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On The Development Of Talcott Parsons' Conception Of Societal Community
During the 1950s and early 1960s, Talcott Parsons tried to write a general interpretive book on American society using the analytic methods he had developed with the four function paradigm. Around 1960, he was joined in the task by his recent doctoral student, Winston White. Although the work was interrupted when White suddenly left academia in 1962, well over 1200 pages of draft chapters and preliminary working papers were produced. Among the drafts and working papers are Parsons’ first attempts, using the four function paradigm, to develop a conception of the integrative subsystem of society. The initial attempt built essentially on Chicago School ecological notions of community in the sense of local community. It conceived the integration of society in terms of an aggregate of local communities. A later draft, from 1966, explored a range of social institutions that serve to integrate American society as a whole. In this work, Parsons sought to develop in analytical detail and in application to a complex modern society, the conception of societal community that had emerged in early drafts for his Societies; Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives and The System of Modern Societies. Our presentation will discuss the differences between the two conceptions of the integration of American society and will also compare Parsons’ conception of societal community to current analyses of civil society and to Jeffrey Alexander’s The Civil Sphere. Parsons emphasized complexes of integrative institutions that have strongly equalitarian effects, but in contrast to Alexander and others, included as well institutions that have stratifying effects. He understood differences in levels of influence among individual actors, collectivities, and associations to be essential to social integration.