Continuity and Change in Parsons’ Understanding of Rationality

Abstract

In the period around 1940, when the Seminar on Rationality took place at Harvard University, Talcott Parsons seemed no longer satisfied with the concept of rationality that he had used and developed in his early writings, including The Structure of Social Action, and which had also attracted Joseph Schumpeter ’s interest. In his own autobiographical statements, Parsons referred on several occasions to institutional changes, viz., his transfer from the Economics to the Sociology Department at Harvard University, to account for his reticence with regard to the Seminar on Rationality. In this chapter, I suggest that new intellectual challenges also triggered his reconsideration of his earlier relation to economics and economic theory. I first sketch why Parsons had difficulty participating in a project that (still) took its point of departure in an economic concept of rationality. Afterward, I clarify a basic transition in Parsons ’ understanding of rationality in society—from an individualized, actor-oriented conception of rationality to one that deals with rationality as value pattern at the level of social systems. The first indications of this transition can already be observed in work on the professions, on which Parsons embarked shortly after the publication of The Structure of Social Action. But The American University, which is the last monograph which Parsons saw into print, also contains elaborate discussions of the problem of rationality. Perhaps Parsons ’ chapter on cognitive rationality in this monograph might be read as his full chapter for the Seminar on Rationality, which took place more than three decades earlier.