This collection of eleven chapters, written by scholars who have
frequently made Parsons’s ideas a central component of their work,
is set in two parts. In Part I, consisting of chapters 1 through 6, a
variety of issues that were of particular empirical and theoretical
concern to Parsons at various points in his career are analyzed,
critiqued and updated: German totalitarianism, political power in
liberal democracies, the student protest movements on U.S. college
campuses, the therapist–patient relationship in psychotherapy, the
phenomenon of death and the reception of his ideas on the social
system. Together these chapters point to some of Parsons’s interests
in political and humanist matters, all of which, at one time or
another, were—if not always tidily, at least
satisfactorily—subsumed within and addressed by his general theory
of action as it continued to develop. Thus, Nazism as a totalitarian
social structure could be explained by the pattern variables, the
notion of power became one of the generalized media of interchange,
the expressiveness inherent in the 1960s campus unrest and in the
therapeutic relationship was understood in terms of the AGIL schema
and death was considered in connection with the telic order.
Part II, which includes chapters 7 through 11, focuses on two
interrelated themes that characterize the late phase of Parsons’s
work: progressive evolution and the societal community. Beginning in
the mid-1960s the process of evolution—both in its societal and
cultural aspects—was given primary of place by Parsons in further
explaining social differentiation and integration—but also, and more
fundamentally, in dealing with the problem of social change. For
Parsons, evolutionary development, with crucial cultural innovations
taking place in the “seed-bed” societies of Israel and classical
Greece, had culminated in modern society, which in the Western context
brought about the industrial, democratic and education revolutions,
and in the American context led to the development of an
“institutionalized individualism” reinforced by the core value of
“instrumental activism.” Both of these latter concepts are given
extensive treatment in Parsons’s last book, the posthumously
published American Society. Of special significance in this work is
the notion of the societal community—particularly of the American
variety—that Parsons contends contributes to internal integration
though citizenship and the normatively defined obligations that
citizenship engenders. In short, Part II demonstrates the importance
that Parsons gave to modern civil society in general as well as to the
exceptional status that he attributed to American society in
particular.
Les mer
Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780857281920
Publisert
2020
Utgave
1. utgave
Utgiver
Vendor
Anthem Press (NBN)
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter