In the last decade or so some bridges have been built between sociology and ecconomics. This raises the question, why did they separate? Peter Boettke explored this question in a 1998 paper “Rational Choice and Human Agency in Economics and Sociology: Exploring the Weber-Austrian connection“.
This is a long paper with a lot of meat in it and I will focus on some sections treating Talcott Parsons and the claim that he was instrumental in unhooking sociology from economics due to his incorporation of ideas from Durkheim and his unhelpful reading of Weber.
The conclusion of my argument is that Parsons did muddy the waters but not in the way that Boettke suggested when he put the blame on Durkheim and the Parsonian reading of Weber.I think that Parsons was probably OK in his reading of Durkheim and Weber (and Durkheim was probably OK as well) but the problem was that Parsons took a major and degenerative turn to general systems theory after his first book in 1937.
Up to that time he was almost completely aligned with both von Mises and Popper as they proceeded with parallel programs in the 1930s. The key works were Parsons’ The Structure of Social Action (1937), the work that von Mises published in German in 1939 and in English as Human Action (1949) and Popper’s The Poverty of Historicism which he started to write in the 1930s and published in journal articles in 1944/5.
The methodological principles that they presented in those publications were almost identical and they had the potential to hold the social sciences together in a progressive program, against the trends to mathematical formalism, the positivist/behaviourist approach and the separation of specialties. To achieve that result the three masters and their apprentices needed to “synergise” their activities by discussion to explore their differences and to sharpen up the points of agreement. Working in cooperation after WW2 when academic work returned to normal they might have formed a critical mass in the professions and made a difference.
Howeve there was no synergy because Parsons went in a different direction after 1937 and Popper never engaged with sociology or economics in a serious way after 1945.
The points of agreement were: (1) methodological individualism, (2) the search for true and realistic universal laws (but not historical laws), (3) rationality in the relationship of ends and means, (4) the normative and voluntarist orientation of human action, (5) subjectivism (but not psychologism), (6) action occurs in real time, (7) rejection of historicism (though Parsons did not use the term).
There was a serious point of disagreement: Parsons and Popper were methodological monists, seeing the same logic of investigation and testing in the natural and the human sciences. In contrast, von Mises insisted on methodological dualism.
Getting back to Boettke’s paper. He pointed out that Weber was close to the Austrians, he read Menger, invited von Mises and Bohm-Bawerk to contribute to his journal and stood shoulder to shoulder with von Mises against the historicists in the professional association.
He identified three reasons for the disjunction of Weber and the Austrians.
1. Talcott Parsons’ translation and interpretation of Weber’s approach (literally the translation of some of his works) and the influence of this in the English-speaking world.
2. The anti-individualistic strand of thought in sociology. “This development is due to Emile Durkheim, and, once again, Talcott Parsons’ restatement of the Durkheimian approach which juxtaposed nonindividualist sociology against individualist economics”.
3. Developments in the Misesian tradition, where efforts were concentrated in economics and did not follow Mises in his polymathic interest in the other social sciences. Pete described this as myopic on two fronts “a reading of praxeology as exclusively a methodological position, and a narrow fixation on praxeology as catallaxy (or economics).”
Writing on “the modern discourse” in the human sciences, Boettke suggested that Durkheim diverted the sociology profession from a Weber/Austrian orientation to an imperialist anti-individualist approach. “The general overriding principle of his approach was that religious, juridical, moral, and economic phenomena must be explained in reference to the particular social milieu within which they are found”. [To anticipate an argument below, refering to the particular milieu could be seen as an anticipation of the legal/institutional approach that Pete sees as an important and recent shift of emphasis in economics].
Weber provided an alternative approach – “a causal-genetic approach which empoyed ideal-type methodology to aid the task of interpretive sociology”. [But it is important to note that both Parsons and Mises identified the ideal-type approach as a retreat from the search for universal laws, towards the wrong kind of historical method. Boettke reminds us that Lachmann identified the notion of the plan as a more helpful contribution than the method of ideal types].
“But Durkheim’s influence dominated sociological thought. Even with the developments pioneered by Talcott Parsons, social systems explanations dominated sociology, i.e. functionalism.”
This formulation does not make the important distinction between the “action frame of reference” of Parsons (1937) and the general systems theory that followed.
In defence of Durkheim.
Both Popper and Hayek dismissed Durkheim as a holist and a collectivist but that was not my impression on reading Durkheim (many decades ago) or Parsons on Durkheim (re-read more recently) . The claim is decisively refuted by Jack Birner in some manuscripts provided in personal communication and in at least one publication, Birner and Ege, “Two views on social stability” in The Am J of Economics and Sociology, Oct 1999.
Hayek rejects Durkheim’s analysis as constructivistic, but his criticism is unjustified. Further analysis reveals many similarities between the two authors’ theories of societal evolution. A striking point of convergence is that Hayek’s theory of markets is a network theory, and that sociological network theory is directly inspired by Durkheim’s work. The main differences are Hayek’s emphasis on the division of knowledge and on coordination as the fundamental stabilizing forces as opposed to Durkheim’s stress on the division of labour and cooperation.
The preface to one of the translations of Durkheim’s Rules points out that Durkheim was writing in part to correct an excessively individualistic (atomistic individualistic) kind of sociology (perhaps the psychologism that Popper detected in J S Mill). Hence his polemics could have given a misleading impression, certainly he was a highly nuanced writer and no simplistic formula can capture the thrust of his arguments. Uncritical students can follow a master in unhelpful ways but anyone who has taken on board methodological individualism can read Durkheim for the insights that he offers without adopting collectivism.
Parsons and Birner explained that Durkheim’s “collective representations” and “group sentiments” are not theories of a collective or group mind, they are shared beliefs. That is why Parsons became so interested in the process of socialisation which imparts or implants the shared beliefs, and of course this can can be explained in MI terms with reference to the particular people who raise the child.
Birner in an ms titled “Moral functionalism” wrote that Hayek and Durkheim shared some important characteristics: they explained the function of moral rules using conjectural history; they explained social order as the unintended result of the spontaneous evolution of rules; the function of rules is to maintain a stable framework; they are both moral functionalists; moral rules involve a cognitive dimension. But:
Hayek accuses Durkheim of constructivism and of being opposed to accepting the outcome of spontaneous social evolutionary processes. He attributes to Durkheim the idea that solidarity is to be obtained by consciously creating and imposing [certain] conditions… and that moral is that which furthers altruism. He have seen that a closer reading of Durkheim reveals a picture that is almost the exact opposite…Spontaneous social orders, the importance of free association, the emphasis on the emancipation of the individual and liberty, are prominent features of the theories of both.
It is possible that Hayek rejected Durkheim’s ideas because he did not closely read his later works which, according to Parsons, adanced a long way from Durkheim’s starting point in positivism towards a sophisticated “action theory”.
The contribution of Alfred Schutz
Boettke noted the efforts that Alfred Schutz made to promote subjectivism in correspondence with Parsons. Schutz did not live a long life and he was not employed as an academic but he was a dedicated student of Husserl and phenomenology and he produced at least one book and four volumes of essays. A book was published containing the letters exchanged between Parsons and Schutz in 1941 when Schutz feared that Parsons was “only nodding” to the theory of subjectivism and he was not protecting the subjectivist point of view from the intrusion of objectivism. [This book is not available in the library at the University of Sydney]. If the target is The Structure of Social Action, then the case is not strong, though for other reasons I am not prepared to defend the direction that Parsons took after his first book.
Parsons clearlly asserted subjectivism in TSSA when he wrote
It is evident that these [action theory] categories have meaning only in terms which include the subjctive point of view, i.e. that of the actor. A theory which, like behaviorism, insists on treating human beings in terms which exclude this subjective aspct, is not a theory of action in the sense of this study. pp. 77-78
The problem with Parsons was not a lack of emphasis on subjectivism in TSSA but the failure to use the principles expounded in that book (which are practically identical with the principles expounded by von Mises and Popper at the same period) for research and case studies that would have demonstrated the power of the principles. Instead he spent some time on fieldwork in medical practice, which he did not write up due to a crisis in his private life caused by the death of his parents and a brother during the early 1940s. Then he returned to “grand theory”, that is, further elaboration of the “action theory” under the influence of general systems theory.
Schutz for his part should have applied his principles in research and case studies to demonstrat the power of his approach. Instead he continued writing philosophical essays expounding the phenomenology of Husserl.
So both Parsons and Schutz did not do what had to be done to progress the field. To that extent Parsons did muddy the waters by turning from the methodological individualism of the action frame of reference and the task of generating a body of testable theories. He justified this on the ground that theory has to precede practice and empirical studies, but the argument against this is that the kind of theories required are testable explanatory theories. The methodological principles developed by Parsons, von Mises and Popper in the 1930s did not need decades of conceptual (verbal) fine tuning to be used.
