is real I do not know. I am inclined to think the second is not totally absent. This leads to an enumeration of the essential shortcomings.

Sorokin found the first three chapters to be difficult and unclear. He attributed most of the difficulty to matters of terminology, asserting that Parsons gave meanings to key terms that differed from those of the thinkers who formulated them and often from contemporary understanding. “One does not know what you mean by these terms and what currents of thought you have in mind. Subsequent analysis is unclear. Giving new meanings to established terms is confusing.”

Another source of difficulty was that Parsons did not define some of his important terms when he introduced them. To these were added more undefined concepts, pro- ducing a “manysided ambiguity” in the work. One could not follow, in Sorokin’s estima- tion, “many of the subsequent reasonings tied up with the basic concepts.”

This fundamental conceptual difficulty was a result of using two modes of defini- tion: mosaic and analytical. Although Sorokin previously had tried (fruitlessly) to point out to Parsons the difficulty with mosaic definitions, Parsons persisted in using such unscientific “logical monsters.”

Because of the lack of conceptual precision and the misuse of established proposi- tions, derivations and conclusions often “jump out in an unwarranted and unexpected way.” Furthermore, the analysis became so fine, detailed, and finicky that Sorokin believed that Parsons “missed the elephant in your hunt for the mosquito.”

Sorokin concluded the letter by noting:

There is plenty of good in your work-but in your work one finds not only this “gold” but plently of “pseudo gold” and something even less noble. If I were you I would rewrite the first three chapters entirely, and perhaps reduce them to one introductory chapter. This would eliminate a lot of confusing nonessential material not necessary for your major points. The book would gain a great deal from such a revision. Such, Parsons, are my impressions in all sincerity and frankness . . . most heartily I wish you success along these lines.25

Sorokin’s difficulty with this manuscript may well have carried over to his assessment of Parsons as a candidate for promotion. In a letter to President Conant discussing recruitment and promotion criteria, he made the following comment:

114 BARRY JOHNSTON

So far as promotion of a younger member is concerned, here I see only one criterion, mainly the total achievement of a young man and his potential possibilities as far as they can be judged. . . . By the totality of achievement I mean first of all whether the man is original and brilliant, a competent scholar or researcher; second, how good a teacher he is; third, how great are his potentialities along both lines. The last is mentioned last but in some cases it has the greatest importance.26

Judging from this letter, Sorokin may have found Parsons’s total achievement to be less than he felt necessary for advancement in rank. The difficulties that he noted were fundamental and serious. They were matters that a chairman was required to reflect on and assess in making a decision.

Approximately a year later, four members of the Harvard Committee on Research in the Social Sciences reviewed a revised copy of Parsons’s manuscript. They were J. A. Schumpeter, J. D. Black, L. J. Henderson, and 0. H. Taylor. Schumpeter made some of the same negative observations as Sorokin, but praised Parsons’s scholarship while providing a novel insight into the problem of language. Although agreeing that the work was too long and “much space seems to be needlessly lost in getting to the point,” Schumpeter said:

The scholarly care with which the main elements of Max Weber’s thoughts are analyzed and followed to their sources and displayed in their significance cannot be too highly commended. The author has in fact so deeply penetrated into the German thicket as to lose in some places the faculty of writing clearly in English about it and some turns of phrase become fully understandable only if translated into German.27

Henderson, though positive and supportive in his report to the Committee, observed: On the other hand there are in the work a large number of details that I regard as erroneous or inadequately analyzed or irrelevant or in a few instances as ex- traneous. Concerning not a few of these it is my impression that I have convinced Parsons that I am right. At any rate it is my view that the book, while very important as a whole, is much in need of modification at many points in detail. . . . Because the work is potentially so good I strongly urge that it should be once more revised.28

The manuscript did indeed undergo another extensive revision. Parsons recounts having gone to Henderson’s home regularly for long sessions devoted to improving the rnan~sc r ip t .~~ He further acknowledged that

two other critics have been particularly helpful through the suggestions and criticisms they have given after reading the manuscript, Professor A. D. Nock, especially in the parts dealing with religion and Dr. Robert K. M e r t ~ n . ~ ’

That some level of support for Sorokin’s assessment is found in the reviews of those who supported Parsons suggest that the Russian’s position was not without a credible basis. Indeed, it implies that Sorokin’s lack of sympathy derived some of its momen- tum from sound scholarly observations and was not a product of pure pique or personality.

Parsons notes that his promotion to assistant professor in 1936 was pushed not by Sorokin but, notably by E. F. Gay, E. B. Wilson and Henderson, all of whom were “outside members” of the department. . . . Even with the assistant professorship, however, I was by no means certain that I wanted to stay at Harvard. In the (to me) critical year of 1937 I received a very good offer . . . I went to Henderson -not Sorokin. Henderson took the matter directly to President


Conant who, with Sorokin’s consent to be sure, offered to advance me immediately to then extant “second term” assistant professorship with a definite promise of permanency as associate professor two years later. On these terms I decided to stay at H a r ~ a r d . ~ ’

The outcome of this episode showed continuing tension between Parsons and Sorokin on scholarly and career issues. It also revealed a Parsonsian power base independent of Sorokin and the other sociologists. This emerging factionalism circum- scribed Sorokin’s power and diminished his influence.

This was also a pivotal period in Sorokin’s scholarly work. In 1937 the first three volumes of Social and Cultural Dynamics were published and widely reviewed. Sorokin’s magnum opus spanned 2,500 years over which he attempted to articulate the patterns of social change in art, philosophy, law, ethics, science, religion, and psychology. Its sweep and vigor was similar to the philosophies of history developed by Toynbee and Spengler. However, the work was widely criticized and condemned within the Harvard community and the profession.

Bierstedt’s excellent discussion of the reviews showed that, even though some found the work meritorious (e.g., Arthur Livingston in the New York Times), most considered it seriously flawed. Both Sidney Hook and William Yandell Elliott objected to it on statistical grounds. Hook called the statistics “lattice work for a weasel interpretation” and concluded that Dynamics was “altogether without wisdom.” Elliott was similarly put off by the use of numbers but found Sorokin’s endeavor far superior to Pareto, who was then in vogue at Harvard. Three of Elliott’s Harvard colleagues found the work to be without significance: A. P. Usher (economics) argued that the ideal-typical thought led to reification and confusion; D. W. Prall (philosophy) found the style “inexcusably prolix” and the interpretation of history to be prejudiced and naive; Crane Brinton of the Society of Fellows and Department of History, in a subtle and acidic essay, damned the work for style and scholarship and as a naive exercise in prophecy. All in all, the work was found deficient by Cambridge scholars.

Dynamics fared poorly within the sociological journals as well. The American Sociological Review devoted four essays to analyzing and discussing it, all of which found it flawed.32

Sorokin, of course, fought back, but there is little doubt that the reviews were damaging. The reactions to Dynamics probably cost him stature among administrators and powerful colleagues. The reception of the work within Harvard and the profession may also have raised questions among graduate students about the general promise of Sorokin’s sociology.33

THE RISE OF TALCOTT PARSONS Tiryakian argues that successful schools usually develop in high-quality universities

located at the nexus of ideas and found in large metropolitan areas. Harvard and Boston certainly satisfy these conditions. However, though Tiryakian acknowledges that a candidate for theoretical hegemony must have a firm institutional base, he does not discuss in any detail the structural features of obtaining and maintaining such a position. From 1935 to 1938, Parsons substantially increased his power and influence not only at Har- vard but also in the community of professional sociologists. Indeed, his position in the latter community contributed to his prestige in the former.

116 BARRY JOHNSTON

Parsons’ ability to attract attention from outside resulted in job offers from other universities. These he used to increase his stature and power within the Department and the University. Of particular significance were offers from Northwestern and the Univer- sity of Wisconsin. Continued interest by Wisconsin provided a fulcrum for Parsons’s promotion to associate professor in 1939. Northwestern’s effort to recruit him was an important element in his promotion to professor and chairmanship of sociology in 1944. However, other important elements entered into the decision to replace Sorokin with Parsons and the Department of Sociology with a Department of Social Relations. Some of these are made clear in a letter from Parsons to the then Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Paul H. Buck, in which he described the implications of the offer from Northwestern:

I think that the essential thing from my point of view is that the offer from North- western has brought the whole complex situation here to a head in such a way as to force the crucial questions of the future role at Harvard, and particularly in the policy of its administration, of the kind of scientific work with which my own career has become identified. I want to use my own personal case as “pressure” only in the sense of helping to bring the administration to face issues of policy which I feel it will have to face sooner or later anyway. . . . The great advantage (of the Northwestern offer) to me would be a free hand, an opportunity to develop something much more in accord with my own ideas than anything which has heretofore existed at H a r ~ a r d . ~ ~

Parsons then discussed the situation of various social science departments within the University and attempted to specify their strengths and weaknesses. For Sociology, he made the following observation:

The sociology experiment was made and very badly bungled. Sorokin should never have been appointed to lead a great development in the first place. The administration should never have allowed him to secure a permanency for Zimmerman. But having made these mistakes the thing has been allowed to stew in its own juices, and continue as one of the sorest spots in the faculty. In the meantime a very big scientific development has been rapidly gathering force . . . I will stake my whole professional reputation on the statement that it is one of the really great movements of modern scientific thought . . . like all really big pioneer movements it is not understood by the majority of the established high priests of social science. Like all such movements it lacks an adequate institutional framework for developing its potentialities, and the development of such a framework is hindered by the vested interest of those already in the field. . . . This general situation is particularly pronounced here at Harvard, as I have out- lined above. The essential question to me is whether Harvard is going to seize the opportunity to be a great leader in this movement or is going to move only as it is forced to do so by the competition of other institutions. Which it is going to be seems to me will constitute a considerable factor in how far Harvard will, in the next generation, maintain a general position of leadership in the academic world or will depend for its position mainly on its wealth and past prestige.

Parsons further shared with Buck the content of previous discussions with Presi- dent Conant about a “basic social science” program at the University and the situation in the Sociology Department. He reported that Conant favored the former, saying “You don’t need to try and convince me, I agree with you.” On the unsatisfactory state of the Sociology Department, Conant commented, “It’s pretty bad when three out of the four permanent members are the wrong people.” (The third was James Ford.)


To return to the immediate practical problem, I think I am clear in my own mind that merely a raise in salary, even a prospect of full professorship soon, without a change in the organizational situation, is not enough. I would rather go to Northwestern. As I have repeatedly told you, I don’t think that any substantial improvement in the Department situation is possible while Sorokin is Chairman. I greatly appreciate your assurances that his chairmanship will terminate soon. Frankly, however, two more years of it are not an attractive prospect to me. I should consider that justified only by the prospect that very substantial improvements would come immediately after that time. Also I frankly feel that your assurance that Zimmerman will not succeed him is an essential condition of a tolerable situation in the Department for me.

In closing, Parsons discussed alternative forms of organization for a new department and several alternatives for its chairman. The tone of the rest of the letter was such that a substantial reorganization was a precondition for his staying at H a r ~ a r d . ~ ~

This letter was written in April 1944, but the administration’s decision to support Parsons and the Social Relations alternative was a product of more than Parsons’s pressure for change. There seemed to be dissatisfaction with Sorokin’s quality of leadership, and the Department was somewhat of an embarrassment to the administration. Parsons’s alternative was a remedy for that situation that did not involve an extensive output of resources. Other than two new positions, which the administration was will- ing to approve, this new approach to social science could be implemented largely through internal reorganization. Consequently, it was an attractive alternative from a variety of perspectives.

On 5 April 1944, Sorokin received a letter from Buck saying that his chairmanship had ended. The Dean pointed out that in May 1940, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences passed a by-law that limited the maximum term of a chairman to five years. For a variety of reasons, the rule was implemented gradually over several years and the time had come to apply the new policy to the Sociology Department. Buck stated:

You have carried the burden of chairmanship since 1931 and deserve relief. I am, therefore, suggesting that your term as chairman come to an end at the conclusion of this current year, that is, on 30 June 1944, and a new chairman take office from that time. I shall appreciate your writing me your advice as to the member of your Department you feel best suited to assume the ~hairmanship.~~

As Sorokin notes in Long Journey, he had three times asked to be relieved of his duties as Department chairman. Furthermore, “While I was anxious to be free of the chairmanship, some other members of the department were very eager to obtain the p~sition.”~’ He responded to Buck’s letter on 10 April, recommending Zimmerman as his successor. However, his recommendation did not prevail and President Conant an- nounced the selection of Parsons on 26 April 1944.38

Sorokin continued as a full-time member of the Department until 1946. This marked the beginning of his relationship with Eli Lilly. By 1949, he reduced his activity in the Department to half-time teaching. He continued in that relationship until 1955 when, at the age of 66, he retired from teaching. From January 1955 to December 1959, he directed most of his efforts toward research in creative altruism. The result was three books and a number of essays and articles. On 31 December 1959, Sorokin became an Emeritus Professor of Harvard.

118 BARRY JOHNSTON

ESTABLISHING THE INSTITUTIONAL BASE The question of why a school did not emerge through or around Sorokin is an in-

teresting one. The intellectual environment at Harvard from 1930 to 1950 was characterized by the continuous presence of talented and productive graduate students. Scholars such as Robert Merton, Kingsley Davis, C. A. Anderson, Edgar Schuler, John Riley, Logan Wilson, Robin Williams, and Wilbert Moore overlapped with or were followed by Bernard Barber, Marion Levy, Albert Cohen, and Francis X. Sutton. Some who arrived after the War were: Harold Garfinkel, David Alberle (anthropology), and James Olds and Gardner Lindzey (psychology). Still later, in the 1940s, came Morris Zelditch and Neil Smelser. Even this brief list shows that both before and after Parsons attained control of the Sociology Department, he was surrounded by capable students interested in extending his work and ideas. At the same time, he enjoyed the support of the Har- vard administration and wide professional recognition. In 195 1, the Parsonsian exemplar Towards a General Theory of Action was published. The work exhibited the characteristically cooperative nature of an exemplar.39 Promising students continued to enter the Department of Social Relations and combined with Parsons’s earlier students to enforce the hegemony of the school within the di~cipline.~’

Clearly, there was a remarkable pool of talent available to both Parsons and Sorokin. Indeed, both established many valuable working relationships with this cadre of sociological talent. However, Parsons did so to a much greater degree and with substantially more success than Sorokin. It was from this network of relationships that the Par- sonsian system was formulated and emerged to compete for hegemony within the discipline. To understand why Parsons succeeded in this milieu and Sorokin did not requires understanding a variety of additional factors.

To comprehend the social dynamics of securing an institutional base at Harvard requires examining a set of factors endogenous to the University and certain exogenous conditions in the discipline of sociology. The endogenous factors include: the character and level of development of Functionalism and Integralism in the works of Parsons and Sorokin; the perception among graduate students and faculty of the potential for success of each form of theorizing; the relationships maintained by each scholar with his collaborators; Harvard’s “Olympus Complex”; the intellectual style and charisma of the major figures; their relationships with graduate students and other scholarly groups within the university. Exogenous considerations have to do with the level of theoretical development within the discipline and opportunities for new approaches during this period.

During the early years of the Department, Parsons had a theoretical advantage over Sorokin. This advantage had to do with the stage of development that characterized his theory. The Parsonsian system at that point may be characterized as being seminal, open, and having a strong promise of success. Such characteristics made it particularly attractive to Harvard graduate students. By 1930, Parsons had already published his translation of Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and by 1936 was approaching the final stages of preparing the Structure of Social Action. He was at the very beginning of his theoretical development and actively incorporating other minds into his projects and concerns. Not only was he engaged in continuous dialogues with Henderson, the Pareto Circle, and other colleagues in the Departments of Economics, Psychology, and Anthropology, but he was actively involved with his graduate students through the Adams House group. Robert Merton, Kingsley Davis, Robin Williams, and Wilbert Moore, along with other graduate students, were regular participants in this


informal but important theory group. It was at Adams House over beer and ideas that life-long friendships and interests were formed around the seminal work of Parsons.41

The openness and promise of success of the Parsonsian system was reflected in the observations of students at Harvard during this time. As John Herren noted, “they had a strong sense of having a very powerful scientific kind of sociology. . . .’J2 This, combined with Parsons’s receptivity to enlist followers, allowed students to take an active part in the emerging tradition, make minor changes, and advance it.43 There were many theoretical and empirical issues to be dealt with that required participation from competent researchers. As one student observed:

There was a sense that he (Parsons) gave people that they could acquire from him a style of analysis - functional institutional analysis -that could be applied to a whole variety of fields. I can remember people saying, “Well, look, Kingsley is doing ‘the family,’ I’ll do. . . .” I remember Wilbert Moore saying, I’ll do “Labor,” somebody will do this and that. In a sense, you know, we divide up the universe and do it all with the capacity iyr the analysis that Parsons (offered) institutional, structural functional analysis.

Students were also quite enthusiastic about the originality .of Parsons’s work and its potential for success.

One of the reasons why there was this confluence of people who really went out into the world and did something and had a big influence on the evolution of sociology and the social sciences was that we were all quite persuaded that we had hold of something that other people didn’t. We had that wonderful, exciting sense that, you know, the rest of those people out there haven’t got it right. We’ve got it right. We can do things others can’t. And all sorts of people-I won’t name names - but I know some people with quite mediocre intellect who have done quite good things, because we had a sense that we knew how to go at it . . . in a way that even the other (social sciences were not). We were sure we were better than political scientists and we thought the economists were too policy-oriented and that the science of society was around the . . . bend of the next decade. And we r$ly had something. There’s no question about it. There was something in this.

In comparison, Sorokin’s work can be viewed as mature, nearly complete, and with an intermediate and controversial position in the discipline. Sorokin’s exemplar, Social and Cultural Dynamics, was a joint venture, but not a creatively cooperative one. The first three volumes were published in 1937 and the fourth in 1941. This represented a complete and polished work that made its appearance at the time when Parsons’s fecund early works were beginning to emerge and elicit interest from Harvard and the discipline. The cooperation with several Russian scholars on Dynamics was not the type which would involve others with Sorokin or his ideas. Most of Sorokin’s collaborators were paid to do a body of specific research into their areas of specialization. The inquiry was to follow a schedule of items developed by Sorokin and the researchers were kept in the dark as to the hypotheses and theoretical interest that informed the work. The group also was dispersed geographically throughout the United States and Europe. Thus, the structure of the relationships between Sorokin and his collaborators explicitly precluded the involvement and contributory elements that were typical of Parsons and his relationship to his collaborator^.^^ Additionally, Sorokin’s books after Dynamics (between 1940-1946) largely were independent ones; those published after 1946 shifted away from science and value-free empiricism toward ideological justifications for an integrated Chris- tian society. Thus, while Dynamics offered some possibility of shared cooperative work, it was not structured to produce the intellectual involvements necessary to form a school.

120 BARRY JOHNSTON

In addition to Sorokin’s theoretical work having a mature and finished nature, its reception in the discipline was mixed and controversial. Because of this, many of Sorokin’s potential students may have been unclear about its promise. The ambiguity around his work was captured by Sorokin when he observed:

The strongly disparaging character of the reviews is a good omen for my books because of a high correlation between the damning of my books by the reviewers of the American Journal of Sociology and their subsequent career. The more strongly they have been damned (and practically all my books were damned by your reviewers), the more significant and successful were my damned works, the more they were translated, and the more voluminous the scientific literature in the form of substantial articles, Ph.D. theses, and books about my books, the greater the space given them in various sociological lexicons and philosophical encyclopedias, and the more substantial the chapters in texts and monographs devoted to my theories and “emotional outbursts.” Even more frequently my “yarns” have been appropriated by some of the damning reviewers a few years after publication of their reviews. . . .47

The above quotation appeared in the “Letters to the Editor” section of the March 1957 volume of the AJS, but Sorokin believed this attitude typical of his treatment by reviewers in Social Forces and The American Sociological Review. Thus Sorokin’s reception, his attitude, and his dialogues with other professionals may have made the promise of his work less clear in the eyes of graduate students and potential future collaborators.

Alvin Gouldner also provides insight into other factors which contributed to Par- sons’s ascent at Har~a rd .~ ’ In The Coming Crisis of Western Socioiogy, he suggested that Parsonsian theory reflected a detachment from the realities of the Depression and World War I1 which was consistent with the institutional ethos of Harvard during that time. Both appeared as emotionally and socially detached from the conditions of society and therefore able to be objective about the world around them. This institutional “Olympus Complex” gave members of the Harvard community support for a theoretical conceit which, in Gouldner’s mind, is necessary to produce bold, detached, and innovative social theory.49 Students in the Department believed that the most important contributions that they could make to resolving societal problems was to develop a scientific sociology that could give the society the understanding needed to deal with current crises. Therefore, their private interests as scholars and academicians were consistent with the public interest of society. Through becoming good scientific sociologists, they could max- imize their contributions to the country. Their orientation to society was aloof, and scientific. This attitude, like the Charles River, provided a buffer and a certain emotional distance from the mundane considerations of a world in pain. Indeed, the emphasis on objective, impersonal, detached scientific understanding made the values of the emerging sociology consistent with those of the established institution. The character of Par- sonsian theory fit the ethos and image of Harvard.

Although not explicitly noted by Gouldner, Harvard ethnocentrism and nativism also may be aspects of the Olympus Complex that had negative implications for Sorokin. The institution’s history is wedded to Anglo-Saxon traditions and, as a bastion of Brahminism, it may have had difficulty coping with the style that Sorokin exhibited. There is ample historical evidence of antipathy in the Boston area toward new immigrants. Indeed, Harvard’s policy was not immune to this more general mood. Alan Kraut observed:

One Harvard professor expressed the objections of numerous others when he com- plained that too many students were coming from outside the element from which


the college had been chiefly recruited for three hundred years. In response, Har- vard mounted a restrictive quota system in 1922 that especially affected the increasing number of East European Jews seeking admission. Revised admission question- naires were designed to flag newcomers by asking, ‘What change, if any, has been made since birth in your name or that of your father? . . .’ After objections from the American Jewish Committee, a special Faculty Committee investigated admission policies and reported in April, 1923, that it recommended that Harvard repudiate such changes and retain a policy of “equal opportunity for all; regardless of race or religion” using “no novel process of scrutiny” to screen applicants. However, covert discrimination at Harvard and elsewhere continued, despite public declarations to the ~ontrary.~’

Sorokin, in a letter to E. A. Ross, noted that foreign scholars had some difficulty at Harvard and suggested the existence of an unofficial quota norm:

Our experimentation with visiting foreign professors has shown that they do not do justice to themselves or to the students. By the time they have adapted themselves somewhat to the conditions, their time has expired. For these reasons, and the fact that Harvard has the largest quota of foreign students, Russian, Italian, French, and others, the Administration is not favorably inclined at the present time to further extensions of the q ~ o t a . ~ ’

In addition, the confrontive, challenging style of Russian intellectual exchange and pedagogy may have grated on the nerves and ears of Sorokin’s graduate students and colleagues. Add to this the flair, passion, and hyperbole characteristic of Russian ex- pression and a style results that was at odds with the ethos and ambiance that Gouldner calls the Olympus Complex.

While Sorokin’s work during most of this period was scientific in orientation, it was not as abstract as that of Parsons. Sorokin’s writing seems to be a product of both affect and intellect. He writes with an involvement and passion foreign to the Parson- sian style. While his scope was broad and his erudition established, there was an element of personal involvement in much of his work. His writings have a flavor different from that of dispassionate science. The man who once described himself as a “wild Jackass always kicking everything about”52 may have fitted poorly into the society of Harvard University. Indeed, while the scope and flavor of Parsons’s work fit well with the institutional ethos, one wonders if perhaps Sorokin’s style, use of language, and passion were not somewhat of an embarrassment to the Department and to Harvard and, as such, tended to isolate him from being considered seriously by graduate students.

Tiryakian has further observed that founding a successful school depends, to a significant degree, on the charismatic qualities of the founder-leader’s personality. This charisma is not purely intellectual. To be successful, the personality of the founder- leader should be open, supportive, and sensitive to the ideas and contributions of others. Here again, there are substantial differences between Parsons and Sorokin, which can be seen in their role orientations and self-images. Sorokin conducted his classes as monologues. While students were impressed by the scope and power of his intellect and arguments, they also found him to be distant, demanding, and denigrating of their scholarly endeavors. As one student observed:

. . . You couldn’t be first rate with Sorokin. If you agreed with him, you were not original, if you disagreed with him, you were wrong. So you were kind of in a tight box with Sorokin. . . . He was not generous with his students, you know, and if they became famous, then he got more generous.53

122 BARRY JOHNSTON

Furthermore, there were problems in communicating with Sorokin. This point was made clearly by another Sorokin student:

If you had something you wanted to discuss with Sorokin, the strategy you had to use was to go in there and pose it. For about ten minutes you got the most brilliant (analysis) you could imagine. And then he started off on, ‘Have you heard about the latest foreign language into which my books have been translated?’ Then, you could forget it. You then s ent another hour and a half, you know, but that was a complete waste of time.

Parsons, on the other hand, had qualitatively different relationships with his

We all studied under Parsons. And, in those days you could stud& under Parsons without having to agree with him. . . . He didn’t like disciples.

There was also a certain openness about Parsons that implied that one’s opinions as a subordinate in the teacher-student relationship counted for something. This was en- couraging and attractive to students and contributed to their interest in him and his work.’6 Much of the flavor of these differences was captured by Robert Merton when he observed that graduate students came to the Department for one or both of two reasons: to study with Sorokin or to be at Harvard.

I went there solely for the first reason . . . but once there many of us “discovered” Parsons. This was especially the result of his first course simply entitled “The Sociological Theories of Hobhouse, Durkheim, Simmel, Tonnies, and Max Weber.” Hobhouse, Simmel and much of Tonnies soon dropped from sight as Parsons made this course the source of his magisterial Structure of Social Action, six years later. We having discovered him, he in turn proceeded to discover us. He was both the cause and occasion for our taking sociological theory seriously. Because he, as a reference figure, accorded us intellectual respect, because he took us seriously, we, in strict accord with George Meadian theory came to take ourselves seriously. We had work to do. Soon, some of us were less students tha5junior colleagues- fledgling colleagues, to be sure, but colleagues for all that.

Other factors which seem important in assessing the differences between these two theorists as teachers are their respective ages and the amount of informal contact which they maintained with students. Parsons was some fourteen years younger than Sorokin and thus closer in age to the first cohort of graduate students. This led not only to long- standing friendships with Merton, Davis, and others, but also made him more ap- proachable than was Sorokin, as elder-statesman of the department. While Parsons most certainly was engaged actively with other members of the Harvard faculty, interests such as the Adams House discussion group gave him a special relationship with students, one that Sorokin did not have.’* It is also curious that while Sorokin spent much time in Long Journey recalling his activities (both personal and intellectual) with students at the University of Minnesota, there is very little discussion about such relations with his Harvard students. Perhaps these differences, in combination with the theoretical ones, made Sorokin less likely to be a candidate for founder-leader than Parsons.

From this discussion, it appears that Parsons was successful in obtaining a sound institutional footing not only in the Department of Sociology, but also in the Univer- sity. He had important and privileged ties with President Conant and Dean Buck. He maintained good relationships with L. J. Henderson, Crane Brinton, Joseph Schumpeter, and many members of the Society of Fellows, Pareto Circle, and Saturday Club. These individuals and institutions brought him to the attention of many Harvard notables.

p4

students. As one of them noted:


During the same period, Parsons fulfilled other requisite conditions for founding a school. He was fortunate to have significant scholars like Edward Shils and Merton work with him on developing major theoretical statements. The interpreter’s role was approached, to a degree, by various scholars. Indeed, Kingsley Davis’s Human Society, multiple editions of Robin Williams’s American Society, and Marion Levy’s The Struc- ture of Society shared fundamental insights into Parsonsian theory with a broader range of intellectuals, students, and social scientists. In this regard, Harry Johnson’s excellent text is also n~teworthy.’~

In the Department of Social Relations, Parsons surrounded himself with a network of cogenerationalists who helped develop, elaborate, and refine his theoretical system. He had a full cadre of lieutenants who worked within this paradigm, spread his message, and often sent their students back to Harvard for professional development. He enjoyed the support of the Harvard administration, filled important positions within regional and national professional associations, and had a particularly good relationship with Jeremiah Kaplan of the Free Press, who published a substantial portion of his works and those inspired by him. Thus, when the opportunity appeared for theoretical dominance within the profession, i.e., the exogenous situation was ripe for a new perspective and sociology open for organizational change, Parsons was in a superb position to compete. The theoretical anomie which Tiriyakian sees as a precondition for a new school to emerge was characteristic of sociology in the mid-1 930s.

In 1935, the hostility toward Chicago domination of the American Sociological Society and its official journal, The American Journal of Sociology, was at its peak. Indeed, the results of the confrontation between the establishment and the rebels was to shift the control of the Society away from Chicago and to replace the American Journal of Sociology (AJS) with the American Sociological Review (ASR) as the Society’s official journal.60 Henrika Kuklick has argued that this rebellion reflected a broad pattern of theoretical reorientation in which hegemony shifted from Chicago toward the emerging structural-functional perspective being developed at Harvard and Columbia.61 Whether or not this thesis is correct, there was a theoretical and professional lacuna into which either Sorokin or Parsons could have expanded. Thus, it can be argued that the state of sociology in the mid-1930s was conducive structurally to the emergence of a new theoretical direction.

Given this opportunity, Parsons was able to put together Norbert Wiley’s three- legged throne of ideas, theory groups, and control of the means of production and to enjoy this privileged perch for more than three decades.63 Parsons’s success in assum- ing the leadership of a department and later an emergent school resulted from significant differences in personality, style, and ideas between him and Sorokin. Parsons’s presentation and manner were well suited to the institutional image of Harvard Univer- sity. He understood the traditions, ethos, and character of the institution. Therefore, he was able to interact with colleagues, administrators, and students in such a way as to preserve and extend the domain assumptions which structure the life-world of Har- vard. His ideas about education, social science, and sociological theory were innovative at a time when both Harvard and the discipline were looking for innovation. These characteristics attracted a core of senior administrators and scholars, publishers, foundation officials, and promising graduate students. Combined with the fecundity and promise of his ideas, these features coalesced and gave rise to a dominant intellectual tradition in sociology, a tradition which brought the man, his theory, and Harvard to a position of leadership at the cutting edge of sociology’s development.

124 BARRY JOHNSTON

Although Sorokin’s position and importance to the discipline are well established, he formed no school and never became a serious candidate for hegemony. This is at- tributable, at least in part, to what Don Martindale called the “lonely-warrior” element in Sorokin’s character.a Indeed, the Russian acknowledged this when he described himself as follows:

I seem to belong to the lone-wolf variety of scholars who, if need be, can do their work alone without a staff of research assistants or funds. On a small scale and with some reservation I can repeat what Albert Einstein said of himself: “I am a horse for a single harness, not cut out for tandem or teamwork; for well I know that in order to attain any definite goal, it is imperative that one person do the thinking and the c~rnmanding .”~~

NOTES Laura Fermi, ZllustriousZmmigrants (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), pp. 139-172; Martin

Jay, The Dialectical Imagination (Boston: Little Brown & Co., 1973); H. Stuart Hughes, The Sea Change: The Migration of Social Thought, 1930-1965 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975); John Kosa, The Home of the Learned Man: A Symposium on the Immigrant Scholar in America (New Haven, CT: College and University Press, 1968); Donald Kent, The Refugee Intellectual: The Americanization of the Immigrants of 1933-41 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1953); Edward Shils, “The Calling of Sociology,” in Theories of Society, ed. Talcott Parsons et al. (New York: Free Press, 1961); Lewis A. Coser, Refugee Scholars in America: Their Impact and Their Experience (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984).

2. Edward A. Tiryakian, “The Significance of Schools in the Development of Sociology,” in Contemporary Issues in Theory and Research, ed. William E. Snizek et al. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979), pp. 21 1-234; Edward A. Tiryakian, “Post-Parsonsian Sociology,” Humboldt Journal of Social Relations

3. Imre Lakatos, “Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programs,” in Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, ed. Imre Lakatos and Alan Musgrave (London: Cambridge University Press, 1970),

1.

(1979/1980): 17-33.

pp. 91-196. 4. Tiryakian, “Significance of Schools,” p. 220. 5. Edward A. Tiryakian, “Hegemonic Schools and the Development of Sociology: Rethinking the History

of the Discipline” (unpublished paper presented at the World Congress of Sociology, Uppsala, Sweden, 1978). Tiryakian, “Post-Parsonsian.” 6. Pitirim A. Sorokin, A Long Journey: The Autobiography of Pitirim A . Sorokin (New Haven, CT: Col-

lege and University Press, 1963), pp. 217-252. 7. Ibid., pp. 221-222. 8. Ibid., p. 242. The members of this committee were R. C. Cabot, T. N. Carver, R. B. Perry, H. H.

Burbank, A. M. Schlesinger, A. M. Tozzer, E. B. Wilson, J. D. Black, J . Ford, and G. W. Allport. L. J. Henderson, E. F. Gay, W. M. Wheeler, and others later joined this group. 9. Ibid., p. 238.

10. Ibid., p. 242. 11. Ibid., p. 245; Pitirim Sorokin, Socialand CulturalDynamics, 4 Vols. (New York: American Book Co.,

12. Sorokin, Long Journey, p. 244. 13. Robert K. Merton, “Remembering the Young Talcott Parsons,” The American Sociologist 15 (1980): 69. 14. This account is based on an interview with Merton by Anna Di Lellio, “Le aspettative sociali di durata: Intervista a Robert K. Merton,” Rassegna Italiana Di Socioligia 26 (1985): 3-26. Merton summarized relevant parts of this interview and provided additional information to this author in Ghent, Belgium, 16 November 1984. 15. The faculty of the Department actually consisted of two classes of members: those devoting full-time to the work of the Department and members who shared their time with Sociology and their original departments. The full-time members were the sociologists and those from Social Ethics. The part-time members came from the Committee on Concentration in Sociology and Social Ethics and other appointments by Presi- dent Lowell (see note 8). The part-time members were to represent the interest of the other social sciences and aid in coordinating their departmental activities with those of Sociology. While the intent was that they be few in number, these outside members actually outnumbered the fulltime staff of the Department. Given that there was no administrative distinction between the two groups (each member had a vote in departmental affairs), the sociologists were outnumbered in their own department. Report of The Committee On Sociology and Social Ethics On The Organization of a Division and Department of Sociology at Harvard University (10 February 1931), p. 1.

1937- 194 1).


16. Merton interview, 16 November 1984. 17. Sorokin, Long Journey, pp. 247-248. Correspondence between Sorokin, Dean K. B. Murdock, and Presi- dent Lowell. Following the change in rules, Sorokin reports the “invasion” of the Department by many Group Six concentrators (the lowest level of satisfactory students). However, Sorokin, Lowell, Murdock, Birkhoff, and others were constantly sensitive to this issue and instituted several measures in an attempt to find effective remedies. Based on projection studies by the Dean’s and Registrar’s Offices, President Lowell anticipated this continuing problem early in its history. In May 1933, he even suggested to Sorokin (via Dean Murdock) that a tutorial approach to the problem be implemented. Specifically, each student who indicated a desire to con- centrate in sociology would be assigned a tutor. During the summer, the student must read some important books in the discipline and pass an examination on the material in the fall. Students who failed the exam would not be allowed to continue in the Department. Sorokin accepted the suggestion and implemented the system. Even with measures such as these, there was a continuous struggle to obtain a high quality of concen- trator. Box 1-5, Records of the Division of Sociology 1931-44, Harvard University Archives, Pusey Library. 18. Letter from Park to Sorokin, 14 October 1936, Harvard University Archive/Pusey Library . . . P. General File. This letter is often quoted by Sorokin to members of the Harvard Administration, e.g., 14 February 1940 memo to the Dean of Faculty in the folder of Department Annual Reports. 19. Robert Bierstedt, American Sociological Theory: A Critical History (New York: Academic Press, 1981),

20. Martin V. Martel, “Talcott Parsons,” in the International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, ed. David L. Sills (New York: The Free Press, 1979), p. 611; Talcott Parsons, “On Building Social Systems Theory: A Personal History,” Daedalus 99 (1970): 826-881. In his essay, Parsons notes that his introduction to Durkheim in London was “not only not very helpful, but also positively misleading: much unlearning about what was true about Durkheim became necessary,” pp. 828-829. According to Martel, “Jaspers also spoke appreciatively of Durkheim, who had been dismissed by Ginsberg in London for allegedly having a mystical ‘group-mind‘ concept, and by Malinowski for more ambivalent reasons,” p. 611. 21. Parsons, On Building, p. 832. 22. Merton, “Remembering,” p. 70. The Adams House group is the term given now to those students who met with Parsons over the course of several years in his tutorial quarters in room G-34 of Adams House. Robert Merton also recalls that the group identified themselves as the “Parsons Sociological Group” and came to identify Parsons’s study as “the Parsonage.” 23. George C. Homans, Coming To My Senses: The Autobiography of a Sociologist (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1985), pp. 104-108. The Pareto Circle refers to an important and informal seminar conducted by Lawrence J. Henderson. The group met over a period of several years, beginning in the fall of 1931-32. Among its more notable participants were: Joseph Schumpeter, Crane Brinton, Elton Mayo, Charles Curtis, George Homans, Robert Merton, and Talcott Parsons. 24. 4 October 1935 letter from Parsons to Sorokin; Parsons’s papers, Harvard University ArchiveIPusey Library-“Correspondence with Sorokin.” The article to which Parsons is referring are: “Wants and Articles in Marshall,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 46 (1931): 101-140; “Economics and Sociology: Marshall in Relation to the Thoughts of His Time,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 46 (1932): 316-347; “Malthus,” En- cyclopedia of the Social Sciences 10 (1933): 68-69; “Pareto,” Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences 11 (1933) 576-578; “Some Reflections on the Nature and Significance of Economics,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 48 (1934) 225-231; “Sociological Elements in Economic Thought I,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 49 (1934) 414-453; “Sociological Elements in Economic Thought 11,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 49 (1935) 645-667; “The Place of Ultimate Values in Sociological Theory,” International Journal of Ethics 45 (1935) 282-316; “H. M. Robertson on Max Weber and His School,” Journal of Political Economy 43 (1935) 688-6%. However, it is not clear what or whom he meant by “well received.” 25. Sorokin to Parsons 11 November 1935, Harvard University Archive/Pusey Library. Parsons’s papers. Sorokin refers to mosaic definitions as those which result from taking a number of traits and putting them together in “a pot” without first doing the necessary work to see if they belong together. This is similar to the form of integration that he discusses as “Spatial or Mechanical Adjacency” in Pitirim A. Sorokin, Social and Cultural Dynumics (New York: The Bedminster Press, 1977), Volume 1, pp. 11-13. 26. Sorokin to J. B. Conant, 17 November 1936. Harvard University Archive; Records of the Sociology Department (1930-1944). 27. Joseph Schumpeter’s letter of 23 December 1936 to the Committee on Research in the Social Sciences; Harvard University Archive/Pusey Library. Records of the Committee on Research in the Social Sciences. 28. L. J. Henderson to J. D. Black, 4 January 1937. Harvard University Archive; Records of the Commit- tee on Research in the Social Sciences. 29. Parsons, On Building, p. 877. 30. Talcott Parsons, The Structure of Social Action (New York: Free Press, 1949). The original “Preface” to the 1937 volume is included in this addition. See pages vii and viii. 31. Parsons, On Building, p. 832.

pp. 398-403.

126 BARRY JOHNSTON

32. Bierstedt, American Sociological Theory, 341-345. The exchange between Brinton and Sorokin (Socio- Astrology vs. Histrionics) is one of the best such exchanges. Reviews of Parsons’s The Structure of Social Action were, on the whole, quite positive. See, for example, W. Rex Crawford’s review in the Annals of the American Academy of Politicaland SocialScience, July 1938, 178-179; Robert Bierstedt “Is Homo Sapient?” in the Saturday Review of Literature, 12 March 1938, 18-19; George Simpson, “Individual and Social Ac- tion,”Ethics, January 1940, 164-192. Louis Wirth reviewed the book critically, yet favorably, in the American Sociological Review (4) 1937: 399-404. The American Journal of Sociology review was by Floyd H. House, Vol. 45, July 1939, 129-130. 33. Sorokin’s place in history is secure and he was certainly not, then or now, without supporters. It is well beyond the scope of this essay and the competence of the author to assess his place in history. 34. Talcott Parsons to Paul H. Buck, 3 April 1944. Harvard University Archive/Pusey Library. Parsons’s papers. 35. Ibid. The “very big scientific development” and “movement” to which Parsons refers is his goal of an integrated program in the social sciences, i.e., Social Relations. Indeed, the combination of social anthropology, sociology, social psychology, and clinical psychology was a bold move by a conservative institution. It was through this disciplinary integration and the resulting department that Parsons hoped to move Harvard sociology and social science not only to the cutting edge of disciplinary development, but to a position of leadership at the cutting edge. 36. Paul H. Buck to Sorokin, 5 April 1944. Harvard University Archives/Pusey Library; Records of the Department of Sociology, 1930-1944. 37. Sorokin, Long Journey, p. 251. 38. P. Sorokin to P. H. Buck, 10 April 1944 and 11 April 1944; P. H. Buck to Sorokin, 26 April 1944. Harvard University Archives/Pusey Library; Records of the Sociology Department, 1930-1944. 39. Talcott Parsons and Edward A. Shils, ed., Towards a General Theory of Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951), pp. 3-29. 40. Nicholas Mullins, Theory and Theory Groups in Contemporary American Sociology (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), pp. 51-60. 41. John Heeren, Functional and Critical Sociology: A Study of Two Groups of Contemporary Sociologists (Duke University, unpublished doctoral dissertation, 1975), pp. 172-175. This stimulating and insightful study provides a substantial amount of information on Harvard and Columbia. However, the fact that Heeren leaves his quotations unattributed (perhaps to guarantee respondents confidentiality) creates some difficulty, since one cannot assess the stature of the respondent. However, some similar observations can be found in Robin Williams’s essay, “Pitirim A. Sorokin: Master and Prophet,” in R. K. Merton and M. W. Riley, Sociological Traditions from Generation to Generation (Norwood, NJ: Abex Publishing Co., 1980), pp. 93-108. See also Robert Bierstedt, Power and Progress (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974), pp. 2-3. While Bierstedt’s best discussion of Sorokin’s background and ideas is found in American, pp. 299-348, he best describes Sorokin as a teacher in the earlier work. 42. Heeren, Functional and Critical psychology, p. 178. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid., 175-176. 46. Sorokin, Long Journey, p. 229. 47. Ibid., p. 173. 48. Gouldner, Coming Crisis, pp. 167-177. 49. Ibid., p. 173. 50. Alan M. Kraut, The Huddled Masses: The Immigrant in American Society (Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1982), p. 168. 51. Sorokin To E. A. Ross, 18 January 1937. Harvard University Archives, Records of the Sociology Department. 52. Heeren, Functional and Critical Sociology, p. 165. 53. Ibid., p. 163. 54. Heeren, Functional, p. 163. 5 5 . Ibid., p. 176. 56. Ibid. 57. Robert K. Merton in interview with Anna Di Lellio, “Le aspettative,” p. 15, and interview with this author. A point in the interview which does not appear in the quotation touches on why students turned to Sorokin: Merton’s interest was stimulated by the likelihood that Sorokin would provide in-depth study of European social theory, ideas not readily available at the time in other major graduate departments. Sorokin’s


history, education, and work on Contemporary Sociological Theories (1928) prepared him uniquely for the role of master explicator of the European heritage. Merton’s comment suggests that Parsons, who in the 1930s was largely unknown in the community of sociologists, came to the attention of graduate students because he taught the courses in which many of them were primarily interested. Parsons’s style of teaching was also open and supportive. Also of interest here is Merton, “Remembering,” p. 70. 58. In addition to the Adams House group, Parsons was tied to other significant discussion groups within the University. Through L. J . Henderson, he participated in the Pareto Circle and became occasionally involved with the Society of Fellows and to a lesser extent the Saturday Club. Henderson and Lowell were founding forces behind the Society of Fellows and both, along with Crane Brinton, participated in the Satur- day Club.

Parsons’s association with these groups added to his prestige and scholarly image within the Harvard community. His acceptance within them (although he was not a member of either the Society of Fellows or the Saturday Club) established him as one who had the ear of many Harvard notables. For an extended discussion of these associations, see Crane Brinton’s The Society of Fellows (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959) and Barbara Heyl’s essay “The Harvard Pareto Circle” in the Journal ofthe History ofthe Behavioral Sciences, 4 (1968): 316-334. 59. Mullins, Theory, p. 40; Harry M. Johnson, Sociology: A Systematic Introduction (New York: Har- court Brace, and World, 1960). 60. Partricia Madoo Lengerman, “The Founding of the American Sociological Review: The Anatomy of a Rebellion,” American Sociological Review 44 (1979), pp. 185-198. 61. Henrika Kuklick, “A Scientific Revolution: Sociological Theory in the United States 1930-1945,” Sociological Inquiry 43 (1973): 3-22. Further discussion of the period ig found in Kuklick, “Boundary Maintenance in American Sociology,” Journal ofthe History ofthe Behavioral Sciences 16 (1980), pp. 201-219; Mark Oromaner, “The Sociological Community and the Works of Talcott Parsons: 1936-1950,” Journal of the History of Sociology 1 (1979), pp. 76-92; Norbert Wiley, “The Rise and Fall of Dominating Theories in American Sociology,” in W. E. Snizek et al., Contemporary Issues in Theory and Research (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979). pp. 47-80. 62. It is not the intent of this paper to argue that Parsons’s successful replacement of Sorokin gave him disciplinary hegemony. Rather, it gave him the foundation from which to compete successfully for that position. There were certainly other perspectives and theorists with whom Parsons had to vie to lead the discipline. However, as Mullins observes, “By 1951 Parsons was a major figure in American sociology; by 1965 he was the major figure. He was central to the Harvard department, to the profession of sociology and to the intellectual specialty of social theory” (1973: 46). 63. Wiley, “Rise and Fall,” p. 48. 64. Don Martindale, “Pitirim A. Sorokin: Soldier of Fortune,” in Sorokin and Sociology: Essays in Honour of Professor Pitirim A. Sorokin, C. C. Hallen and R. Prasad, eds. (India: Satish Book Enterprise, 1974).

65. Sorokin, Long Journey, p. 274. pp. 3-42.