Power: a note on Talcott Parsons and the Brown University conversations

American Journal of Economics and Sociology, The, Jan, 2006 by Robert Holton

In one sense, the Brown University conversations see Parsons reflecting in a fairly predictable way on the major preoccupations of his intellectual life. The consistent drive to map the social through general theory building is well represented here, as are the polemical foils of utilitarianism and economistic theories of rational self-interest. Parsons's cybernetic and evolutionary emphases of the 1960s and 1970s are also prominent. While some of this may seem dated, there is nonetheless an engaging reflexivity and gentle irony in his presentation, together with a rehearsal of the reasoning that persuaded Parsons of the coherence and robustness of his theoretical schema. This is perhaps most evident when he is questioned on his controversial discussion of the place of power in social life.

The immediacy, accessibility, and even modesty of Parsons's manner of exposition is a striking feature of these conversations. This is worthy of note because it contrasts so markedly with the superficial way in which the Parsons's theoretical legacy has been formalized by sociological textbooks into the arid dogmas of structural-functionalism. It is hard to recognize these textbook caricatures in the intellectual milieux in Europe and the United States that Parsons evokes in these conversations and within which he defines the trajectories of his thought. What he portrays here as exploratory theoretical lines of argument, subject to constant refinement and elaboration, as reflected in work on the generalized media of exchange, somehow became hypostasized by critics into a theoretical edifice of axiomatic certainty and dogmatic aspiration. The American Journal of Economics and Sociology has therefore done scholarship a significant service in publishing this transcription. It helps shed light on a legacy that still has the capacity to enrich debate rather than become consigned to the museum of lost sociological causes.

Parsons was, of course, a formalist in the way he conducted general theory building, as the four-function AGIL paradigm and its subdivision into 16 (4 x 4) and even 64 (4 x 4 x 4) conceptual boxes indicates. This mode of proceeding, together with the particularly dense abstraction of The Social System (1951), may have made it easier for formalistic textbook caricatures to become plausible. Parsons's negative reputation nonetheless also draws on widespread intellectual and political skepticism as to his capacity to recognize and analyze power, inequality, and conflict in the social world, leading to his reputation as a conservative apologist for social order and Western modernity. The Brown conversations, however, help to make clear a view recognized in specialist literature (e.g., Holton and Turner 1986) that Parsons was politically engaged with world crises of his epoch. He was also well able to position himself and his work, in a reflexive manner, within the narratives of social change in which he was implicated and within which he took a self-confessedly optimistic liberal-democratic position.

What implications does all this have for the ways in which he approached the analysis of power?

Aspects of Parsons's comparative political sociology of power, inequality, and stratification are rehearsed at a number of points in this transcription. They engage with formative world events in his lifetime such as the two world wars, the Russian revolution, and the rise of Hitler. In response to the widespread failure of proletarian revolution, he is particularly scathing about the analytical capacities of Marxist traditions--old or new--to analyze world trends and social change. Themes in this critique include the failure of Marxist economics to come to terms with marginalism, and excessive reliance on ideas of power domination, including recourse to "the powerful repressive capacities of bourgeois-dominated government." What Parsons does not explain here is how a knowledge of marginalism might assist the analysis of capitalism. And while it may come as news to some readers that Parsons accepted that bourgeois governments exerted a powerful repressive effect, he shows little interest here in broader arguments about social control, whether Marx's emphasis on "the dull compulsion of economic circumstance" or the major foray of critical theory into the analysis of ideological repression and co-option.

Parsons's interlocutors at Brown pushed him repeatedly on the problem of power, but the oblique ways in which he responded suggest, if not a dialogue of the deaf, then perhaps something closer to a "ships passing in the night" effect. Parsons certainly makes some effort to bridge the gap between the two, arguing that power conflicts are not a zero-sum game. We are dealing, rather, with a generalized medium of exchange that circulates between actors, which is enabling as well as constraining. Ironically perhaps, this brings him closer, on certain levels, to Foucault, who also emphasized the efficacy of power and its capillary-like circulation. Parsons and Foucault seem both to reject the zero-sum game assumption, arguing that power is endemic in social life. Having said this, Parsons continued to think of power as a matter of sovereignty, rather than developing an interest in exploring discursive power as Foucault was later to do. Second, while Parsons did develop some important innovations in the sociology of the body, around the notion of the sick role, these were developed through the analysis of norms, rather than in the direction of a microphysics of power.