Abstract
Every theoretical system has another system inside it struggling to get out. And every system has a nightmare: that the caged system will break out.
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Notes
See Talcott Parsons, The Structure of Social Action (New York: McGraw-Hill & Co., 1937), esp. pp. 81–82. “Interest will be focused in the process of emergence of a particular theoretical system, that of the ‘voluntaristic theory of action”’ (p. 12). “This study is meant to be a monographic study of one particular problem in the history of recent social thought … the ‘voluntaristic theory of action’” (p. 14). Moreover, and as distinct from idealistic social theories, “the voluntaristic system does not in the least deny an important role to conditional and other non-normative elements, but considers these as interdependent with the normative” (p. 82).
Emile Durkheim, Socialism and Saint-Simon (Le Socialism), ed. Alvin W. Gouldner (New York: Collier Books, 1958), esp. pp. 22ff.
Jeffrey C. Alexander, “Theoretical Logic in Sociological Thought,” (to be published in 2 vols. by the University of California Press, Berkeley, in 1979). Part 2 of vol. 1 contains what is in effect a thorough answer to Therborn’s bowdlerization of Weber as idealist. I have drawn heavily on the manuscript in my remarks here.
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958). This and the previous quotation from Weber are from p. 181.
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© 1980 Alvin W. Gouldner
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Gouldner, A.W. (1980). Nightmare Marxism. In: The Two Marxisms. Critical Social Studies. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-16296-3_13
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